This claims to be providing a reason people distrust vaccines, but is really just a list of cases where a conservative is exposed to bad media (it's framed as an "anybody" being exposed to bad media). It ignores the cases where a conservative is exposed to good media, a liberal is exposed to bad media, and a liberal is exposed to good media. Being exposed to bad media is the reason for the vast majority of political distrust on all sides. Vaccines aren't special in this regard, but this writeup is using it as an excuse to paint a picture for political points, and thereby contribute to bad media.
The average person lacks the resources and intellect to accurately assess covid vaccines. They have to rely on trust. Can you provide a trustworthy source on whether or not an individual should get the vaccine?
I think I get what you’re trying to say but I’m arguing it doesn’t matter. Any bad media (especially of the ideologically motivated kind) is an absolute failure.
I think a large part of the media had worked hard for this. Having no trustworthy media is bad because it is needed. I think articles are currently more down to facts, but gaining trust takes far longer than losing it. And there is still plenty of either lies or naive obliviousness.
The internet has decimated most newspaper revenue in the USA and has seen massive newsroom closures over the past decade. Only large entities like the NYT and WaPo etc really have the pockets to do expensive in depth reporting. Also trust is low because one political party in the USA has made it it's mantra for decades now to deride any news that is critical of it as "fake news" and a "liberal bias", so that doesn't help the situation.
It's interesting how willing folks in tech are to say “if you're not paying, you're the product” when it comes to apps or social networks, but then turn around and sneer at news paywalls. If you're not willing to pony up a few bucks for subscriptions, of course you'll get sensationalized and click-driven news, that's the business model you voted for with your wallet.
(I'll plug ProPublica, though. They do good work as a non-profit, including a series on TurboTax that has put political heat on the company's practices)
I payed my favorite newspaper and they still didn't write what I like.
Fun aside, I think you are correct. The net inflated the value of articles and similar to art, quality didn't necessarily translate to value. Although I don't think that tech people were particularly stingy in paying writers.
Many of the things I read are repulsive, and I wish I could take away money from the people who published them. A huge amount of it is also time-wasting linkbait that doesn't follow up on the promise of its headline, and I wish I could make them pay me for having read it.
I pay for news I want other people to read, not for things that I read. I read tons of scientifically illiterate, deliberately deceptive right-wing dogshit. It's worth reading, because I want to be familiar with the arguments of bad people, but I certainly don't want to economically support them.
> I pay for news I want other people to read, not for things that I read. I read tons of scientifically illiterate, deliberately deceptive right-wing dogshit. It's worth reading, because I want to be familiar with the arguments of bad people, but I certainly don't want to economically support them.
This is a good point, and basically what got me to switch my WSJ subscription (I disagree with their editorial stance but respect their newsroom) to a recurring ProPublica donation. One too many WSJ op-eds that I didn't want to financially support.
Yes, non-profit news organizations that mimic the NPR/CPB model are finding traction in lots of communities around the country, and many of them do great work. Most of them are digital
"print" publications that do some video here and there. There was also a major shift towards news festivals that did long-form interviews with various types of leaders, many of which are posted on sites like Youtube. Unfortunately, the pandemic has hampered a lot of those types of events.
Recently I've been using Wikipedia as my news source. They have both a current events page [1] and a page summarizing this year's events [2]. I feel like Wikipedia's goal of being an encyclopedia forces out a lot of editorializing. Wikipedia also has the benefit of every article has the in-line links to context through other Wikipedia pages. It also has given me the opportunity to read about news stories that have fallen out of the public eye even though their "story" is still progressing (like the Ever Given blocking the Suez).
To make the articles more readable. I changed my link styling to more closely match the text styling, which can be done directly through the Wikipedia user account (using the "common.css" page).
A vicious combination of many 'media' sources actually sucking, and a concerted political effort to push that narrative. No wonder people are confused.
I don’t necessarily think this is a de facto terrible thing.
Healthy skepticism towards having a few large corporations be the source of truth about the world is necessary to prevent manipulation and coercion of the public by a few wealthy individuals.
The unfortunate part comes when that skepticism clouds the ability to discern whether or not one is contradicting fundamental physical properties of the world. . . Not to say that those aren’t entirely up for debate either.
>Healthy skepticism towards having a few large corporations be the source of truth about the world is necessary to prevent manipulation and coercion of the public by a few wealthy individuals.
Manipulation is now in social media and other 'decentralized' platforms, but the money is still from the same people, just even less accountable.
I don't think it improved at all, quite the opposite in fact.
To be honest, I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything.
One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour. Most boring, non-sensational broadcast there is and yet, they fill it up with sold content and reporting. Also, no advertising.
> I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything.
The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it.
It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.
This is also my suspicion, although I've heard that NYT's subscriptions are doing as well as they've ever done and while I wouldn't describe NYT's journalism as "click-bait", they've certainly engaged in more than their share of overt ideological propagandism (which isn't unique to them, but part of a landscape shift away from aspirationally objective reporting).
The best sign of click bait is posting obviously false, inflammatory articles and then silently putting out a retraction days later after the clicks have come in.
The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.
Perhaps the avid reader would say that they are most disappointed in papers like the NYT. You cannot really be disappointed by FOX or CNN. Different medium, but I think it still applies.
I think we have different notions of "clickbait". Personally I think NYT's particular brand of dishonesty is a bit more subtle than what I normally think of as "clickbait", but I won't argue the point. They are certainly and frequently guilty of publishing overt falsehoods and then quietly retracting (or even stealth-editing) days or weeks later.
Yes. The example that springs to mind (and I get downvoted without explanation every time I mention this, so goodbye Internet Points) was the Covington Catholic affair--the still photo of the kid in a MAGA hat apparently smugly smirking at a Native American elder (the media reported that he was a Vietnam veteran which was an outright falsehood). The whole of the media developed the same narrative around the still photo which was directly contradicted by a widely-circulated, publicly available 2 hour video. The narrative was that some racist white kids disrespected a Native American elder while the 2 hour video makes it clear that kids had been subjected to a lengthy racist and homophobic tirade.
I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:
>Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial.
and then a link to an article from the very next day[2] explaining what happened in fuller detail after more videos came out.
I'm not sure what point you're making. Your observations are all consistent with the "overt falsehood followed by quiet retraction" claim. Are you quibbling about "days later" versus "day later" with respect to the retraction?
> I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:
As an outsider watching from across the ocean, the 2016 election (the race itself and its media coverage, I'm not talking about the result) really hurt you guys.
The NYT still does world-class journalism, but not even a paper with that kind of rock-solid journalistic tradition fully recovered from the moralistic crusade it had become.
I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.
