I formerly worked as a news editor at a metro daily newspaper, and before that I worked at various other news outlets and magazines.
Here's the reality: The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness. I worked with a bunch of really talented reporters and editors throughout my career, and almost without exception, they highly valued those things. Moreover, many have an anti-authoritarian bent, and that leads to a desire to expose corruption, rather than protect it.
But ...
* I've seen publishers kill stories because they thought it would make advertisers unhappy.
* I've seen senior execs put pressure on editors to downplay stories that painted the region in a bad light.
* I've seen a political campaign refuse to permit a certain reporter to attend their campaign events because they didn't like that the reporter wasn't acting like a PR tool.
* I've seen budgets for "watchdog journalism" become slowly starved, in favor of clickbait.
And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business (who are really trying to make money and exert influence).
Granted, there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued, and unfortunately that's where a lot of eyeballs end up these days, because so many people just want their existing biases to be re-inforced.
But what America really needs is more media literacy, so we can better distinguish the former from the latter. We, as a society, are SO BAD at this. Our B.S. detectors have lots of false positives and false negatives. We look to the wrong signals to determine whether a news report is trustworthy. We fail to evaluate information critically as long as it validates our pre-existing views. We have a hard time separating facts from opinions.
This lack of media literacy is worrisome enough, but now we've got political leaders capitalizing on the fact that we're bad at this and actively trying to delegitimize the media (as if it's a single thing) because it serves their own purposes.
> The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness
The average journalist thinks they value the truth, accuracy and fairness. Observed behavior is very different to this flattering self portrait which is why they aren't trusted.
Actual behaviors of real journalists that create distrust which can't be blamed on advertisers or editors:
- Accepting large grants from billionaire foundations that are tied to pushing specific agendas and views. Example: look at how much money the Gates Foundation gives out in journalism grants tied to his personal agenda.
- Publishing stories that contain obvious "errors" (invariably convenient for their pre-existing agenda). Example: the NYT published a front page that consisted solely of the names of 1000 people who had supposedly died of COVID. It was meant to scare people and it took some rando on twitter about half an hour to notice that the 6th name on the list was of a person who had been murdered.
- Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory.
- Point blank refusal to challenge certain types of sources because they think it's immoral to do so. Example: the BBC decided some years ago that climate change was "settled science" and that it was morally wrong to report on anything that might reduce faith in the "consensus". This is the opposite of the classical conception of journalism (challenging authority, digging up scandals, get both sides of the story etc).
- Relying heavily on sources that are widely known to be discredited. Example: Fauci stated early on in COVID that he lied about masks in official statements to the press, specifically to manipulate people's behavior. This did not stop the press using him as a trusted authoritative source. Another example: the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.
Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization.
Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.
> - Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory.
On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal).
Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative:
> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
> On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore.
The Columbia Journalism Review is about as reliable on media matters as you could want, and Jeff Gerth is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with decades of investigative journalism experience at the NY Times.
He lays out an extensive case showing that there was an effort to mislead the public.
> The Columbia Journalism Review is about as reliable on media matters as you could want, and Jeff Gerth is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist
These bonafides aside this particular piece has faced a mountain of criticisms [1] and from a quick read doesn't pass the smell test for journalistic integrity itself. It makes Trump sound like a victim, a saint and a martyr all at once.
> Trump, unaware of the coming tornado, including the most salacious contents of the dossier, set out to form a government and make peace with the press. He made the rounds of news organizations, meeting with broadcast anchors, editors at Condé Nast magazines, and the Times.
> Trump’s longest sit-down after the election was with the Times, including the then-publisher, editors, and reporters. For seventy-five minutes Trump’s love/hate relationship with his hometown paper was on display.
> At the end, he called the Times a “world jewel.”
> These bonafides aside this particular piece has faced a mountain of criticisms
Congratulations on relying on Trump's own strategy of declaring any critical reporting, no matter how well sourced, to be "Fake News".
> It makes Trump sound like a victim, a saint and a martyr all at once.
This is laughably false to any fair minded person who has even skimmed the article.
For example in paragraph six:
>At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth. (The Washington Post has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements.)
Throwing away the public's trust in the media because you're unwilling to stick to factual reporting on Trump's screw ups is the very definition of "You're not helping."
“There was message distortion,” former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told The Fact Checker in a telephone interview. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.” He said he was unaware of how Biden described the letter during the debate.
