I think a large part of the media had worked hard for this. Having no trustworthy media is bad because it is needed. I think articles are currently more down to facts, but gaining trust takes far longer than losing it. And there is still plenty of either lies or naive obliviousness.
I disagree. Media seems to me to have gotten much more sensationalist and click baity over the last decade and often really stretches the facts in interests of agenda. To be fair maybe they feel this is necessary to survive in the face of the internet.
Trust is hard to establish but only takes an instant to break.
I don't think the media has been weakened. I think that the media has always been this bad. Perhaps even worse. The public just didn't know about it, because it was a lot harder to verify the facts through other means.
I'm not sure it's true though. Look at any polls about trust in the media. It's been falling for a long time. People are becoming aware that journalists are systematically unreliable and it's having an impact.
I'm mixed on this because it seems people trusted the media too much in the old days, seems naive. But now clearly there are lots of people/governments that are trying to reduce peoples believe in all institutions, including media.
Our information ecosystem is truly poisoned at this stage, certainly not helped by a parade of "journalists" that see it as their job to correct the thinking of the unwashed masses versus delivering the truth as best they can approximate. Not that it was perfect years ago, but many folks see their job as that of an activist or even an agent of power. Mix in a dying media business model, and that desperation can get pretty ugly and have real negative effects on society.
And there is a real benefit to be had (for some) when no one can trust what they hear or think. It seems like a great time to be a bad actor.
I see most takes here discussing the growing distrust in media as a problem to fix. Instead, I see it as a welcome change, a necessary but not sufficient condition to a more free society. The media has always been extremely biased, selling a particular elite consensus view of the world. Sure, some real reporting made it though once in a while especially when it was orthogonal to the overarching narrative or when it directly served it. But major news organizations have always been run and edited by the same academic elite and political elite who make policy.
For some examples, you will not find any high-level media people (senior editors, senior reporters) at any institution who believe the Vietname war was an act of aggression, who believe George Bush Jr was a war criminal, who believe consumerism and economic growth are not net good for the world, who believe the USA is most responsible for the state of the Middle East, who believe Cuba has often been a force for good in the world and the illegal embargo against it should be lifted, who believe Israel is an apartheid state performing daily acts of aggression against Palestine, that jts fair and good for people who don't work to be poor and miserable and so on.
You don't even have to accept these views as true, but you should still note that CNN and The New York Times and Fox News and Breitbart all agree on the bedrock narrative of the USA's fundamentally noble role in the world, its fairness to its citizens, its desire to do good, even if they disagree on a few specifics and may or may not think there were some mistakes along the way.
To me it seems that having people distrust this media is like having people distrust Pravda in the USSR: absolutely crucial if they are to think of a better world. Now of course, some people stop trusting the NYT and move to trusting flat earth groups on FB, which is worse. But I believe thatvthe great good that some from realizing you shouldn't trust those in authority simply because you've been taught to will see a slow but fundamental shift in society. One that news organizations and PR firms and other propaganda machines will fight tooth and nail, as this article shows.
Perhaps not a popular opinion, but I think trust is low because journalists are becoming more opinionated, and the fact that has been allowed to happen may appear to be an erosion in what a journalist is to do. As we've gotten more savvy about the media, increased access, and number of voices, I think people are getting tired of being told what to think, or they feel manipulated to think a certain way, and thus less trustful of the news. I learned in college many years ago to look for the authors voice. Dare I say the authors voice should be as formal, and background as possible. "Just the facts" would be an interesting change.
Contrary to what seems to be common wisdom, increasing belief in misinformation is likely untrue [1]. I wonder if distrust in media stems from the fact that the democratization brought about by the internet has made people more aware of inaccuracies and bias than before. Not that the media is making more mistakes, but that people are more aware of them. Plenty of outlets half a century ago made glaring mistakes, but people probably didn't know. But now, when the media references a primary source it's often possible for people to immediately view the primary source themselves and see how it matches up with how the outlet described it. I suspect there's a significant segment of news producers and writers that don't understand this dynamic. They think they can get away with the same kind of slant as they could back in the days of print, they don't realize that I'm reading their article on one manner and googling their sources on the other.
I've always wondered whether that's an issue with the media now (specifically) or whether it's actually been an issue for its entire history, with the difference being that with the internet, we can finally look up claims made by 'authorities' much more easily.
That wasn't really the case in the olden days, where gatekeepers controlled access to the media and a large audience. If your local/national newspaper was lying, you'd only know if you were deeply involved in the subject or went to serious lengths to research it. At which point, so what? You'd have no way to easily publish your findings and get a large portion of society hearing them and realising the current media were lying to people or pushing a distorted narrative.
The internet has merely made it easier to fact check people's claims and expose the mistakes made (and lies told) by the 'establishment'.