I share your perspective about a ~2016 inflection point, but the cracks were showing even earlier. I remember in ~2014 things like the Michael Brown shooting coverage across the board parroted activists' talking points which were invariably and conclusively disproven by the evidence (MB wasn't shot in the back as he ran away, etc). This isn't a wider commentary on BLM, although I think BLM coverage provides a really interesting perspective on media coverage. This is all to say that the phenomenon isn't fully explained by Trump, although I think the phenomenon really accelerated as a result of Trump (I'm not positing a causal relationship, if I had to speculate I'd guess it's an intense feedback loop).
From some articles I've read[1], and discussions I've had (aka mostly anecdata) I really think that it's because views among journalists are changing. They view "just the facts" as potentially misleading because just the facts can lead to incorrect conclusions. Adding in color words that have a touch of opinion/speculation in them is ok if it helps the reader to reach the correct conclusion. Tis is also coupled with a strong sense of moral obligation on the part of journalists to lead people to the right conclusions.
But that requires that the journalist knows what the right conclusions are. They're skeptical about other peoples' claims; they're not nearly skeptical enough about their own positions.
IDK if NYT has ever touched on a subject where you have insider knowledge, but it did to me. They framed and flavoured politically and event which was a result of purely technical decisions.
NYT has also published pieces about my country that I'd hardly could classify as any other thing than undisguised activism.
So I remain very skeptical. It seems to me that there's a wave of new journalism culture in all the west that it's not being challenged from the inside.
Here in Spain journalist make their ocassional reunions, interviews and stuff and they moan of the low consideration people have about them, then they go back to their seats to write or record what is basically political activism.
I'm Italian, I know full well what you're talking about, I have zero sympathy for "the public doesn't trust us" type of lamentations because, guess what, it's their own fault.
What I'm saying is that papers like the NYT were at least trying to separate facts from opinions in their reporting. It's just painful to see such a healthy tradition become overshadowed by the political trend du jour.
But are they? I dont read NYT often but everytime I do I'm able to identify the frame withouth much difficulty.
Journalists have to write about everything, and they arent experts at anything. My hypothesis is thqt the lazyiest of em just become activists and make this a way of life.
If you have any doubt about this, write any of the most common names in major publications in google and try find their twitter.
Having good information is very difficult, and it typically involves paying for it, or accessing specialist publications, or niche ones.
When I was in high school, I was near proximity to some kids that CNN did the same thing to. They took what would've been potentially a decent, local, investigative story and juiced it. How? They baited kids, who didn't know these other kids or the events they were involved in, directly outside of my high school into saying something for the news report. The average viewer would never know all those kids they interviewed had no knowledge of what they were talking about and it has since flavored how I receive these "nightly reports".
Shortly after Trump won, there was a round table interview with different journalists from various media on NPR. They essentially all agreed that it was their duty to make Trump look as bad as possible, though they worded it slightly less audaciously. I distinctly remember them saying that they should no longer be objective.
I think to those on the right the last few years really opened their eyes to how much bias there is in journalism. I wish more people on the left noticed it as well, though I’m sure some did.
Either way, I’m surprised nobody has taken the opportunity to start a news source that actually attempts to be objective. Maybe it’s impossible, or maybe people just don’t want it…but I do.
> there was a round table interview with different journalists from various media on NPR. They essentially all agreed that it was their duty to make Trump look as bad as possible, though they worded it slightly less audaciously. I distinctly remember them saying that they should no longer be objective.
Sorry but …you're gonna to have to back that up with pointer to some kind of records of this event .
IMO, NPR has drifted even farther leftward in the last decade. They used to be pretty middle-of-the-road liberal, but now they strike me as some woke variety of left-wing (a person's identity is paramount, tells you everything you need to know about their experiences, etc).
2016 was an inflection point because we had a particular candidate that built a movement that weaponized disinformation and falsehoods. Legacy media continually boosted Trump's profile as a curiosity, and was hesitant to outright call these falsehoods what they were, attempting to stick to outmoded journalistic norms that worked for politicians who only perform relatively minor deceptions.
The reckoning was indeed severe, but it was deserved.
Not sure why you were downvoted. What you said is absolutely true. Washington Post kept a lie tally for Trump and when he left office, the tally was close to 30K lies[1].
Also completely agree that the "both sides" coverage did not work as intended.
Can't speak for others, but I downvoted because the OP's explanation is absurd. Yes, Trump's absolutely a liar, but the absurdity lies in the claim that the media's "outmoded norms" (i.e., honesty, objectivity, neutrality, etc) inhibited it from calling out Trump's lies is ridiculous. Honesty doesn't inhibit an institution from pointing out one side's lies, on the contrary, honesty demands it. However, honesty also demands pointing out the other side's lies, and therein lies the rub.
that’s ambiguously overstated. perhaps 1% of nyt journalism is “world-class”, meaning well-researched, investigative, and impactful. 99% is of the “moralistic crusade” kind of journalism, trying to influence the popular sentiment, rather than reporting on it.
and while 2016 was an inflection point, it’s certainly been on a longer slide, observable during the 2008 financial crisis and somewhat before that.
2015-2016 was the breaking point for me. Not an ounce of impartial journalism, they just wore their political ideology on their sleeve with no shame and did everything they could to support their position. They weren't reporting news, they were just pushing whatever propaganda they needed to prop up their ideology. I haven't watched mainstream media a single time since sometime in 2016, and don't plan to again. They lost my trust and I assume it would be many years and would require fundamental changes before I'd consider listening to them again, they're completely corrupt at this point in my mind.
> I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.
Cheerleading the Iraq War did it, for me. Especially for the NYT, but media generally. I sincerely wish them all the worst.
Then again, journalists as stock characters in fiction have been morally grey at best for just about all of the 20th century, at least, and I think to a substantial degree before that, too. I'm not sure where the idea that journalists have typically been, or been regarded as, forthright and virtuous, in the past, came from. The whole thing seems like a fiction built on a very few examples from a narrow time period (Cronkite's usually cited, for example)
I hear a lot of variations of "the media was never perfect", which is true in a strict sense, but dishonesty comes in degrees and that's what we're debating. In particular, while I did grow up with the media cheerleading the Iraq War, mostly that was just citing "intelligence sources". Now the media overtly lies about the contents of publicly available content (e.g., the Damore "Google Memo" or the Covington Catholic video) or it has a journalist wearing a gas mask standing in front of a burning police station with a "Mostly Peaceful Protest" caption underneath.
Maybe my formative years were part of a relative anomaly in journalistic history--maybe journalists were always ideologically homogeneous propagandists and the last decade is naught but a return to form. In whichever case I know from experience it doesn't have to be that way and I emphatically reject the backslide.
2016 is when the majority of US news stopped trying to have any pretense of objectivity. I'd put the start of the slide closer to 2005 as a response to Bush winning re-election and calming of the post 9/11 fervor.
This is all true, but the key point here is that NYT is one of, if not the most, valuable brand in US print media. They had the money to hire a world-class engineering team to pioneer the print news experience online (the creator of D3js and Svelte have both held engineering positions there), but the vast majority of print publications did not. It's not really accurate to extrapolate NYT's digital success across print media as a whole.
