They so frequently use half-truths, lies by omission, complete removal of context, and in many cases report on things without substantiating evidence or credible sources, that it's hard to think they have much value at all. And it's not just one outlet, it's all of them. Sometimes they'll be accurate when the story fits what they want to say, and when it doesn't they will either say nothing at all (see: Sweden, Germany, France) or they'll grossly misrepresent things.

The recent Felix Kjellberg incident is a fine example of what I've seen happen non-stop over the past 4-5 years. Every single week it's yet again the same exact thing, this time with a different story. It has never relented.

If the choices are: direct from the source which may or may not be accurate 100% of the time, or via a media known to be incredibly dishonest and inaccurate at an alarming rate, it's really not a hard choice here for me.

> If the internet wasn't around to fact check the lies of mainstream media in real-time, imagine what they'd be getting away with.

Wasn't there a phrase, "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet"? What if you listen to fact-checkers who themselves cherry-pick and distort? How would you know?

With all that said, there are serious flaws with how news is distributed which can make these human characteristics more pronounced (and I suspect our opinions of the so-called "mainstream media" are actually more similar than they are different), and that we generally ought to use the news to point us toward actual primary sources we can review for ourselves, rather than use the news as a source of anger-pornography (which gets tons of clicks) to bolster our misguided opinions.

As a consumer of sources of information, I'm just trying to make decisions based upon a tiny fraction of an extremely limited amount of information we know about the world around us (which I'd argue the vast majority of what we read isn't particularly helpful).

So what I'm getting at is that I feel that your tone is far too generalized to really be meaningful in any sense.

(I apologize if that sounds harsh)

Misinformation, fake news, propaganda all pretty much the same thing and they've all been around for a long time.

Our media is a reflection of who we are. Confused, misled, naive and easily persuaded. Suspension of disbelief happens to even the smartest cookies, no one escapes.

Until a automatic reliable semantic fact checker comes along with 99% accuracy we're all in this swirling pile of garbage together.

You know what’s hard? Finding good reporting. Everyone is selling you something, even if it’s just a comfortable world view.

If you report a story, using only the facts that support your narrative, and omitting only the facts that don’t support it, have you lied? Have you reported propaganda?

What if you report a story, without reporting anything as a fact? What if you report “anonymous sources claim ___”, or “___ is being criticised for ___”, or “a verified document describes ___”. None of those reports involve any facts at all, nor any verifiable fictions.

What if you simply disagree on what the facts are?

What if you intentionally misinterpret something, in an effort to debunk it. If I make a mostly true statement, but use an obvious hyperbole, or get a minor detail wrong, am I “just using the English language as intended”, or “just spreading false information”.

> What do you think of the Media Bias Chart?

I think if you tasked 50 different research teams with producing their own chart with the methods they deemed best, that you’d get 50 different charts.

> It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual

We have always had the ability to enforce authority on others. That doesn’t mean we have had any success in creating authorities to be the arbiter of truth. In fact, we have a long history as a species of failing miserably at doing that.

Easily verifiable outright lies in the media do happen, but the cases where this is so black and white are incredibly uncommon, and that’s not what these systems are trying to deal with. I mean, recently “conspiracy theories” have become a target for moderation. Do you know what a conspiracy theory actually is? It’s any theory that two or more people conspired to do something. How much recent news reporting would fit that definition?

Any system that attempts to strip people of their right to critical though (which is what this is) is doomed to fail in the exact same way that every such system implemented throughout history has.

All media is biased because all media is gathered and edited by biased people (or as I like to call them: people). The only thing fact checking can help cutting down on is actual fake news -- hoaxes and blatantly obvious lies.

The "fake news" label however is applied so broadly now that you can have two contrasting reports standing side by side calling each other fake news when neither side is able to report on the full picture and both sides skew the few factoids they have in accordance with their biases or use inflammatory language.

I have yet to see a journal or reporter who consistently reports facts as presented while checking for authenticity and motive. It seems like certain organisations have learned that they can bypass a lot of accountability by "leaking" information anonymously rather than using official press releases (e.g. the "intelligence" sources during the late stages of the presidential election campaigning, none of which any agency seems to consider worth hunting down as a security risk like any of the real "leakers" before).

The closest I've seen is a constant chorus of "we don't know the specifics yet", which predictably doesn't perform well when competing with "news" sources that just forward unsubstantiated tweets and anonymous "eyewitness accounts".

Remember when every media outlet on the planet said that Hillary Clinton would win the election in a landslide? The same outlets also said brexit would never happen. How did that turn out? Many of these articles are now deleted.

They repeatedly lie without consequence. No other industry could get away with it.

It's reaching the point where if the media is telling you something you should instantly bet against it. Their job is to sell clicks, not tell you the truth.

Let me take an example story that was printed in most news papers after the election. Two facts: The number of new articles written during the election about the Clinton email scandal was twice as many as the Trump tape scandal, but news papers also wrote more than twice as much about the Trump tape scandal than the Clinton email scandal. Both are factual true, but any conclusion made on them is akin to falsehoods because they leave out the necessary context. What is missing is time, as in that news paper wrote about the Clinton email scandal the whole 6 months that the study looked at, while the Trump audio tape scandal was earthed only one month before the election date. As such looking at articles per day while each scandal was new, the trump scandal created significant more articles than any other month, while the long duration of the email scandal created a much higher total number of articles than those of the single month that the audio tapes were discussed.

But it is not news to say that an event stretched over 6 months can create more articles than a single month, or that the last month of an election generates a lot of news articles. It is something a Wikipedia article might mention to balance a paragraph, but it do not generate clicks from a political targeted audience. Lying by omission is technically not an outright falsehood, and they aren't required to make retractions to fix it, so both sides instead paints them selves as victims of the media and media is happy to write articles about it that tailors to their matching demographic. Money is gained and all that is lost is trust.

Yet if you look at the list of mistakes the mainstream media has made in the past decade I’m not sure why anyone would assume they are worthy of an assumption of good faith reporting.

Or do you suggest to only read news from sources aligned politically with your views regardless of whether there is or isn't any true in the news?

Anyway, in my opinion people who read the news and disregard facts that don't agree with their opinions is what I think is wrong with the world at the moment. Because of large number of these people, lying actually starts making sense, at least if you only care about getting elected. Because then what you say doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is whether you are able to exploit existing divisions to hijack voters by telling lies that agree with voters' emotions.

They don't validate sources, rarely investigate, heck they barely even copy edit these days. They re-report entirely false stories published in questionable sources, using their name to validate it. Obviously everyone knows how deeply inaccurate any story becomes once technology is involved, now imagine that level of inaccuracy spread across all the topics they cover.

Its painfully self-interested for them to be claiming to be such a clear source of truth.

You could call them on their BS then only because you have internet too. When it comes to other sources mass media do no better job. You just can't see that easily how crappy they are in approximating the truth.