Such as? That's an outlandish claim unless you have receipts to back it up.

He does get things wrong occasionally, he's only human after all, but he tends to publish very public retractions which is more than can be said for professional journalists.

That would be a huge step, and not some minor detail as you're trying to frame it.

And they were not 'errors' - his statements were quite deliberately misrepresented. If I, a non-native speaker, can understand what he wrote, then native-speaker journalists should not be presumed to be so incompetent, especially since they did not correct their stories and headlines once informed of the 'errors'.

I'm not entirly sure:

- Fox outright lied about voting machines (and much more)

- NBC lied about Russiagate (and much more)

- CNN lied about Ivermectin and painted Joe Rogan yellow (and much more)

Outright falsehoods are definitely a thing.

I don't think it's true (why would it be), and even it is true, it is stupid to assume that it is true. It only can cause harm, but no benefits at all.

Without agreeing or disagreeing with you, I want to ask: Do you not realize how shaky of a claim this is? Even if you did somehow know this to be true, why would anybody believe that you know this?

Have you somehow both consumed the vast majority of journalism and known enough to judge its veracity (presumably without relying on other journalism)? You would have to be a subject matter expert in just about everything, as well as somehow spend more than 24 hours a day consuming news for your claim to be at all credible.

> Sounds like the journalists are doing their job. Sounds like the death of investigative journalism.

Its because news is for entertainment purpose not knowledge acquisition from the journalists perspective and secondly because powerful players are involved.

This guy donated 40 million dollars to the ruling political party and has parents with connections. Why would you write a truthful article outlining the grand fraud that took place when you only have something to loose by doing so?

I think it’s entirely reasonable to hold journalists to some standards that include “not making shit up and then reporting on it”.

I can be (and am) simultaneously sympathetic to their side but not to their journalistic actions in this case.

First, a nitpick: that is a thought not a feeling: you didn't state how it made you feel, you stated an idea.

Moving on... That's not why people mistrust the media. They mistrust the media because they are told to by politicians seeking to discredit journalism and control the narrative.

That's not how journalism works, at least until fairly recently

What are you talking about? Careful language regarding certainty of a statement has got nothing to do with choice of interviewee or subject matter.

Of course journalists make judgement calls about what subjects to cover and of course this shapes news coverage.

You present this as some super-secret conspiracy, ‘broken wide open’ by the Internet. Did you really not know before then? Did you not read differing newspapers and spot that the choice of story and spin differed.

Historically , what is pejoratively described as the ‘Main Stream Media’ has hosted journalists who care deeply about quality of reporting and getting the story straight, fact-checking and making sure that quotes are obtained from opposing points of view.

It’s the internet and rolling news which has put a strain on the consensus.

> news is highly repetitive

> what is presented as news is actually opinion

Agreed on all points.

A few years ago I went through a period of wanting to get down to the truth on major stories in the news. Almost on a daily basis I would watch/read the same story form sources with different political biases. After that, I would look for actual source documents to verify claims. If it was a crime story, there would be police reports. If it was about a law or treaty, there would be a document trail. Etc. I kept notes.

I would then report my findings, in detail, to friends, mostly on FB.

What I discovered was that nearly 100% of the news stories out there fell in a range between absolutely fake and seriously distorted. It was very rare to find objectively accurate reporting on anything. I would venture a guess that the only thing that is reported with some accuracy in news broadcasts are road conditions and traffic. It's that bad.

The amount of work it took to do this was surprising. One thing became certain, this was not sustainable. I took it on as a hobby/learning-experience. I think I was done in about a year. Even that was too long.

The other surprising finding was how otherwise-intelligent people received the reality that what they believed to be true was, in fact, either distorted or a complete fabrication. This is the part that hurt me the most. I lost friends over this. Seriously.

What is it that makes people, even those holding advanced degrees in the sciences, simply refuse to accept reality when presented to them in very clear detail? I don't know. It is incredibly frustrating to run into an "emperor has no clothes" situation with people you have thought to be capable, intelligent, analytical and objective for decades.

I try to hold no political bias and do not label myself with a political party at all. I think that's truly dumb, no political party can be right 100% of the time or about anything, I don't care who they might be. And yet, some of what I saw was the kind of deep attachment to ideology that you can only label as being a result of indoctrination.