For those that have been alive long enough to witness the transition, the internet shift to clickbait is just continuing a trend that was ushered in by 24 hour news cycles.
News being "all the time" is the true villain here. When news was infrequent and on a schedule, stories had to compete for relevance and often wouldn't dominate airtime and our thoughts nearly as much as today.
I disagree. I think that the 24-hour news cycle does contribute to the problem, absolutely. However, the critical aspect you're forgetting here is that the internet conditioned us to not pay for content because the ability to distribute content became commoditized. Once that happened, one of the largest sources of revenue for print publications disappeared, which forced print publications to rely more on ads, and therefore stories with headlines that drove more ad impressions (i.e. clickbait).
Newspapers were always funded mostly by ads. You could argue that internet ads are worse than print ads because tracking, but I don't see that argument here. Newspaper headlines, particularly on the front page, have always been designed to catch the eye. Cable news has many of the same features.
Classifieds were a big portion of income. Craigslist effectively killed that in the mid 90s. It's been a slow steady decline to stay solvent. They had to switch to the "print what your audience wants to read," type of infotainment. Emotion, particularly fear is very effective to keep asses in seats (and eyes on screens).
I occasionally like to go back 10 years or so and read some of the ridiculous fear mongering of the time, now that it's well out of context.
Yup, they should all be abolished. We're not meant to know what is happening on the other side of the country. We don't need to, otherwise it takes up precious mind space. Being "well-informed" is a lie sold to us by these channels.
Everything was moving to this direction for a long time, but having 24 hours news let people optimize such headlines faster than before, and the internet made it possible to optimize millions of headlines.
This is a trend that’s been existing for a while, and since now we have better tools to experiment as a society the progress of this trend is accelerating.
>The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines.
Nah anyone old enough knows this shift happened with cable news and a shift to 24/7 news. You cannot find enough content to make that interesting without filling it full of sensationalist bs. This was an issue far before the internet was a ever a major news source.
I think this is quite relevant, but for the opposite reason that you're implying. Yes, news has always had the unreliability problem, and maybe it is especially bad today, but the corollary problem is the topic of the OP: Americans distrust the news. You claim the reason for increased distrust is the obvious one: The increased badness of the news - that reporting has gotten so incompetent and/or misleading that people are now seeing it through the Gell-Mann amnesia. My experience, however, is that more and more people are using Gell-Mann amnesia (or just general knowledge of reporting incompetence) as a blanket excuse to dismiss media that disagrees with their social/political feelings. They are clinging to this new idea that they know better than those fools reporting the news, and so they throw the baby out with the bath water to serve their preconceptions.
Similarly, for product reviews skip Verge, MKBHD, etc and head straight to Mobile Tech Review (yes strange name). Zero bs, all content: https://www.youtube.com/user/mobiletechreview
I don't think that's it. CNN is very broad. They report politics, world news, economics, but also celebrity gossip, human interest, lifestyle, opinion. That's their brand and they're actually pretty good at it. Their website hosts an enormous volume of content very reliably and without a paywall.
Hatred for CNN and other mainstream news is fed to a huge swath of the population by conservative politicians and pundits. They also heap scorn on excellent news sources like the NY Times and Washington Post because their factual reporting is damaging to their dishonest campaigns. Meanwhile, conservative media has shed any semblance of civility and just run blatantly agenda-driven stories. There's no both sides to this. It's almost entirely due to conservatives.
Here's a good test - if you find yourself in general almost always agreeing with / aligning with all of the stories that your favorite news source runs - that's how you know it's not a real news source. Real, impartial, objective, news, would report on everything, and give voice to other opinions than your own. They'd report things you agree with, and things you disagree with. They'd report things that further your agenda in the eyes of the public, and things that don't. They'd give others a chance to share their viewpoints as well as your own. When all you read on CNN are stories you personally resonate with, that's how you should know that you're not actually receiving the news, you're receiving an ideology.
I can guarantee you that you don't just happen to hold the "right" viewpoints across all areas, removing the need to ever be exposed to other ideas. (And no, having CNN set up caricatures of other's ideas to make a mockery of them is not being exposed to other viewpoints). The idea that you're so right and everyone else is so dumb/wrong/evil/etc. that they're not allowed a voice, is really not a good position to hold.
Real news is not subjective. There is no agree or disagree. News outlets running stories on climate denial, election lies, covid denial are driving an agenda of untruths. Most of my point of view is driven by an aggregate of credible sources. And I don't generally watch or read opinions.
> Real news is not subjective. There is no agree or disagree.
That's not actually remotely true. People Are Subjective, and "real news" is written by people, and often about people. For one example, they gave Sanders less coverage than Clinton in every single week of the Dem primary; about 2/3 overall.
Their visuals, style, tone and presentation are meticulously crafted to give the impression that they're trustworthy and patriotic; that things are simple. That really ought to give you a clue that they're selling you something.
You're confusing editorial bias with inaccuracy. When CNN says there's a fire in California there's probably a fire in California. That list of very subjective allegations of bias or mistakes out of what's probably tens of thousands of stories they run per year. And I'm fully aware it is a for profit business run by fallible human beings. What I'm saying is that it's a fundamentally ethical and reliable source. One that almost always gets their facts straight but is not able to cover every angle. That's why I read a variety of sources.
I'm not comparing them a mythical platonic ideal media organization. I'm comparing them to outlets that are willing to push blatant falsehoods like birtherism or vaccine denial while giving "equal time" to climate deniers or the Laffer Curve economists. Fox was run for decades by a guy who loved conspiracy theories and was not bothered by colluding with politicians on one side and not the other. OAN and Newsmax are worse.
And on top of that a lot the hatred towards CNN is based purely on politically motivated lies. Trump hated them and told his supporters to hate them for spurious reasons. He would accuse them of lying about "the Russia thing" without citing an actual bad report as a way to distract from the factual reporting that made him look bad. Spreading mistrust of the media was part of his playbook to control what people believe and it worked extremely well.
People will read that, and think to themselves, oh what an even handed tone. What a large number of facts, and nice graphic breakdowns. But the crucial context is missing - who is running those camps, and what are their contracts like? Those people are making money hand over fist, on the back of the misery of children in tin-foil blankets drinking water out of toilets.
Same with their "fast facts" section on Assange - an exercise in misinformation. The information might be "factual", but it's carefully selected to give a particular impression. Crucial information isn't there, such as the US' key witness admitting he gave false evidence, or Nils Melzer's observations.
Yes, a search for Nils Melzer yields TWO articles - compare to a search for 'Kardashian', which yields 1,700 hits. There are more stories about the Kardashian's shoe line than the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
A search for 'Chomsky' yields 7 result; none seem to be about him or his observations. Yes, SEVEN, the single digit number. 'Zizek' yields ONE (and 'Žižek 'yields zero).
'Snooki' yields 116.
