non sequitur

From a few chosen examples, it's a massive stretch to say journalism is "mostly lies".

It's a further stretch to talk about state propaganda without distinguishing between various topics of journalism (political, sports, tech, economic, etc) not to mention source and past performance.

This is just FUD, and it's facile.

It's been pretty crazy to see how many of the frothing right-wing fake-news sites are created by (nominal) leftists. Humankind's a real piece of work.

Not "could" but "is".

That's how media works, if all media agree to say something wrong during some period of time, that will become true. (Example : Aztrazeneca vaccines, masks, ...). And most media belongs to billionaires. The only thing is that they don't belong to the same billionaires and thus don't most of the time push in the same direction which creates some diversity

I'm not saying this is the case here, but media and propaganda are very close things

They not only spread, but they also create them. Media nowadays is in a pretty blatant exercise of framing conversations and not mentioning contrarian evidence for the agenda they are, most of the times very clearly, trying to push.

I always say the same. If you see a news piece that stinks propaganda, follow the author and go through his history or his twitter. Most of the times you'll discover a guy who has no shame, has not even the slightest intention of bringing you a reality that you have no direct experience of, and giving you the clues of what might be the truth.

An this people many times is not working for a no-name organization, but the WSJ, NYT, BBC, you name it.

In Spain this is so blatant and palpable that makes most media basically worthless. You're just reading opinions on events that they may not even made the exercise to check some sources or talk to somebody who has direct experience about. You have to look for who's the author and filter around it. Know their names. There's no other way around it.

IMO we are not even talking about bias here, it's like because journalists told themselves that knowing the objetive truth is impossible, then full swing the other way and be lazy, have no objections to blatant propaganda, and so on.

So reading, watching or hearing them is only useful as an exercise of know what they want people to think about. If you want to have any insight you really need to filter through names, and if you're lucky reach specialized media, which tends to be another totally different story, because obviously people who has direct experience of something is way harder to convince of some BS.

Edit: This may be useful for some people. I decided to use a custom CSS extension to highlight the authors that I did the painful process of checking their background and analyzer their reports. I can't do for everyone but it improved my experience in a few news sites, since remembering all names is difficult.

Mainstream news is not information, it's entertainment. The sooner your realize it the better.

Journalists have nor the time, nor the expertise or the means to write a purely accurate objective articles (that nobody wants to read because it's purely informational). I cannot count the times I read articles about my field of expertise, that are laughably inaccurate or pain false.

Journalists crunch out quick stories that are exaggerated or come from one angle, so that people would read it after seeing the headline, and get agitated enough to share it. Remark that this is not the fault of the journalists, but just how that whole system works.

You should read "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" by Ryan Holiday, and see how fragile that whole system is. And because of its fragility, can be easily manipulated on top of it.

If you want to get informed, either read books written by experts (like suggested), read the original scientific paper and draw your own conclusions, or stay ahead of your game by getting news from sources other than media. That last part will show you that by the time it's covered by main stream news, it's already old news (think bitcoin etc.)

When I read something, first thing I check is "who is this person?". If it's an expert on the subject, or has his own experience and tells the story, I'm happy to read it. If it's a journalist that is crunching out stories every week, I skip it.

The media has done this to themselves. For years they have eagerly profited not on the truth, but on the outrageous. Many news outlets will spin the truth any way they can to make it more outrageous, fear-inducing, or more (in their parlance) "breaking".

Lastly, the media should not be our source of truth, nor should the government be our source of truth. Truth needs not to be told to individuals but discovered by individuals after carefully considering information from multiple sources.

I'll take a stab.

Central authorities tend to be and to become political in nature. Their incentives include, among other things, maintaining their funding and not looking bad (eg: maintaining a purpose for existing, excusing their own misbehavior, making any political benefactors happy). What they say will probably align with those institutional incentives first, before truth. It can also stop them from saying things they ought to.