This is what I think the algorithms that present information to people surfing the web, FB, whatever, have caused a lot of damage to society. On FB, I watched, as two family members went at each other from different sides of the political spectrum. One became extreme left and the other extreme right. Prior to spending a lot of time on FB they were the best of friends (siblings). After about a year of being very active on FB, each having made a descent into ideologically opposite resonant chambers, their relationship suffered serious damage, perhaps even permanently.

News of this kind does not deserve that label. And, in my opinion, does not deserve the protections afforded in the US constitution through freedom of the press. I don't believe the intent was to protect liars and manipulators. I think this has to change, I just don't know how. If someone like me can spend a few hours on a story and get down to the truth, news organizations, with their staff and resources can do the same or better.

From my perspective, after having determined that nearly 100% of what we are told is twisted garbage, this kind of thing needs to be criminalized. The reason I say this is that today's technology has enabled powerful lies to reach hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, around the world in an instant. This is the major change that has, again, in my opinion, tilted the scale from being lax about misinformation to having to be very strict.

From my perspective, lies and manipulation should not enjoy legal protection at all and they should come with severe civil and potentially criminal consequences based on scale. A television network has the kind of scale that would require them to be factual in their reporting. A local neighborhood newspaper or an individual without much reach is a different matter. What I say to my circle of friends is very different from the constitutionally protected category represented by major global and international media networks.

How about opinion? Sure, no problem. However, when purported news outlets engage in delivering manipulated opinion pieces nearly 100% of the time they should no longer be able to hide behind constitutional protection. If they cause someone, anyone, damage, they ought to be legally liable for it. In other words, you can't say someone is a murderer and spread that into the minds of tens or hundreds of millions of people and then claim it was just opinion. You've done damage. The laws should not protect you from the consequences of your actions.

Anyhow, a bit of a rant, I know. It pains me because the internet was supposed to launch an era of enlightenment. Yes, of course, it has done great good for humanity, and yet in this one domain I think I can say it has been a massive failure. There's probably more misinformation out there (in terms of news) than factual reporting. The problem is that it takes hours per story to get to the truth and almost nobody has the time or desire to engage in that kind of research. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes the truth, at least in the minds of those without the time, skills or inclination to try and challenge what they are being told.

I don't think so. Most journalists these days start with a agenda and cherry pick facts to make their stories. It's so obvious it's laughable.

Yes, we did, and the media-driven false perception was already well-established 20 years ago; I saw papers about the media-driven false perception in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Media sensationalism isn't new. Even the heightened form driven by the 24-hour news cycle is older than that (CNN, the 24-hour news network that drove the 24-hour news cycle, is 37 years old. Fox News and MSNBC, the two competing general 24-hour news networks that made that cycle competitive were each founded 21+ years ago in 1996.)

That's a gross generalization.

> Even the news orgs we hold in very high regard (NPR) do it.

Source?

> They need to operate more like the justice system; you should be absolutely sure of the facts before you publish them.

One should never use absolutes as there are exceptions to nearly everything.

It really is. As a former journalist, I can tell you a lot of crackpot stories come across our desks. We look at them, will see if the evidence can ‘stand up’ the story - if not, it gets spiked.

I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism.

Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake.

The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did.

I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story.

If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.

That’s embarrassing. I actually did overstate the disagreement upon re-reading your prior comment. My apologies.

> There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit.

Even CNN and Fox can be held in check for literally lying, but by the people they’re lying about, and in turn they operate in a space where they report on a more powerful entity than themselves when they lie or subvert the truth. The American government is also a player in the information space, and its chief officials are not always telling the truth, or disclosing the full truth. So what we have is a wash in which information competes with information, and we don’t always have good, accurate or useful information where we need it or desire it. I still wouldn’t call this a market failure, people profit and lose off of good or bad information all the time; it’s when we allow ourselves to become tools for moneyed or empowered interests who use those programs and writings to induce action that we experience a very real human or political failure.

The purpose of the news industry is to inform, but it has always and will forever be at the behest of people with an interest in informing in a manner they prioritize in competition with other people with differing interests, and it is itself for-profit industry whether or not the profits are expressed on the P&L of a given corporation.

Everyone is wrong about some facts. Surely I'm wrong about some facts, as I'm not omniscient.

However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts. Some people are clearly more often wrong about facts than others.