That's not News bud; not any more than Fox. That's entertainment. If you want to learn about a fire in California there are hundreds of ways to do it, and they're probably mostly better than CNN.
That's basically all your personal biases on display. Chomsky is certainly not news. Nor do I expect them to cover absolutely everything. Like I said, I use multiple sources but even still my head can only hold so much and CNN only has a finite number of reporters. Like I also said they certainly have editorial bias because they have to choose what to cover given finite resources. The fact they miss some of these tiny stories is expected. That doesn't make them unethical or inaccurate.
CNN is "fundamentally ethical and reliable", but I have my "personal biases" on display ... "Chomsky certainly isn't news"... "Tiny stories", like Donziger and Melzer.
... Wow. Well, enjoy following the news CNN choose to tell you, I guess. Those Kardashian shoe lines are much more news than anything Chomsky has to say for some people, and I guess you're one of them. lol
I just started watching this over the past year, not every day, but when something interesting happens and I want a mindless way to follow developments.
PBS broadcasts and uploads to various places, which makes consumption so much easier than others that are seeking profits. Between NewsHour, FrontLine, and their local broadcasts, PBS has done a great job compared to other media outlets.
I think it’s more than just click baits. Many Journalists have essentially become “activists”, you can see their Twitter feed and it would basically make you question whether they are some party affiliate or journalists. So in stead of telling the news as is, they would add their own twists bringing in partisan commentators. Essentially news has become so opinionated, on a given topic depending on who is covering it you would get an entirely different picture.
That has nothing to do with click bait and more to do with keeping loyal user base inflamed and plugged in. That’s why NYT doesn’t even bother how 50% of the country would feel when they blatantly call the worst pandemic in century “red COVID”. Or when Fox News cheers at the sitting presidents inability to answer a question without completely losing the thread as if it is a win for the side they are in. Real loser is the American people as always.
I attempted to list out all of the insane things that news does today at https://legiblenews.com/about/ and yes, breaking is so overused to the point of abuse.
I too like PBS NewsHour and modeled https://legiblenews.com/ off the idea of being non-sensational with no ads.
Another thing I did that this crowd would appreciate: I made sure that each page would have one and only one web request. Check it out in your network activity area in your browser—its fast!
No, people trust activists and propagandists, because they know where they're coming from. The problem comes when people claiming to have some bizarre abstract Platonic neutrality are constantly lying to you in order to push you into the behavior that they would prefer you have.
Activists and propagandists are far more honest, and are far more trusted by the public.
Maybe honesty shouldn't be bizzare. Only if you wholesale buy into the 2 party divide will you think that facts are a foreign concept. There can be news people that are pro-truth, pro-citizen and not pro any party. That would look like the views of a normal person off the street who is not super into politics - the fourth pillar of democracy.
Do you hate mixing religion with politics? Well, law with politics, news with politics and law enforcement / millitary with politics is the same toxic mixture that ends up stealing power from the citizen, who is supposed to be the most powerful entity in a functioning democracy..
I think it's injecting judgement and morality into news. Once news is flavored by political views and moral judgements people will pick the sources that show the correct reprehensible behaviour based on their world view..
One good attempt I've seen a while back was Sagar Enjetti and Crystal Ball with a show called 'The Rising' - It's on YouTube but produced quite well.. The guy has a republican tilt and the girl supports democrat politics and they have a very good rapport with each other - which results in both calling out holes in each others argument without being adverserial..
It's not too surprising. How can anyone trust a journalism that has chosen to prioritize advocacy over the nuts and bolts of reporting? Fox news was the first -- it's all Fox news today.
That's why I love ZeroHedge. No credibility by definition, so you don't even expect it. You have to think on your own.
But, they provide very timely news on "market-moving" information (i.e. news that are/will be breaking news), often faster than mainstream media. So that is a very valuable service (for me).
We have a generation of 'reporters' who never knew the old way of journalism. Dispatches from flagship news outlets disclose no awaress they're doing their jobs in a tragically wrongheaded manner.
The blend of activism and journalism is the crux of the problem. In Canada the state-run news organization CBC knows they have low trust, however can't admit their role in it. About once a year they write an op-ed talking about the best ways to use legislation to fix the problem. This is the same state-run media company that said objectivity is "potentially harmful": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-july-...
I think what the link is saying is that, people are inherently biased, and to try to pretend otherwise is "potentially harmful," because you still inject your own views in biases into a topic, while pretending that you don't.
> I think what the link is saying is that, people are inherently biased, and to try to pretend otherwise is "potentially harmful," because you still inject your own views in biases into a topic, while pretending that you don't.
This is a common talking point of the advocacy crowd. The problem is that, as used, it's a non-sequitur.
Sure, human beings have inherent bias. The answer to that is, and always has been, to strive for objectivity as best we can even though we are flawed. The advocacy crowd instead takes it as an excuse to throw objectivity out entirely and double down on their own bias.
The link you cited and attributed to "the state run media company" wasn't actually from any current representative of the state-run media company. It was from a professor at a University who had formerly been a journalist. (ETA: meant to reply to the previous post by "trutannus", sorry!)
I wasn't using scare quotes, I was using literal quotes from your previous post. You said "This is the same state-run media company that said objectivity is 'potentially harmful'", but your link points to a University professor who doesn't represent CBC or any state-run media company as best I can see.
"However, Candis Callison calls objectivity "the view from nowhere" and considers it potentially harmful. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and Canada for television, the internet and radio, including at the CBC."
I'm a university professor who used to work at AT&T. I hold all sorts of positions, but that doesn't mean you should attribute them to "a major US telecommunications firm."
I'd agree unless AT&T published your remarks in their publications, yes. Do you really think there is no connection between what op-eds get approved for publication, and the organization publishing them? Do you also think that former employees being published in their former employer's news publication does not indicate some level of ideological aliment? I think that it does. If you don't, that's fine, but the conclusion I've come to is not unreasonable when you consider all the context.
It's a bad quote even in context! If you were in a trial, and the judge said "you all should know that I'm biased and it's harmful to pretend otherwise", would you expect to get a fair hearing?
Except it's not. They're trying to redefine what the point of journalism is. They want to add interpretation as a goal. If you read deeper into the article, you see this:
"There's a limit to how much you can put yourself in, but when you begin to think in terms of your place in society, what your relative privilege is, what social orders have benefited you and where they have not benefited you, I think this is where you're thinking about a news story. [It] shouldn't just be about a news story as an event, but how it's an intersection of systems and structures."
To me, this isn't what the news is about. This is option and interpretation. News should report facts, not try to apply social theory to interpret them for me. I'm not quote mining like you suggest. The context of the article does not make it any better. Further:
"It's been a very interesting few weeks on social media. And especially on Twitter, where you have Indigenous journalists and Black journalists talking about what's happened to them in the newsroom. Those kinds of narratives really illustrate the ways in which journalism is absolutely a work of interpretation, and recognizing journalism as contributing to a social order is a first step in seeing it as a tool that might do good in the world."