Yes there's any number of sources one can dig up to support either argument that come from well trusted sources.
Russia's known to want to disrupt elections anywhere they can however. They'll even spread in the media the _appearance_ that elections were distorted to muddy the waters further even if no election interference took place.
I don’t doubt that many foreign entities have interests at stake and ongoing efforts to influence US elections and vice versa. These efforts will take many forms with some appearing less legitimate than others.
If you see the world as indecipherably muddy other than Russia has some otherworldly electoral propaganda power, well then it isn’t clear why you comment.
I think your response represent a common trap that people fall into, where we treat "the media" as if it's one entity, whereas in fact it's many distinct entities with very different attributes.
When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.
You may be right - in theory. But existence of Journalist collaboration networks make this a moot point. Google JournOList and tell me there isn’t any coordination.
Edit - one other point, so many articles are also sourced from Reuters and AP that the Media, while different companies all have the same source material.
Yes there are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. A lot of the problems with "the media" are really problems with standard journalistic practices and those are uniform.
The OP's point is a subtler one, which seeks to explore _why_ journalists do what they do in the first place. Sure, it's charitable: they are undoubtedly some who seek to go "straight to the top" by aping whatever bias their editors favor etc. But there's far more news out there to report than just the clickbaity subjects you seem to favor -- Russiagate, Bill Gates, COVID, climate change -- and the folks doing it deserve credit.
The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level.
Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.
We shouldn't be blaming the pencils those journalists used either I suppose, the graphite didn't have an intent to deceive. But those pencils, like those journalists, operated in an environment that makes deception a goal, and the only product at the end of the line was a misleading one.
It's individual journalists that take the grants, they take the interviews with discredited people, they refuse to cover one side of the story because they were convinced by the other side that they're on the Right Side Of History, etc. If you make editors responsible for all that then what are journalists? Robots?
> Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not
Yet volunteer bloggers regularly manage to not only read papers, they find specific problems with them.
The core problem here is that journalism as a field culturally accepts very low standards, and has no interest in raising them. Journalists are trained not to think too hard about anything and to distrust anyone who does, which is why independent journalism has such a different flavor to it. During COVID you could go to the legacy media and read a headline like "Lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives" which would quote a press release from a university. Then a few hours later you could go read some blog by some random anonymous dude and get a list of five massive and obvious methodology errors that rendered the underlying paper deceptive propaganda, problems of the sort that you didn't need any expertise to notice.
Normies see this and think maybe people who can't pull off amazing feats of investigation like reading publicly available PDFs shouldn't be journalists?
In journalistic culture not only won't they do things like this, they train their readers and each other to systematically ignore such investigations because they aren't "credible sources". But that's so wrong. They are credible sources, because they systematically prove their claims and over time that creates more credibility than whatever photocopier for academic opinions is being presented by the newspapers today.
Not the OP, but this is a leading question that goes in the wrong direction. You can't really trust any source 100%. You need to do your own research and be humble about it. Journalists are good at this kind of work but they make plenty of mistakes (and as the child of Journalists I will also add that they can be total idiots who are more focused on emotional stories than facts). Basic media literacy with a healthy dose of skepticism and humility is necessary to get anything more than urban legends out of the paper.
The problem with "doing your own research" is that it is unworkable as a policy for the masses, as it leads most to settle on believing well-spoken hucksters. Humility to know when you should trust someone else as a guide is necessary until you've developed the personal experience+knowledge to evaluate sources independently.
> You need to do your own research and be humble about it.
It takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to research a short news article in a topic that I'm familiar with. For topics I'm not an expert in it's multiple hours.
I simply don't have time for it. Family, work, and sleep already occupy much of my day.
That's a common objection, yeah, and it's a problem.
One solution is to recognize that, unfortunately, in that case you don't have much reliable knowledge about the world and therefore your default position should be to not try to influence it. Practically that means things like not judging other people, not voting, or alternatively voting for libertarians who don't believe in imposing rules on other people (because if you voted for specific rules, you'd be doing so based on unreliable information).
Luckily you don't have to actually research every single article. It's OK to generalize over time. Rules can also be shared. Here's some of mine: ignore any story about Russia because they're always unreliable especially since the war, ignore any study about science or public health, ignore any claims made by (ex)-intelligence agents, ignore any claims that appear to support woke narratives, ignore any statistical claims about China, ignore economic predictions or really anything that depends on academically developed statistical models.
