Nah, the media has been doing that quite successfully all on its own for the past decade or so, flying off the rails completely sometime during the 2016 election cycle. Save for WSJ and Glenn Greenwald, there's no trust remaining at all.
> The whole narrative that the media are the enemy of the people needs to die and soon or we will all regret it.
It’s not clear to me that the press as an institution is still necessary in the age of the internet. It’s also not clear to me that the media, as it exists, deserves the protections that have developed over the years. The notion of writing articles that not only don’t cite sources, but keep them secret, is obsolete.
> The top five were the military, Amazon, Google, local police, and colleges and universities. The bottom five were the press, the executive branch, Facebook, political parties, and Congress.
The fact that a press is necessary to a free society does not mean that this press is what should serve that function. In this day and age of universal literacy and universal access to information via the Internet, we need reporting of facts, not self-appointed guardians of the “narrative.”
Go back and look at CNN tapes from the late 1980s or early 1990s. They’re unrecognizable compared to news broadcasts today. Neutral, unemotional, reporting of facts. No attempt to construct larger narratives or push them down viewers’ throats.
You've lost credibility completely with this sentence. While I'd agree that many news outlets have their biases, some hugely so, saying everything they say is a lie is just categorically wrong.
Many news outlets like Reuters and the PA have business models based around factual reporting for others.
> of journalism is really important today because of the politicization of so many institutions, including virtually all traditional media outlets like Scientific American.
Yes and no. Yes, many of these formerly prestigious publications have declined. No, they no longer qualify for the honor of being called journalists.
Words matter. We have to stop rewarding bad behaviour.
> Are they informing you? Or outraging you? They need to decide.
They decided. They're outraging you.
(Somewhat more precisely, outrage vs. inform is a spectrum, not a binary, and they are moving more toward outrage and less toward inform. They still inform, but less reliably than they used to. And as a result, media trust hits a new low, because people can tell that media is informing less than it used to.)
Have you not seen most mainstream news in the last several decades? I was watching CNN in the gym at the hotel on a business trip and maybe every fifth sentence was a snide judgement.
> if you strip people of the ability to debate and discern facts
If you dare to debate and discern the wrong facts, you get a hit piece published on you like Slate Star Codex. Or you get fired like the NY Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr.
It seems some of the media play an enthusiastic part in stripping people of that ability, not in protecting it.
>They could at least stop making up bullshit claims in headlines and text.
The problem there is that journalism has been decimated and they have to do something (to get clicks) to survive. I'm just pointing that out, not defending it.
> This is a direct result of the degradation of journalism.
And, you know, a political ideology that believes the media lies about everything. The current President of the United States himself says it constantly.
>>>> Nowadays, none is trustworthy by default anymore.
Perhaps that is a good thing. Maybe this is a good excuse to stop and consider multiple news outlets, even if it conflicts with our own opinions, for our news sources.
FTFY.
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