This is even more alarming. They're essentially saying the news is by its nature an interpretation of events and can't be otherwise. This is false. There are plenty of news sources which report short, concise segments of information without interpretation (ie: Reuters).
That pretty much sums up what's happened to the CBC as of late. A far left activist organization, pretending to deliver news, funded by the state.
It's a real shame, given that the CBC used to be quite a respectable organization, and would work hard to represent perspectives from all over Canada (given the constraints of the time).
I'm ostensibly in the group they're pandering to, but I just can't tolerate the obvious agenda setting. I can't imagine what the more conservative Canadians must think about it. Rex Murphy (a former CBC reporter) doesn't have much good to say about his old organization.
If you think the CBC is "far left," then you don't actually know what "far left" really is. CBC is, at most, left of center. I'm open to having my mind changed if you can provide, for example, an instance of the CBC advocating workers seizing the means of production.
I won't be able to find a specific example, but there has been a lot of air-time given to interviews about disrupting, quitting, and publicly shaming your workplace if you don't ideologically align with them. For example, there's a segment called Battle Tactics for your Sexist Workplace which CBC airs some Sundays. There was a segment on how to properly "go public" about why you quit, which is arguably a career limiting move dressed up as virtuous political posturing.
They don't produce the segment, but they give it air time which does imply some agreement with the content. I disagree that they're center-left, or far-left, but they definitely ride the outermost left boundary of the Overton Window, and sometimes spill a little over.
>There was a segment on how to properly "go public" about why you quit, which is arguably a career limiting move dressed up as virtuous political posturing.
If someone quits because their workplace is sexist, perhaps the motivation in going public is to warn people. You framing this as not being anything but virtue signaling (without using the actual phrase) and use it as an indisputable fact to back your point up strikes me as being the same sort of thing that people on the right claim the media engages in.
I don't think you're being honest here in the way you're construing my point. It looks like you've re-framed it, made stuff up to make me fit the form of a right-wing malcontent.
Can you point to where I said this was an indisputable fact? If you can't, then that's likely because I said the opposite, which you can see in the line you yourself quoted me on:
"which is arguably a career limiting move dressed up as virtuous political posturing."
It's pretty clear here that this is an opinion, not a retelling of fact.
When you remove the stuff I didn't say, my point is less easily shoehorned into the right wing perspective you want it to be.
And you've misconstrued what I've said. You used the airing of the segment as an indisputable piece of evidence in defense of GP's point of CBC being nothing more than left wing propaganda, which it is not. The fact that you threw in the bit about going public being virtue signaling merely makes me find you distrustworthy. The fact that you threw in the weasel word "arguably" and conveniently left out an argument that's more compelling than what you said was arguable simply means I question what you've said even more.
For someone who said they're open to having their views challenged, the tenacity with which you respin other's arguments suggests the opposite. I see little to no engagement with the argument's content, a lot of objections to form, and a lot of interpretation.
You don't come off as someone who wants to have good faith discussions. Instead you come off as someone who wants to bait people into replying, then go word-for-word through their reply to find any gotcha moment you can to match your spin.
In this reply chain for example, you've:
- framed me as thinking CBC is far left (a lie)
- put words in the mouth of another commenter,
- removed critical points from my comment,
- simplified my argument to a straw-man,
- tried to convert an opinion into a statement of fact by accusing me of just using "weasel words",
- inferred my motive, and
- accused me of leaving out other arguments.
This topic is inherently opinion based. I've been clear that's what I'm offering. Multiple times now you've accused me otherwise. You're free to respectfully disagree with my opinion, but this is neither respectful, nor a discussion of opinion with you at this point.
I'm not going to go any further with you down this line of conversation. Have a nice day.
>I see little to no engagement with the argument's content, a lot of objections to form, and a lot of interpretation.
I said I'm open to having my mind changed that CBC is not far left and you came up with this whole thing about them talking about how to go public if you quit from a workplace you find sexist as though it's some kind of supporting point. I called it a bad point and now you're crying about it.
That is some crazy woke bullshit that tries to redefine what objectivity means.
” One of the great books this year on journalism is by Desmond Cole, talking about his experience working at The Toronto Star, what it is to be a Black journalist and how it is that objectivity props up white supremacy.”
The claim is that objectivity is impossible thus not worthy of pursuit and one should instead examine ones “location” to use your biases for good.
This is typical CBC pap. If it’s not being discussed in the elite “progressive” circles of Toronto it’s not news.
I don't see the CBC saying that. I see them quoting someone they interviewed as saying that. Can you pinpoint where the CBC themselves take such a stance?
Yes, a fair point. This person is a former reporter for CBC. For me I think it's fair to say that this is coming from CBC as the general tone of the article appears to endorse their former employee's viewpoint. Employees who are hired on, and then later brought back to discuss their views, to me at least, do shed light into the views of the organization.
>"updated their manifest to suggest they’re entertainment and not fact based."
This is not new, nor exclusive to Fox. The Daily Show goes out of it's way to declare they aren't a news outlet, and Rachel Maddow also calls her program entertainment rather than news.
Is there really a difference, though? To me this is all just "a rose by any other name" and calling something news vs entertainment is a distinction without a difference.
"No reasonable viewer could conclude that Maddow implied an assertion of objective fact,” the opinion penned by Judge Milan D. Smith added (read it here) of the suit OAN filed in the fall of 2020 with great flurry."
"For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context,” Bashant said in a reflection of the ever spirally and tawdry state of American political discourse. “The context of Maddow’s statement shows reasonable viewers would consider the contested statement to be her opinion."
Fox does the same thing, presents opinion shows (23:30 of their 24 hour cycle) as news.
I think the biggest issue is that in many cases we see advocacy with a particular party position in mind, and not openly declaring which party position they advocate.
This means that Fox is really Mainstream Republican, opposed to MAGA and Libertarians.
Likewise, CNN is Progressive, NBC, CBS, ABC are mainstream Democrat.
This explains the rise of more alternative media to the Right of Fox, and to the Left of many of the Democrat channels.
I think there is still an untapped market around the Libertarian Left which to me doesn't really have a major newsmedia company pushing it yet.
It has really changed what is needed to get different perspectives on the same story, almost that you need to consume it from 3 channels to get all the angles. That may be a fault of newsbite sized media rather than depth which is regularly needed.
Much of this is the media's own doing but they're not alone: politicians have been drumming this beat for decades. They don't want voters to trust the media because that's the primary means by which they are held accountable.
I enjoy the tag line for Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation: "They know we know they lie". So for them, the game becomes to make everything look like a lie so that we can't distinguish what the truth is. Demonizing media and creating fractured narratives is the prime way to accomplish this.
I'm sure politicians and others enjoy the low levels of trust, but I think (to your point) this has been brought on by the media's own rejection of aspirations of objectivity and neutrality.