Note: Of course, the media could indeed be worse for various reasons (like say, the internet making decent journalism too expensive to be viable and culling the herd down to 'those best at attracting attention to themselves'), but you have to question whether things really were ever 'good' here, or whether the barriers to entry just made them appear to be 'good'.
There was this period after WWII where newspeople risked their lives and dedicated themselves to telling the truth and working for the betterment of society. There were organizations that took the fourth estate seriously and fought hard to investigate, educate, and speak truth to power.
But if you go back in history, other than about a three-decade blip, the media has never been trustworthy. It's always been schlock designed to make money, entertain, and push positions and ideologies, since the beginning, all the way up to today. The baby boomers tried to make this statement about the media being a force for good, but it was ultimately a pipe dream, and people knew it even in the 70s. Yet they kept trying to sell us this bill of goods about the media's inherent virtue and necessity.
The end result is modern generations just expect the media to be something it's not, and couldn't ever be for long. So of course they're disillusioned. Ever since Nixon, Americans' falling trust in society and widening political and ideological gaps have led to a status quo of anomie, cynicism and apathy.
And I think that's great! You can't break an addiction until you hit rock bottom. Society has been so fucking obsessed with the media for so long that they can't imagine a world where someone isn't spoon-feeding them garbage. But the less people trust it, the closer they are to realizing that they might need to check up on the shit they're eating to see if there's poison in it. "Mama broadcaster and Papa newspaper would never deceive me - we vote for the same politicians!!"
My hope is that in 10 years, people will finally get off their fat, lazy, stupid asses, and do some due diligence. Get some critical thinking skills and learn to research. Look into local politics and find out what's happening around them. Maybe actually learn what the positions of political candidates are and what the actual implications of them are. (Ok that last one will never happen, but a boy can dream)
The media is solely responsible for the lack of trust they now engender. Once the news media decided to push ideological agendas over reality in the 1980's the seeds of this crapscape were sewn. Everyone has at least a small pocket specialty knowledge they trust over what "the public" knows because they can prove their knowledge is of higher quality. Examples:
Are you a hacker of any stripe? Do you cringe when anything about technology or "hacking" comes up on the news? Do you know the phrases "the interwebs" and "the internet is not a big truck"? Politicians and the media are technological imbeciles. But we still trust them to get everything else right though...
Are you a gamer? Ever seen the media and politicians try to explain that video games turn kids into murderers? You know this is BS. But we can still trust them about other subjects...
Are you a nurse or doctor? Can you watch any TV show about ER doctors? Probably not, I mean how many heart attacks does the average ER really see in a given 24 hour period... But hey, media can probably be trusted for everything else...
Are you a gun owner? Ever seen the media and politicians say ANYTHING about guns that is even remotely accurate? But hey, they probably get everything else right...
Are you a liberal? Hey at least this news outlet says things that don't split my head with antagonistic ideology...
Are you a conservative? Hey at least this news outlet says things that don't split my head with antagonistic ideology...
Alex Jones was talking about Epstein as far back as 2008. Before Wikileaks became persona non grata with the US government it exposed a LOT of governmental and corporate corruption. Criminey this very week we're seeing the last throws of the Bush W. administration's endless war campaign they sold the American People in 2001. The media ate it up and threw it in our faces for MONTHS that we HAD to go after them WMD's in... not Afghanistan where the Taliban were, but Iraq! Wait, how'd we get involved in Iraq AGAIN?
The news media has made itself into a laughing stock and now they want to cry foul that so many people went elsewhere for their news. And in the massive exodus from them other ass clowns swept in. The only problem with Jones is none of his information is vetted. Most people know this going in, but yea of course you have plenty of people who just mainline it all. I'm not suggesting Jones et. al. are any better, but what we have right now is the ONLY possible way the situation could have evolved. If I were the CIA and I were at all concerned with the public health of the US, I'd start by whacking the idiots at the World Economic Forum. We have real problems to deal with and these ass clowns are out proselytizing the "New Normal" and their version of the new world order. For fucks sake, Mr. head off the WEF himself Klaus Schwab wrote a fucking book called "COVID-19: The Great Reset". If these idiots could knock off their noises about global domination maby people who were already afraid and unsure of whats going on in these crazy times would calm down and listen to more rational voices.
The graph of decline in trust in the media over time is interesting. I'm not sure it's necessarily because the media is less trustworthy, although that's probably the case given increased partisanship about every subject nowadays. But like "yellow journalism" is a term from the 19th century; this isn't a new phenomenon. I think a better explanation for the decrease in trust in the media is an increase in information enabled by the internet. Sometimes this information is false and the media is reporting the truth, but people are more willing to believe what lines up with their narrative so seeing the media disagree with their belief decreases their trust in the media. Sometimes information from outside the media is true and the media is reporting falsehoods; this also damages people's trust in the media's credibility. This is a feedback loop then where instances of false reporting cause doubts on instances of thurthful reporting, and instances of truthful reporting that don't align with a group's biases are attacked as possibly false.
