> And the current media landscape looks nothing like that
Yes, congratulations, you found the point.
The current media landscape is nothing like that, because the current media landscape is only about 10 years old. For all of modern history until the introduction of social media sites like youtube, twitter, and facebook, the only way to spread information or opinion was to get the editors of for-profit media companies to agree to publish you.
It is beside the point but also worth pointing out that also until very recently, like the last decade, the editors of those institutions have been of a very particular gender and racial demographic.
The new media, with all of it's "discourse" is democratic editorialism. Welcome to the freest market of ideas the world has ever seen. You can't call up your buddies Ailes, Rosenthal, Jordan, Sorenson, and Klose to tell the public what to think about you anymore.
> Lastly, again your third paragraph is a straw man.
We're talking about "cancel culture" here, aren't we? The phenomenon where members of the public decide based on new information to stop buying products because of the beliefs and actions of their creators? What is that if not the democratic free-market action that Mill so often advocated as the optimal way to organize society?
> Personal opinion: I think it was around 2004 when the media slowly stopped being the journalists that protect our democracy, and instead corporations and individuals with political agendas.
It's literally always been that way.
For a while in the late 20th Century US, the alignment of the propaganda interests of the major US media was such that it spoke with almost a single voice, but the homogeneity wasn't some kind of virtuous objectivity.
> one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there
NY Times, Huffington Post and many other outlets have a social justice agenda so this is easily shown to be false. Any news publication regularly read by left leaning Americans stay uncritical of anything that furthers a social justice agenda.
How often do you see news articles critical of the prevailing viewpoints? How often do you see articles critical of the prevailing viewpoints on the left?
> Ultimately the problem is that it isn't that we have illegitimate news flooding the market of information it's that we are finally starting to realize almost all of our information was biased to one degree or another and we are slow to adjust the way we consume information.
Why not both...?
> isn't that we have illegitimate news flooding the market of information
This is absolutely a problem. Old media seems to be pretty content with narrative framing for the most part, this new brand of illegitimate media just makes shit up. They have no intent to engage in the public discourse, their only purpose is to reinforce alternate realities and to shift the Overton window.
> But what America really needs is more media literacy
You describe a mountain of problems _inside_ your own industry, and yet you walk away with the idea that it's the public that needs extraordinary change to account for this.
I appreciate your point of view, but I think your conclusion is horribly biased.
>> People become "journalists" because there's money in it, through ads
>So what? Most of the internet runs on ads.
Which is an entirely other story, that in my opinion is even worse.
But the point is in the entire paragraph. Most of these people do not become journalists to bring accurate and researched reporting. It's purely pecause there's money in it. Potentially lots. The guy working for the NYT and the guy working for Buzzfeed have two very, very different definitions of deontology.
>I think you underestimate how difficult it is to define "trash". Once you begin censoring "garbage", you introduce bias.
Removing obvious lies is a start. Which, for a start, would remove a good part of breitbart, infowars, and a few left leaning journals. And it's fine! Truth is not biased.
>This is the reason our country has free speech. It's the only practical way to keep us from revolting.
Your usage of free speech has been widely criticized in the entire world and no European country would trade their free speech for yours, for example. It could also be argued that a good old revolution might have made your country better. Dusting off that woefully outdated constitution, reworking your political system, etc. instead of worshipping it as some shining star.
>Imagine if Facebook were owned by Trump or Bannon and they were removing "fake news". You would be even more upset, right?
If they are _actual_ fake news (i.e. not what Trump considers fake news, but proper lies, or voluntary misdirection), I wouldn't give a damn as long as it is done on both sides.
>I agree. Do you learn better through your own experience or when someone tells you what to do all the time?
If it's something I actually want to learn? Myself. If it's something I don't really care about? Eh, I might let other people tell me about it. And that's the dangerous part. I have limited time and ability to do fact checking. It takes someone five minutes to type up a "Hillary Clinton doesn't enjoy poptarts and eats children" story, and an order of magnitude more for me to debunk it for everyone. Enough of those articles and it effectively overtakes truth in people's minds. That is the exact same thing in Facebook feeds. People are getting bombarded with articles, some accurate, many not. You simply cannot fitler them. Especially if you're not aware they are false. Critical thinking skills are one part of the solution. But until everyone is properly trained (and then the methods of propaganda will have evolved), for the good of society, people particularly vulnerable to it must be protected.
Also, let's not forget that a good majority of people are told what to do all the time, at leas tat work. It wouldn't be suprising that part of this behavior is translated to their personal time, which includes getting informed.
> Today's mass media is better, in terms of adherence to the truth, diversity, and creativity than at any point in time.
I'm not sure how you would go about backing up a statement like this. It doesn't pass the eye test to me.
I think you could definitely say that mass media is bigger, and within it there are pockets of excellent journalism that have the features you describe.