As some love to say, "[perfect] objectivity and neutrality are impossible [so the media is right in going full-on activist]". The media is having a firesale on its own credibility, and the "proceeds" are going to specific ideological causes to the detriment of society as a whole (what good can possibly come from an ideology which explicitly and routinely condemns objectivity, neutrality, rigor, etc?).
"The media" is generally a series of for-profit corporations that wish to maintain an audience by any means possible, and also have major business interests in front of Congress.
When the OP says "politicians prefer it when objective media goes away and gets replaced with advocates" and you say (paraphrasing) that "the objective media has responded to financial incentives and become advocates [so they can gain viewers and credibility with Congress]" you aren't saying anything different. You're just describing a situation in which societal and political incentives were changed to disincentivize the financial benefit of responsible reporting, and both media companies and politicians are responding to those incentives.
To then say "gosh I'm really mad at the media because they're bad" is like being mad at raindrops because they're wet. If you don't like the situation, propose an actual political or policy change that will improve the situation. I see too many people saying "I hate the media, and [my preferred politicians] rail against the media, ergo I will vote for [my preferred politicians]" failing to recognize that this dynamic simply reinforces the feedback loop rather than changing anything.
> When the OP says "politicians prefer it when objective media goes away and gets replaced with advocates" and you say (paraphrasing) that "the objective media has responded to financial incentives and become advocates [so they can gain viewers and credibility with Congress]" you aren't saying anything different.
I know, hence my "to your point"
> To then say "gosh I'm really mad at the media because they're bad" is like being mad at raindrops because they're wet.
The media landscape degraded in the last ~decade. Raindrops have always been wet. I don't propose a solution because I don't understand the dynamics exactly. I don't think I have to understand the dynamics exactly (or have a solution in mind) in order to talk about the problem.
> I see too many people saying "I hate the media, and [my preferred politicians] rail against the media, ergo I will vote for [my preferred politicians]" failing to recognize that this dynamic simply reinforces the feedback loop rather than changing anything.
Of course, this doesn't describe me. Contrary to the media portrait, you can't draw any reasonable inferences about someone's politics based on whether they support or criticize the changes to the media landscape.
Politicians are as untrusted by the public as the media is, and they work together constantly. Sometimes politicians what you to believe everything you read, because the people that whiteboarded out then slipped the story into the media are working for the people who are funding that politician. That politician is going to quote that editorial to excuse their awful vote in support of something their biggest donor wants passed.
I think the political party breakdown is very interesting as well. Trust from the Democratic side has not really dropped so much, but the mistrust from the Republican side looks absolutely staggering.
11% of Republicans trust the media - which is down from 14% 4 years ago. This doesn't seem like a big drop, but relatively, that is still a 20% decrease, in an already low amount.
Something is deeply wrong when half of your adult population just flat out doesn't trust you. Where do these people get their news about the world? Do they just live in a constant state of mistrust?
I mean, I was specifically referring to people who mistrust the media. I think it's the media's fault for this - "these" people seem absolutely rational and correct in their mistrust.
However, that doesn't obviate the need to have factual information about the world. Goings-on in local communities and nationally. So I am curious - where do they get their knowledge from?
Do they trust local sources and ignore national ones? Are there specific personalities they listen to? Is it all Facebook and YouTube, all of the time? Or do they just not watch, or use large grains of salt when they do watch?
Anyways, I am legitimately curious and I do think it's a problem that no one outside the left trusts the media. If that isn't a blatant condemnation of these media companies, who squandered that trust away, I don't know what is.
Sort of, but not completely in my opinion. In some sense they give people what they want, the same as Facebook giving people content that they "engage" more with (which is often negative).
Asking the media companies (who are as profit driven as anyone else) to be the adults is like asking social media companies to do the same. When it comes down to it, they will optimize for profit, and if not enough people are really interested in good journalism and reporting, that will get cut and replaced with sensationalism.
Meh, maybe it's the Republicans who have the right idea on trusting the news media here vs. the Democrats.
The problem is of course they're probably getting news from even less trustworthy places as you mention, but the news media simply doesn't deserve the trust of anyone in the general population.
>Meh, maybe it's the Republicans who have the right idea on trusting the news media here vs. the Democrats.
Given the percentage of Republicans that believe the 2020 election was actually stolen, how do you justify this view? Are the outlets that Republicans DO trust providing more reputable news, or are they spewing complete nonsense that is far more wrong than the mainstream news media? Every piece of evidence I've seen points to this rather than Republicans being right.
I'm not saying the Republicans have better sources of information or that they're better informed. I'm saying the mainstream news outlets are completely undeserving of our trust considering how agenda-driven and partisan most of them are. My contention is "trusting the mass media" is not inherently a positive quality.
>My contention is "trusting the mass media" is not inherently a positive quality.
Maybe not inherently good, but few things are. Given that people who trust the mass media, on average, have a more accurate view of what's happening in the world, it most certainly seems to be better than the alternative, does it not?
The mass media peddled lies to sell us on atrocities like the Iraq War, refused to hold the Obama administration accountable for the prosecution of financial crimes, and often have a media bias pro the Democratic party in general. How much airtime would the Hunter Biden story have gotten on MSM if it’d been Eric Trump? Like yeah, maybe CNN believes climate change is real, but on the issues that matter they’ve failed a countless number of times to inform the public on issues that matter. Settling for their garbage is pointless.
I'm not republican per-se, but I identify as somewhat conservative. I get my news by assembling multiple stories about events, along with any social media non professional reporting I can get. Generally speaking, I don't believe there's enough good information out there such that I can have a real idea of 'what's going on' outside of things directly in my life and community.
>Every piece of evidence I've seen
Did you believe it when they said inflation was going to be transitory? How about when they had back-to-back headlines that Powell 'saved the economy' and that 'Billionaires quadrupled their wealth during the crisis'?
>Generally speaking, I don't believe there's enough good information out there such that I can have a real idea of 'what's going on' outside of things directly in my life and community.
That's a pretty extreme epistemological stance to take. I can't refute it (I've personally gone down that road before), but I also don't see how one can hold that stance while also identifying with any political position at all and believing that they have solid justification for it.
>Did you believe it when they said inflation was going to be transitory?
Did "the media" say this, or did they report that that's the government's position on the matter? Has inflation proven to not be transitory?
>How about when they had back-to-back headlines that Powell 'saved the economy' and that 'Billionaires quadrupled their wealth during the crisis'?
The only place I recall ever reading that Powell saved the economy is WallStreetBets memes. Regardless of that, is the issue here that these headlines are contradictory?
A bigger question is "Do Republicans trust their politicians". Trusting politicians but not the media seems like a dangerous combination when it comes to questioning those politicians behavior and intent.
>Where do these people get their news about the world?
The scary answer is likely, Facebook. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence here, but if anyone has researched it, I'd love to see an article about it.
