> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>and to provide, often, a less-biased report on things.
This isn't what a journalist does at all though and I think they're pretty honest about this if asked.
At best they take the facts and induce bias to provide them in a way that is most palatable to their audience and mirrors the belief of their audience to get more views and therefore more ad impressions. At worst they see themselves as a class above normal people and their job is to ensure the people below them think the right way.
Essentially in a world where the actual events is transmitted via video over social media moments after they occur, seems pretty redundant that we need it filtered through biased individuals who's business only existed because newspapers used to be the most efficient way of doing that.
> They leave it to the reader to make of it what they will. In my personal opinion, this is how reporting should be.
If one side lies out their ass or states "opinion" that is easily disproved as untrue, then it shifts the conversation without having facts.
In my view, proper journalism needs to reaffirm basic facts in their coverage so viewers/listeners don't have to put up with obvious bullshit or crazy opinions.
People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.
> 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.
> In my personal opinion, this is how reporting should be. Don’t do my thinking for me and don’t lead me in a particular direction.
That's the type of reporting that leads to false equivalence and IMO wastes my time.
I don't need to hear "both sides" of every argument. I don't have enough time to understand every complex issue in detail. What I do need is a smart journalist I trust to investigate the issue, determine the truth and than share that with me along with the evidence that lead them to that conclusion.
That's actually useful to me. Currently reporting of just "Person A said blah, Person B said foo" doesn't help me, it leaves the power with whether A or B are more eloquent, deceitful or experienced, not who is more truthful or accurate. It can still be misleading based upon which pieces are chosen to be reported, and the parts left out people will naturally fill in with their personal biases about how they believe the world works.
> One of the most effective forms of misleading reporting involves cherry-picking facts that support your narrative and not exploring stories where it is obvious that facts may disrupt your desired narrative.
Isn't that what about 100% of existing news media is doing? They key here is to read more than one source, but having a source that would alone represent more than one narrative by now is pretty close to hopeless.
> 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.
> We rely on journalists to sift through information and give us a balanced story based on their perception of the truth.
We rely on journalists to sift through information and give us the truth, period. I don't want a balanced story, and such 'balance' tends to be struck between reality and what appears to be lunacy.
I wish more journalists would be critical, especially where it counts (e.g. interviewing politicians). But for a top-down directive to be negative, regardless of the truth, no - that's unacceptable.
> since they selectively focus only on evidence that supports their POV whilst conveniently ignoring everything else.
Sounds like the New York Times model. I think journalists basically feel the need, in fact it’s their job to do this because they think the narrative is paramount to everything else.
> 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.
> I wish "the media" would go back to reporting the news instead of repeating talking points.
I see this said a lot but I don't think that's a simple request, assuming what we're really saying here is "objective facts, not opinions". There's a finite amount of news you can report so which objective facts you choose to show your readers is in itself a subjective decision of "newsworthiness". And how do you present that news to your audience? Anything other than a chronological list of events (which would be an awful user experience) requires subjective judgement of importance.
I’m also very dubious that you could build a sustainable business around such an idea. I think a lot of people say they want objective news but when presented with a choice they’ll favour media that caters to their existing biases.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of garbage media out there today and it can absolutely get better. But I think people are striving for an entirely objective media that simply doesn't exist, and never has.
Yet, this is not an "either/or" situation. You can generalize and cite a source. However, for some reason you choose to ignore this simple fact. Instead, you're essentially saying "kids these days don't understand what journalism is; summarizing sells, but we do it poorly because we're human, so get over it". Absolutely useless.
Actually, people here on hn can summarize better 4 times out of 5, and that's the reason I've mostly stopped following links and read comments instead - there are too many lies in journalism, even if unintentional (and I believe it mostly isn’t).
> 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.
> The beauty of this fiction that journalists are not making a judgment call in choosing who to quote, on what topic,
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.
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.
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