Back when there was only one real source of truth, the media, any alternative sources of information were so few in number that their combined efforts couldn't induce any doubt in the media's veracity. At that point the feedback loop couldn't get started, so it didn't matter if what the media reported turned out to be true or not. We romanticize that time period by assuming that journalists of the time were more trustworthy; that may or may not be true, but I have a hard time believing that human proclivities -like twisting the story to fit the journalist's biases or to hide stories that go against the narrative- have changed significantly for the worse since then. Journalists of the time probably did many of the same things as modern media is accused of doing, but without anyone else to point it out there was no decrease in trust.
The media has mostly responded by trying to insist that they're always trustworthy. This probably isn't the best move. It definitely increases partisanship as it moved people into one of two camps: believers of everything the media says or disbelievers of anything the media says. I don't know what a new agency that somehow emphasizes that it's not totally trustworthy or that its articles may be flawed looks like, but it'd probably get too much flak from both camps to survive currently. So I think that "fixing" the media involves a decrease in partisanship first.
(In my opinion the biggest thing we could do to decrease partisanship would be to revamp the political system to favor smaller parties that have to compromise and form a coalition to govern. The current US voting system, first past the post, mathematically favors two parties only (https://ncase.me/ballot/), so the first step would be to reform the voting system to something that allows third and fourth and fifth parties.)
People in the US have not been exposed to much propaganda from the media before, so tended to trust the news. That's why fake news and biased reporting had such an adverse effect.
Now this is changing, as more people realize that New York Times or Fox News are not much different from Pravda, and that it's not a good idea to blindly trust talking heads on TV.
I guess there was too much trust in the MSM at one point and what we see now is a 2 fold problem:
1. A hangover after the blind trust period
2. A degradation of MSM became obvious and opened a way for smaller outlets and citizen journalists.
This is not just bad. This is even worse if we consider a lot of people trust more any random charismatic person on Facebook or Twitter than a journalist, but the sad thing here is how I understand them.
In Spain we have so many examples about how mass media have made up news in order to manipulate people than I don't think many people trust in them any more. Just look up for a policeman called Villarejo and you will find how some police agents, politicians, and mass media business were working together hiding shady business and affairs of Juan Carlos I (the former King of Spain), making fake news about opposing politicians, and making smokescreens to hide corruption cases.
Without trusting mass media and random social networks, you only can verify yourself those spicy news looking in different places to know the truth, and even doing that, you can't have the real truth since every media have their ideology and they usually are really partisan to the party that back their ideology.
"Sold out" is a real problem. More people than we want to admit see corruption coupled with big media as a enemy, not a thing to be trusted. Many ordinary people flat out do not know when to trust, so they don't.
They then seek others and continue to have conversations, and they find others lacking trust resonates and that opens the door for a lot of BS normally and easily seen.
Just an example of the difficulty we now face:
Hiding YouTube dislikes will, among other effects, serve to help big corporate media compete against new media.
Hiding the dislikes also breeds more mistrust. This is unavoidable no matter how reasoned the move is.
Public trust in corporate media is really low, and the younger a potential user of that media is the worse those metrics are.
Had that same media held more closely to journalism, rather than access journalism, which is essentially a sales job, the trust problems we struggle with today would not have grown into the chronic problem it all is today.
You identified politicians committing similar abuse of the public trust.
Look at Russiagate. Basically, it flat out did not happen the way many believed it did. Back when that started, many and myself included went to the original documents, saw speculation and in some cases saw it helpfully color coded, and turned on the news only to see all that elevated to fact.
That scared me frankly.
What can one conclude?
I do not see how judging others helps right now. Not saying anyone did here, but I am saying that is happening a lot and when it happens the door for good info to find it's way home gets closed. Advocates render their efforts far less potent.
Secondly, the lack of trust really can't be assigned to people. We have a lot of "they are stupid" type discussion, judgement and rationalization going on and very little of that is helpful.
ie: 70 million people voted for...
That is a real mess and the people who had a far better position of authority and trust denigrated that themselves, and for dollars and ratings.
All that is a real mess!
How can authorities, who have abused public trust be counted on to fact check and improve on misinformation without amplifying the already chronic trust problems they created?
In a more basic sense, how can we improve on public trust at all?
I am not sure how that is done quickly.
Longer term, we need media that makes informing people a priority. And doing that likely means a move away from the current AD and access based media we have now.
Given how things are right now, the more important thing is to avoid judgement of others and encourage more and better information exchange. We will not know what reaches people, until it does.
Once it does, we need those people to continue seeking better information so we see more people making better choices more of the time.
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