But these standouts are far too easily drowned in a glut of misinformation, editorializing, listicles, and so on. And so it becomes really easy to dismiss 'the media' when 'the media' is far from a homogeneous industry. Even certain websites aren't homogeneous - I don't know that your average reader would know the difference between BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News, for example.
> I and perhaps many other people think the media should inform people; that is a statement of its purpose, and it appears that the collective actions of people in society have redesigned it to eliminate most of the informing.
Your expectation that the media should inform people is reasonable but unrealistic. The original designers had fairly specific design goals in mind and it did not explicitly include “to inform”, this can only be tacked on.
Today we have newspapers, radio, TV and of course the Internet as tools of (mass) media.
If you were among the original designers of the newspaper[0], which was the first tool of mass media for centuries, but your preference to inform was out-weighed by competing interests (aka politics), then of course you are well within your rights to be outraged — you are entitled to criticize the design for falling short of your expectations.
In other words, unless you were personally part of the design team, you can’t really speak about what the design should be or should have been, since you are in no position to influence the system’s purpose before it was built.
You can only deal with the consequences of the designers’ creation, which includes working around the limitations of the system as designed, or building a new system from scratch.
A new system that addresses those limitations would not only be expensive to build from scratch, it would also have to compete for attention and funding to be sustainable — the market has to decide if they truly care about being better informed or not.
Facebook, which is perhaps the most modern type of media, is as vulnerable as the others when it comes to ability to misinform.
[0] ”News was highly selective and often propagandistic. Readers were eager for sensationalism, such as accounts of magic, public executions and disasters; this material did not pose a threat to the state, because it did not pose criticism of the state.” culled from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_newspaper_publishin...
> The world before complex algorithms generating clicks on the Internet was pretty biased and stupid
The way the news has been ranting about social media, you'd think it was responsible for all the world's ill. The hyperbole and just pathetic nonsense from the media the past few years has been ridiculous. From the pewdiepie nonsense to the insane coverage of trump to the current hysteria over facebook. I wish we could go back to a time when the news media didn't have such obvious agenda. It would be nice if the news industry pushed out news instead of their agenda.
> but that's often not interesting enough to write about for many journalists
If everyone was educated, thought critically and understood stats, where would news companies get their journalists from?
> I think the problem is the addition of "opinionated" content media outlets publish to generate outrage. E.g. IMO the NYT is the gold standard of journalism but a lot of their opinion pieces are not even fit to print
A lot of their journalism isn’t that great anymore either. (In the last 3-5 years, there has been a massive upheaval in the ranks as revenues have declined and experienced journalists have left.)
> You know what the media has become? A cesspool of bullshit unworthy of any trust.
I wouldn’t label all media outlets under the same but mainstream media (think of what we grew up watching - CNN, NYT, BBC etc) is increasingly becoming what you described, opinion driven activism fueled journalism rather than reporting facts. It’s a sad state of affairs but across the world it is the same norm, journalists have turned into crowd pleasing (many have their own tweeter world where they are not shy to be an ideologue) click rate seeking media professional rather. My sense is that this type of journalism and their wide coverage under libel protection for example in US only polarizes further the people and as you mentioned make people mistrust _all_ experts. Which is not a good place to be for a society.
Good news is more and more independent journalism (ones not behind under mainstream umbrella or with brands of their own) are doing works in real journalism. People such as Glenn Greenwald are using platforms such as substack which is far better imo than any news you read these days to cover and report a nuanced topic.
> Your response is unrelated to what I was disagreeing with.
Well the flow of money is the source of pretty key in enabling a strong, free press.
> My underlying argument is that a strong free press must be maintained and that the reductionist argument that legitimate news sources and JoeRandomYouTuber should be treated identically is naive at best.
Sure.
So there should be some kind of non-discriminatory rules that allow new players to find a voice as well as maintaining credible news sources.
> Traditional news sources found their revenue declining and so chased whatever attracted consumers, including sensationalist cretins like Bolt. Google should accept responsibility for this.
Well I agree that the news ecosystem has changed, and I agree that a strong and free press has value.
> At least they're doing something.
See I don't see this as a good thing at all. I see this as making the problem worse by funding players who are some of the worse examples.
> I think this is missing the darker point, which is that the main stream media along with the political parties that support them, are the the echo chamber.
They are part of the echo chamber. They aren't the echo chamber. Social media does a fantastic job of demonstrating that people naturally construct their own echo chambers. We tend to judge the main stream media & polities without appreciating a context where they don't exist. It's increasingly clear that for all their ills, they do deliver, albeit in a flawed and limited degree, on their espoused objectives.
They're terrible, except as compared to all the alternatives.
> how awful and terrible and threatening to democracy it is when Google and Facebook suddenly made it easy to be exposed to lots of alternative points of view on the same story
You are being sarcastic here but (imho) gossip, fake news, and echo chambers are really threatening democracy.