> Do they just live in a constant state of mistrust
Likely yes. Again, going back to FB anecdota, there seems to be a significant portion of the population that mistrusts everything. Immigrants, minorities, government, anyone outside of their social group. A large portion of these peoples post are motivated by/or based on some kind of fear.
Yeah, that's also the real headline here I think, and the thing to be worried about: around 2000, every group was at around 50%, give and take a few points. Nowadays the "trust in media" is as polarized as anything else. No wonder Democrats and Republicans can barely agree on anything anymore...
DailyWire and NPR. Yes DW is bias but they are factual. I listen to NPR a lot less than I used to. Occasionally I'll hit up BBC or some other European news source.
For the record I'd consider myself an independent. I voted Obama twice. So, I think it's more than just Republicans not trusting the media. MSM has lost a ton of viewers since their cash cow Trump left as well.
It's worth noting that while Republican trust in "The Media" is 11%, Republican trust in Fox News is 57%. I'd say the answer to this sort of survey is in many ways more an artifact of all the officials and organizations who say "The Media" cannot be trusted, but of course this specific new source that I am a fan of is not "The Media". (Likewise, trust of local news organizations, something everyone would have a specific picture of in mind, is at 75%).
There is definitely an extent to which trust in the 4th estate has dropped, but I personally think it's overblown by these sorts of questions. If I was to guess, much of the drop is a change in how people consider the media in their minds. Along with becoming a loaded phrase, we are now shown more of what the media we don't personally choose to consume looks like than ever before. Now when people hear "The Media" they don't just think about the media they choose, but the media that their faction of the internet rages about. I'd be very interested in the answer to something along the lines of "What's your favorite media source?" then "How much do you trust X?"
You might be surprised to know that Fox has received a lot of backlash from TrumpWorld after how they handled the coverage of the 2020 election. A significant number of Republicans have basically disowned Fox and the DrudgeReport.
> In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media -- such as newspapers, TV and radio -- when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly -- a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all?
The article reports that those responding with "great deal" or "a fair amount" is the second-lowest on record.
I was once interviewed about my thoughts on a candidate during a presidential primary. Without giving away too much detail, I mentioned that I was unenthusiastic about the candidate and didn't understand his sudden surge in popularity. I threw in a sentence about wanting to vote for someone I actually felt was authentic and trustworthy.
The reporter used my "I want someone trustworthy" quote (without the context) and in such a way to imply I saw something in the candidate, when in reality, I was explaining that I didn't trust him as far as I could throw him. She just tossed my line in the article right after mentioning good things about the candidate. Totally and utterly misleading.
Pretty direct and eye opening to me. That reporter went out with a story in mind and used my words however she saw fit.
I'm still amazed at what they don't cover, and even suppress.
The disparity of coverage between such as the largest antiwar protests in history, institutional imperial torture, the Occupy movement, or bank bailouts; compared to pop-stars or sports, is soul-rocking.
Many otherwise smart people seem to accept this. They see it as normal, inevitable, and even victim blame saying that the media are "just giving people what they want".
I disagree - polls all say people want healthcare, they want Bush and Cheney held for war crimes, they want clean water and a healthy planet. People want better education and childcare and mental health support. And those otherwise smart people agree with me, then go right back to turning on the bullshit; proudly voting for the lesser but still abominable evil.
A great demonstration of the power of selecting which stories to cover is in Democracy Now versus nearly everything else. A DN listener hears about tons of labor action and protests that don't make it to other news sources (or, if they do at all, are waaaaay down in a tiny column near the end), so would have a very different idea about e.g. how active (and, perhaps, how useful) labor unions are, while someone with other sources may only hear about one or two major protests and one or two major strikes per year. DN also keeps up with coverage of protests in particular, where other outlets mention them only infrequently, such that a consumer of the latter might think they fizzle out or fail much sooner than they actually do.
I dunno which is more "accurate" or "true", but it's a great example of how deciding what counts as noteworthy news is itself a very powerful editorial force. Where other outlets (even NPR and such) are setting aside news-coverage time to promote blockbuster films(!), the DN version of that would be promoting a documentary about indigenous-peoples issues or climate change or something. Totally different view of the world, just because of what the outlet deems worth covering.
> polls all say people want ... Bush and Cheney held for war crimes
I'm calling BS on that one. You might be able to find a poll that says that, but no, polls don't all say that. You need to look at a wider selection of polls.
I'll give you that one, I ought have phrased that better.
Maybe something like, every poll outside of America and maybe one or two other countries that have benefited greatly from those wars since 2001.
I would like to believe that if Americans were actually informed, by a media that worked on their behalf, they'd nearly universally want to prosecute Bush and Cheney as well. How sad, if I'm wrong on that.
Zinn's book, and his methods have many detractors [1], [2], [3]
Have you read any of the criticisms of the book now that the historical record is much more complete around some of his claims?
While Zinn makes for entertaining reading, history is savaging much of it. I enjoyed reading it, but the more I read of contemporary sources, the more I became convinced that Zinn was giving us a very selective story without the vital nuance.
2. 2014 State run broadcaster claim Israeli soldiers "shoot at everything that moves".
3. 2018, 2019 and 2020 close friends of me were targeted first by a large business newspaper, then by the second biggest broadcaster, then by the largest broadcaster.
None of them had anything to back it up except spooky music, interviews with people who disliked them, medias own admissions that they don't understand international finance etc.
Meanwhile police had run undercover and official investigations based on the same sources and shut the case not because of the usual lack of resources or because they couldn't prove it but because there wasn't anything wrong.
Depends on the story, the publisher, and the sources. Like everything else.
If the story is well cited, from a reputable publisher, and/or backed up by concrete facts, then I tend to trust is a little.
Not a lit, but a little. I am generally skeptical of most things here, though. As another poster in here said, I am always shocked by the ignorance on this site relating to things I have a ton of experience with. I have to assume that same ignorance extends to other areas as well.
That being said, in general, if a post makes it to the top of HN, it seems to be better informed than other places I go for news.
I feel a very strong low tide in the general publics withdrawal of their support of many institutions. Where is all that energy previously occupied going to go?
It's all click bait now, from whatever side, crafted to generate outrage.
News media is sold to the general public below cost to drive eyeballs to advertising. As the saying goes, the general public aren't the customer, they're the product.
If you want a to understand the mistrust, Awekan with JP has a satirical channel on youtube that takes on "we lie to you the news". From a conservative perspective. Funny and absurd.
2 million subs.
You don't need to agree with it, just recognize that its a pretty accurate representation that conservatives believe fb is coordinating the censorship with the government. In no small part due to them banning Trump, and statements like this from the press secretary.
Psaki: 'We're Flagging Problematic Posts On Facebook That Spread Disinformation'
E.g. in response to the question "Now, apart from how FREQUENTLY you use them as sources of news, we'd like to know whether or not you can trust the accuracy of the news and information you get from each of the following news sources. First, do you feel you can trust the accuracy of the news and information you get from ... ?" the source that the most people (74%) said they can trust in 2019 (the last time the question was asked) was local television news. Other local news sources also got rated more trustworthy than national ones.