Mainstream popular media does not exist to be an objective arbiter of truth but instead because enough people want to consume it. It's a business, albeit a business that has an incredible amount of power over not only the public's opinion, but what they should care about, both through what they report and what they don't report. They will push as many emotional buttons as they can to keep you coming back. Because they have a lot of power over the public they are targets for actors wishing to advance their own goals. Individual journalists are not a-political and you shouldn't expect them to be. Assume all reporting is tribal (especially if you agree with it), and that not only is the story as presented probably biased towards their own view of the world but that they've probably also left inconvenient things out. Political creatures tend to associate with those they agree with, and are in turn controlled by the group. Potential ostracism from their in-group is another source of bias.

I think it heavily depends on what media you see. The best journalism generally avoids it (i.e., the straight news side). Most journalism isn't in the top few percentile, but you don't need to read anything less than the best. I stick to the best, and when I encounter lesser stuff (e.g., I was visiting relatives and CNN was on TV), it's shocking and depressing how obviously bad it is. (BTW, one good source I discovered on that trip: BBC World News television - actually excellent cable news!)

But the opinion pages of even the best news sources (e.g., NY Times, Wall St Journal) are 99% exercises in propaganda; it almost defines opinion in the news. It's disgusting to me that they brazenly deceive their readers, but it's ok because it says 'opinion'.

However, where I see propaganda far more is online, not in the news media. I see it comments and blog posts, etc., including in this forum, sadly. The focus on the professional news media is odd to me; and in fact, and ironically, de-legitimizing the professional news media is a widespread propaganda campaign from a specific political grouping.

If you take a closer look, the established media is not so innocent about that. Most of them find it perfectly ok to lie for money every few minutes (TV ads)...

> That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side.

It's entirely possible to counter balance something with a lie, neither the original or response being the truth, which doesn't help inform the viewers either.

All news media is propaganda, the question is it true or not.

That’s why it’s important to try and find source material. Also look up company ownership and authors

This, one billion times. I don't care which network or show you watch, or which newspaper you read, they are all lying. They are all pushing an agenda very clearly.

I mostly make do with Bloomberg, WSJ and NPR. I can't even read the NY Times these days.

I do.

If you find it tough to figure out, consider more context and your place in it.

Honestly, one of the things these propaganda outlets are pretty good at is flummoxing people who make judgements based on too little information. Either they get locked up in some "it's all the same, can't decide" trap [1], or they react exclusively to some misleading cherry-picking the outlet put in front of them.

[1] e.g. "RT is financed by a government and the BBC is financed by a government, SO THAT MEANS THEY"RE THE SAME AND SHOULD BE TREATED THE SAME!1!!"

Nowadays propaganda is being pushed so hard to the public, and manipulation tactics are being so in demand, that there are even MOOCs teaching how to push propaganda tactics into journalism to blatantly manipulate the audience.

Take, for example, the edx course euphemistically called "journalism for social change"

https://www.edx.org/course/journalism-social-change-uc-berke...

This shit is a clear sign that the entire free world is being enthusiastically carted away from democracy and right into the middle of authoritarian dictatorships, and everyone in charge seems eager to either play along with this change or even use it to their advantage.

Oh absolutely. I was thinking more of citizen journalist videos which are typically uncut. One example I know of is when the news video has a hard cut, they're trying to manipulate it. This is pretty common, and they use it often when showing videos of people speaking.

"We witness that there is a relationship between government, media and industry that is evident even at this most spurious and superficial level. These three institutions support one another. We know that however cool a media outlet may purport to be, their primary loyalty is to their corporate backers. We know also that you cannot criticise the corporate backers openly without censorship and subsequent manipulation of this information."

That is easy enough. What is difficult is to teach people they cannot just trust the people who tell them what they want to hear.

> Hopefully honest tellers of first hand tales will exist and get the reputation for honesty they deserve.

The odds of that are basically zero. There is no reliable way for people to know whether someone's tales are first hand or not, nor whether they are honest or not. If people stop consuming mainstream media and turn to gonzo journalism, powerful interests will manipulate information channels to direct eyeballs to the journalists they buy. The audience will not notice.

You can't be that naive. You think every piece of corruption has been exposed? Usually when corruption is exposed it's about something that's been going on for years. Yet somehow you think all corruption as of right now has been exposed?

When the government calls for censorship of all media that oppresses their narrative and the media hires former CIA agents and parrots their talking points, you might as well have state run media.