> my point is the original claim of "journalism is not our fact gathering process" is just wrong.
Allow me to reword; facts are necessary but not at all sufficient to constitute journalism, nor journalism can claim monopoly on fact gathering. E.g. we have other, more formal, fact gathering processes such as science or court of law, which cannot be substituted with journalism, damages of which we see to the extent it tries to.
The firehose of twitter, youtube etc feeds already give us facts to talk about, argue about, rage about, call for more information about. And we are not in better shape for it. We cannot sufficiently convert those facts into sense. Nor those facts are always the ones we should be interested in.
That's why it's critical not to reduce journalism to fact gathering.
Well then what is? I used to live next door to a journalist - by which I mean someone who went out into the world (haiti, israel/west bank, US immigration policy) and asked questions and collected facts. They didn't always get everything right, and their work seemed to encourage a deliberate sort of fence-sitting with respect to the issues and places that they covered, but they did work that nobody else is/was doing.
Those people on social media who appear to be the "fact gathering apparatus" ? they are just echoing the work of people like my old neighbor.
Without journalists, the ones we sometimes call reporters, we've got nothing to work with.
Now certainly, their job also extends into "sense making" and "relevance deciding". But the important ones - the reporters - are the ones gathering the material that the the rest of us - including the non-reporting journalists - are working with when we try to do the same thing.
>Interesting that none of the rules of journalism include just reporting facts.
Facts are not enough because in order for 'facts' to be useful they have to be embedded in a larger structure - like a theory, or ideology, or narrative, or whatever.
Here's a fact: "Sun rises in the East, and sets in the West". This fact is compatible with heliocentric and geocentric models. The fact on its own doesn't tell you which is which. It doesn't tell you the context, nor the other facts that may have been omitted or superfluously included when reported, and proponents of both theories can use it to justify their position. This is why there can never be such a thing as "journalism that just reports the facts".
> journalists are also called 'reporters' but from my experience 'reporting' to them does not mean reporting what was told to them but retelling in a way that suits their own agenda
I've seen arguments that there are too many facts to be told, so it is the very job of a journalist to take those facts and tell a story by selectively highlighting ones that matter in that story.
I disagree with the premise. I think we (the audience) could handle all the facts if they were given to us straight. The narrative journalists are creating is not helpful, is actively harmful - because it's always someone's agenda and because they twist the facts too much (i.e. they lie through their teeth) to tell that story.
INB4 I get accused of generalizing, I'm invoking Sturgeon's law twice - once on journalists and once on critical thinking of general population, all that while giving a friendly reminder that this "general population" is the majority of the electorate. Sometimes all that crap tends to reinforce instead of cancelling out.
> There is very much a difference between news organisations that attempt to present the facts e.g. NPR, PBS, DV, BBC, ABC AU and those that seek to divide and target specific demographics for profit e.g. Fox News, The Sun.
You believe this because of your bias. There are a significant amount of people with another set of biases who think Fox News, The Sun, etc are presenting facts. Both you of guys are wrong.
> There are facts in this world.
Yes. And the job of the news industry is to spin facts for their employers'/elites' interests. If you think the news industry is in the business of facts and truth then you really have fallen prey to their marketing. Every major newspaper was created to push a political agenda - including the oldest newspaper ( The NY Post ) which was founded by alexander hamilton to push his federalist agenda.
> Reckless and intellectually lazy comments like yours are what is responsible for so many of the problems in politics in the last decade or so.
You need to expand your view. The news industry has been lying forever. Problems of politics has existed forever.
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day."
-- Thomas Jefferson ( one of the people who gave us free press )
If you think this period is new, then go check out some george carlin clips where he talks about censorship, disinformation, etc. This issue is something we've had since the founding of the nations and has existed in our parents' time and will exist in the future.
> Seek out facts instead of pretending they don't exist.
Agreed. But I'll add an addendum. Stop pretending the news is about facts and not politics/opinion/agenda/etc. I'll add a second addendum - "fact" checking organizations are even more biased.
Try this. Ask a fox news fan why they like fox news and what will they say? They'll say that it is because fox news is factual and accurate. I know because I've asked. But we aren't idiots, we know that's bullshit and they like fox news because they like fox news' opinions.
Now ask a "NPR, PBS, DV, BBC, ABC AU" fan why they like "NPR, PBS, DV, BBC, ABC AU". You know what they will say? The exact same thing as fox news watchers. I know because I've asked.
>> And mainstream journalism is really committed to getting the facts right.
Is it? Maybe it once was but the collapse of local news and the massive drop of talented writers and support staff like editors and fact checkers seems to have changed the environment. Most news today is little more than Twitter posts cobbled together.
> Its more that journalism is a team effort, where writers, line editors, fact checkers, designers, data folks and others work together to produce an accurate and complete work.
And yet it produces so unbelievably large and frequent issues with the accuracy and completeness that this either does not help, is not the goal, or journalists not working for large publishers must get this wrong all the time, all over the place. I don't think that's the case, and I do think that the belief that it somehow helps is specifically why there are so many giant issues with the current media products.
> You'd expect journalists to give you facts, instead their focus is on creating emotion through narrative, while rooting for their story, downplaying inconvenient facts.