I wonder how much of that is due to culture fit (reporting news in a way that matches the expectations of the people in the area) vs ease of verification (if something happened in your neighborhood, it's easier to find out whether the news is accurate than if it's about a faraway place you've never been to).
The deregulation of the '90's, combined with questionable court decisions, and the resulting interference with Government in media--not to mention the rise of social media & big tech's influence and the resulting wane of traditional media's--has brought us to the point where most media orgs have no incentive to act trustworthy. It's just not profitable any more!
As a non-american, my picture of the american media started shattering with the Iraq war, and especially the events preceding it. It's only been down-hill since then.
Miller was essentially a saboteur. She was primarily operating out of self-interest but used her position to promote false stories in exchange for access. And she was punished for her crimes.
NYT also ran Joseph Wilson's oped explaining the yellowcake accusations against Iraq were likely fabricated.
An apology and a retraction don't outweigh years of cheer-leading. They did serious harm by loaning W and his goons credibility. It's hard to overstate how responsible they are for the whole thing.
That is a part of it. Some organizations were better than others, but for certain publications/channels, it felt like their sole purpose was to coax the american public into endorsing another war, using whatever rationalizations necessary.
Its not just that. I remember in the build up to the war CNN having lots of patriotic style coverage with how great the US armies were, how bad Saddam was (and his brother), lots of pictures of jets and battle ships. Once the war started there were lots of amazing shots of smart bombs doing amazing things, but no coverage of anyone living there on the receiving end.
All of that was just them dusting off the 1991 playbook from the first Gulf War. That was the first time an ongoing war was mass marketed in the "modern" way, I think (you could argue successful war propaganda has been happening for centuries through other media).
I even remember this thing at the Scholastic Book Fair that was basically a book-magazine thing and contained a large fold out map and a list of all the int'l military divisions that would be participating in Operation Desert Storm; essentially armchair generalship marketed to kids.
Can someone tell me why we should have ever trusted any of them in the first place? How was trust earned? Was trust ever broken? What was done to rebuild trust?
At one point, the New York Times had an editor who knew that his newsroom leaned left. So he deliberately steered the paper somewhat right, in order to balance out the reporters. He literally had on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight."
That earns some trust. Not total trust, but a lot more than I trust the NYT today.
It’s not just trust in media (or government). It’s most societal institutions that have lost trust. I’d argue even trusting one’s own neighbours is probably at an all-time low.
Trust should be something we think about in our interactions and how we can work to improve it.
I think that if the media had given Trump credit for Operation Warpspeed/the vaccines there’d be a lot less vaccine hesitancy on the right.
I’m not saying people being less hesitant because of that would be logical, but it’s one way their bias has actually killed people.
Frankly, Biden should have done so too. I think it would have been the best ethical and political move. Imagine if they did a commercial together telling people to get vaccinated.
Operation Warpspeed was a miserable failure. They promised 100 million vaccines by the end of 2020 and managed 5m, screwing up at almost every step. And it’s not like they did anything to speed up vaccine development, because that was all done in Europe.
Realize that as soon as Biden took over then there was zero chance of any conservative doing anything to help Biden “succeed” in any dimension, regardless of how many lives are on the line. You don’t see Trump on Fox News telling people to get vaccinated do you?
They were late by what - a few months? Speaking of Europe, we had vaccines for quite a while and they didn't. There's also no way prepurchasing a bunch of different vaccines didn't help/fund development.
As per your second point, I agree. On the other side you had democratic presidential candidates saying they wouldn't take "Trump's vaccine." It's disgusting what the political divide has brought.
He deserves as much credit as most presidents do for most things done under them...which is to say, not much. But you can be damned sure that if Biden was president first and then Trump we'd still be hearing about how it was due to President Biden that we have the vaccines.
This is entirely the media's fault. Sadly most journalists no longer know the word impartiality. They instead focus on creating narratives that fit their views and push them onto the masses. Nothing is more infuriating and disappointing than seeing simple established facts being distorted and twisted into something it's not. And this includes reputable media such as Washington Post and NYTimes. I think Reuters might be the only news agency keeping sensationalism and bias to the minimum.
How can anyone trust the media when it seems to have become a target of institutional capture for political and ideological gain? Journalism is not really journalism anymore - it's propaganda. It's duty is not to inform, but to persuade. This tendency towards advocacy journalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism) has been very apparent in the trend of newsroom revolts. See the following example stories about this phenomenon:
I know the following is somewhat naive / oversimplified; but it is a good thought provoker.
You can't advertise a product that is misleading or dangerous, and yet there are no such limitations (or even warnings!) on the media? Maybe media reporting should have warnings on it like medicine advertising.
Well, ye. There's always elite classes with special rules. Social media is pushed to censor 'misinformation' while news media can lie all day. Entertainment media need to clearly label product placements, news media can make 'sponsored content' nearly indistinguishable from the other content. If you have a blog with 'questionable' content you can be fined, news media can have 'opinion' columns advocating for genocide and there's no issue. If you get arrested at a riot, you can just say you're a journalist and you'll likely be let go as they don't want to bother with the potential outrage..
I'm worried about undue influence of Tech Billionaires.
If you hold the belief that "Global warming is real", "and the world has too many people." How pernicious those two beliefs put together could be. You couple that with some Eugenic beliefs in creating a super human race. And find out that Epstein had those views, and then you find out about the flight logs of people that visited his island. It just breeds distrust.
Nearly 20 years ago we started pushing STEM in society. I would expect everyone here thinks that's a great idea but what happened to Not-STEM. Journalism lost all their top candidates into STEM. The quality of journalism objectively dropped and when that happens it turns into "Yellow Journalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Basically what we see today in journalism is no different than 100 years ago. A very high degree of yellow journalism.
Pulitzer and Hearst became so bad that they openly called for the assassination of the US president(mckinley). Both ran basically the same call to assassinate with different authors. The realization that pulitzer and hearst had some hand in having the republican president assassinated is what got him to stop. He went back to the paper and put a stop to the yellow journalism and then put the prize in his will.
Very obvious the Hannity and Oreilly Fox news led the move, but now it's virtually everyone. It's not even just the USA. The yellow journalism coming out of the CBC is a nice steady flow.
The media right now are in a similar position as the media in any kleptocracy or oligarchy: they repeat the lies of power uncritically and try to anesthetize the public with crude sensationalism. You can see why they’re afraid to ask questions too; look what they did to Assange. Or Stephen Donzinger. You’ll probably not hear that name much on mainstream news. Meanwhile the NSA violates the constitution daily and the Congress is perpetually unable to address any of the concerns of the public while the powerful gorge themselves on the corpse of the public good. It’s a story as old as time. Usually this is the last stage leading to general collapse of the government.
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