> I haven't seen much self reflection amongst journalists
The problem is that journalists are getting caught in a vicious circle. Either they present true news and have little viewers, or present gossip or echo what people want to hear and have lots of viewers.
My two cents is that advertisement is what is killing journalism.
YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences.
Why is that? Because all that happens in the privacy of your own computer. Usually any newspaper that publicly have printed such bullshit in their pages will be dead. Public will react to it.
What is different? Facebook, YouTube, etc. are personalized. You are shown what you are interested in without public accountability. Niche radical content gets a lot of views for its own controversial nature. Views and money.
Who wants to investigate, hire good writers and expend the money that it takes to write a good article when you can hire some one without ethics for a fraction of the price and get as many or more views as radicalization grows?
YouTube, Facebook and others say that they are not responsible of the content they offer. I think that it should be true for things like comments. But for the monetized content they are 100% responsible of incentivizing that radicalization and killing good journalism in the process.
> Which powerful, privileged people should get to decide what we are allowed to hear about?
Journalists and news media, bound by the respect and principles of their profession, fulfilled this function in the past. There seemed to be a time in the past where division between reporting and editorials were more separate. We've destroyed the institution of news media without a good replacement; now people are taking editorials (people's social media posts) as the equivalent of news.
> Is it even necessary for free speech to directly result in a happier humanity?
If not then what is it worth?
> What if it simply preserves the conditions that we need for progress
I'm simply not seeing how social media after a good 10 years of it is progressing anything other than the profits of its owners.
> I sense that they are intentionally covering the situation in non-inflammatory way.
We want more of this though right?
I sense that many people can't understand the difference between opinions or editorials and news.
I sense that many people actually enjoy the inflammatory way news is sometimes covered unless it's different from the way they'd like to see it.
I sense that people can't understand how a single new outlet can have varying opinions and points of view on a single issue and will choose a single one out of many to make their point.
Imagine how different things would be if people were intelligent consumers of news.
I don't think you can have a news industry dependent on clicks and profits and have no sensationalism. I also don't think you can have a completely unbiased media when people, based on their consumption, don't seem to want it. It's unrealistic given the different biases and motivations that people have.
>But mainstream journalists almost to a fault genuinely view their job as bringing important facts to their audience, and they care about getting things right.
What you call "mainstream media" I call "corporate media". And some journalists may feel that way however clicks, eyeballs, and stickiness take priority over their views. There’s too much competition for traditional media outlets to survive without adopting techniques that were once unthinkable. Corrections are rarely issued these days and edits are done in an almost stealthy manner. I had to stop following the Twitter accounts that tracked these changes because it became an endless stream of tweets.
The days of Tim Russert, David Broder, Jim Lehrer, Ted Koppel etc. are long gone. I would consider Matt Taibbi[1] one of the last journalists that followed in their footsteps but he is definitely not corporate and barely mainstream. Taibbi left Rolling Stone and uses Substack which has been attacked by the NYT, and others, as alt-right and misinformation which I find ironic coming from the paper that published Judith Miller’s WMDs propaganda. Even Jason Calacanis referred to Taibbi as a “right guy” on one of the recent All-In podcasts even though Matt is an ardent Sanders supporter. The Blob doesn’t like it when you don’t toe the line.
Corporate media is dead to me even though the vast majority of it is "Left".
>I understand the fight your picking, but really this isn't that much of an argument.
Really? I don't watch Fox News or any corporate media and you assumed I did. You might be shocked to learn that I worked in the Clinton administration and voted for Obama!
> we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest
There was editorial control. Someone to be held accountable, and someone making decisions knowing that. User-generated content is different. I am less certain of any prescription for the problem than I am in the difference being salient. Heuristics that work on print media aren’t easily translated to social.
> But the Internet is perhaps a much bigger problem in this regard. It is perceived as journalism while it may be either opinion, commercial speech, or simply hate speech.
This is a false dichotomy. What we get from CNN, NYT, FOX, WAPO is opinion, PR, and better veiled hate speech.
Yes, congratulations, you found the point.
The current media landscape is nothing like that, because the current media landscape is only about 10 years old. For all of modern history until the introduction of social media sites like youtube, twitter, and facebook, the only way to spread information or opinion was to get the editors of for-profit media companies to agree to publish you.
It is beside the point but also worth pointing out that also until very recently, like the last decade, the editors of those institutions have been of a very particular gender and racial demographic.
The new media, with all of it's "discourse" is democratic editorialism. Welcome to the freest market of ideas the world has ever seen. You can't call up your buddies Ailes, Rosenthal, Jordan, Sorenson, and Klose to tell the public what to think about you anymore.
> Lastly, again your third paragraph is a straw man.
We're talking about "cancel culture" here, aren't we? The phenomenon where members of the public decide based on new information to stop buying products because of the beliefs and actions of their creators? What is that if not the democratic free-market action that Mill so often advocated as the optimal way to organize society?
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