Factual news looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events. People don't want to read that, and journalists must to some degree write what people want to read. It's quite the dilemma.
> most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu.
Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism is at the root of a lot of problems in modern media for both practicing journalists (which I understand may in some ways be your larger point) and consumers of journalism today. Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus. I don’t believe it is fair to say this doesn’t require expertise.
> Just because people don't know the difference between a fact and a hypothesis/conclusion doesn't mean there are no facts; unless you want to go full ontological skeptic and dispute that it is possible to ever know anything (never go full sophist!).
Journalists themselves have been blurring the line between facts and opinion for a long time now. The simple act of omitting an information because the information doesn't fit a specific narrative is already an attempt at building that very narrative.
And journalists have become very good at information hiding to shape points of views. First right wing media, then left wing media who broadly adopted that strategy. So it's not simply about facts. You can be factual while not giving the whole picture of an event, you can still deceive people.
> news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
Most news on the internet is plagiarized off of a few original sources at best and then redistributed on various sites and portals.
This is a devastating problem for a democratic society. For example, local reporting in the United States has been eroded to the extreme. When a society does not have a commitment to factuality, people become more susceptible to fake news (propaganda), conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), and tend to become more uneducated. Yes, it is true, education can be very easily undone, including in highly intelligent, well-educated individuals.
Facts do not come naturally, nor do they come out of “progress”, such as technological progress. Factuality requires hard work and a lot of money, and it requires reporters on the ground, including in foreign places, such as in the case of foreign correspondents. Unfortunately, the use of foreign correspondents for American news services, physically on the ground in foreign lands, has almost been completely eliminated.
The lack of foreign correspondents means that when a crisis abroad occurs, Americans often have to fill in the gaps and infer what is going on. This allows bad actors to take control.
Of course people do not like to hear the facts. They are hard to listen to and believe in, but they are healthy, especially for a democratic and free society. Of course they are healthy for you as an individual.
The Financial Times has excellent reporting with foreign correspondents located in various countries across the world. The Financial Times also has great tech reporting. In the 8 years that I have been a subscriber, I have only found myself disappointed while reading one single article reporting on tech. Also, of course, I subscribe to local newspapers too.
> Most of the so called news / journalism isn't news / journalism any more than Aspartame is sugar.
News was never news. It was actually branding by the news industry in the 20th century that duped everyone into thinking that news was objective. If you are interested, go look at what newspapers were in the 1800s. They were propaganda outfits created by wealthy individuals to push agenda. The oldest newspaper in the US ( NY Post ) was a propaganda organization created by Madison to attack Thomas Jefferson and his agrarian ideals. The highest prize in journalism is the pulitzer prize which is named for the founder of yellow journalism.
I think we are better off removing the lie that news is objective and go back to the truth. News is propaganda. I think it'll be healthy for the nation to accept reality rather than blindly accepting an idealized falsehood.
> Call me crazy but it's time for a legal definition of news (vs editorial) and then have that definition forced.
How? That's an impossibility. For example, when CNN, MSNBC, NYTimes, WaPo write favorable anti-2nd amendment "news" articles and Foxnews write favorable pro-2nd amendment "news" articles, how are you going to define objectivity?
Are we going to have biased government officials deciding what objective news is? Do you trust obama or trump to decide what is biased and what isn't biased? I certainly don't.
I think all news should contain labeling informing the public that these organizations are all propaganda organizations with heavy biases and let the public consume as they see fit. Just like with cigarettes, alcohol, soda, etc.
I certainly don't want government deciding what is objective.
> It’s hard to argue that stealing people’s work supports the mission of the news. This is not adding any new information to the mix.
Not so different from current publications. Most human written news is also based on repackaging Twitter and press agencies. Few journalists actually gather original content. Should be OK to copy news information from any source without consent, its fact based not creative data.
> Journalists do this work for you and are trained to do it, but of course there is nothing wrong with going closer to the source.
Journalists are trained in journalism, not particular problem domains. Someone writing an article on an event in the middle east may have no education in Middle Eastern history. Without domain specific knowledge, it's impossible to write a coherent article on complex topics like these.
The very premise of general-purpose journalism is obsolete for numerous subjects. For foreign affairs, for example, the underlying facts all come from the same AP wires or press briefings. There is no value-add to having a non-expert massage those into an article. Likewise for politics. Most technology news comes from press releases, etc.
> but even stating facts can be extremely manipulative
Another thing is the choice of facts you decide to state. All media have a bias in what type of news they decide to cover. Usually they pick stories based on what their audience wants to hear. I don't think there's a solution, besides trying to be more critical about medias in general.
Allow me to reword; facts are necessary but not at all sufficient to constitute journalism, nor journalism can claim monopoly on fact gathering. E.g. we have other, more formal, fact gathering processes such as science or court of law, which cannot be substituted with journalism, damages of which we see to the extent it tries to.
The firehose of twitter, youtube etc feeds already give us facts to talk about, argue about, rage about, call for more information about. And we are not in better shape for it. We cannot sufficiently convert those facts into sense. Nor those facts are always the ones we should be interested in.
That's why it's critical not to reduce journalism to fact gathering.
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