While in no way a panacea, you might want to check out Ground News (https://ground.news/). They at least make an attempt to point out how different news sources respond to the same stories. Perhaps most interesting are the "Blindspot" sections which show news stories that are not covered by opposing political sides.
Not OP but for me it's not about what sources to trust (blindly? literally none of them), but what type of information you can trust. Naked facts seem to be safe for the time being, context should be assumed to be heavily biased in a particular direction, and opinions are worse than worthless.
Unfortunately I've found journalists and/or their sources often lie about basic facts too, even when those facts are easily checked.
You'd think they wouldn't do this. Probably they do it because they know most people will take factual claims at face value, or the journalists are so sloppy/confused that they themselves don't realize the claims are wrong.
The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked, which allow or encourage open commenting with third party moderation so I can quickly see disagreement, etc. Mostly that means Substacks, these days.
Turtles all the way down, yep. At some level you have to rely on heuristics and just make a judgement call, but the checking at the prior levels still has a lot of value.
Straight news reporting has no lower level, short of your going out and talking to the same kind of people the reporter did.
Commentary can have such citations. Investigative journalism might have citable passages in part, but ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself (which won't be some hyperlink you can go check). Journalists create the things that others cite. If they could produce what they need mainly by reading and citing, they wouldn't be journalists.
News can be checked in lots of ways. If there's a factual claim about some public data, check it. If someone is assigned a job title, is that actually their job title? Does it contain internal contradictions? Does it make claims that contradict knowledge you already have, or things that were previously claimed? All those types of checks are ones I've done before to news stories and found they failed them.
Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of something else and stuck his name into Google. That surfaced another news report about the murder. This is basic fact checking but the NYT didn't do it. The data was too good to check, so they didn't.
That murder victim in the C-19 data was only exposed because he was #6 in the list. Imagine if his name+age were buried on page 23/45. Checking each and every name in a list that long is beyond a reasonable standard for fact-checking for an individual journalist.
It was because he was the first non-elderly person in the list, which is an obvious thing to double check because COVID basically never kills people below a fairly high age. That was already well known at the time.
If journalists can't check the claims they're making, they shouldn't make them. The fact that the NYT wanted to make 1000 factual claims on the front page doesn't suddenly mean they don't have to check them. It means they shouldn't pull that sort of stunt. The loss of trust is clearly deserved.
People need better media literacy, but that's still a type of "victim blaming" and there's a reason why in law we tend to go after producers more than consumers of a thing, due to effects of scale.
What the (not all, and not all the time..) media does when they bait people into moral hazard could easily be categorized as a crime (harming the informational commons) in some cases. How do we know? Imagine if the news had to publish things the same way that you testify in a courtroom. Do you think they would be more or less truthful and due diligent than they currently are?
Non-commercial speech to the public needs to be taken as seriously as it is when it's commercial (companies etc) speech to the public, and the unqualified unwarrantyable claims scrutinized just as much.
Individual journalists can be great people but the net result of systemic malincentives is a problem that's being gamed. There's a reason why rich and powerful people buy up newspapers (and politicians for that matter) and it doesn't have to do solely with telling the truth.
I am not "blaming" anyone for taking advantage of it, or complaining, but we can fix it.
The issue whenever we discuss punishing journalists/news organizations for "not telling the truth" is that "the truth" is often hard to identify. We also have a classic "who watches the watchmen?" problem, where we have to decide who gets determine the "real" truth. That can get real dicey really quickly. I find the lesser of two evils is to lean towards "well they can publish what they want, by and large" (obviously we have libel and slander laws and such).
I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?
I agree and you are very correct that the "truth" is a hard problem. But that's why we go the other direction: we know what a lie looks like (even if unintentional). This works great in court, and has a method to it.
Falsification is scientific.
Libel and slander laws do a good job in a narrow domain (personal reputation).
And that's why I use the word "truthful" (spirit of the thing) not "truth" (itself) because like science, ideally we are just falsifying. Scientific truth (of everything, itself) is some asymptotic holy grail end state that we never reach, but hopefully are approaching by falsifying over time.
>we know what a lie looks like (even if unintentional)
"But do we?" is I guess my point. There's a lot of intent and, again, determining what the "truth" (or even truthful) is that stands in the way. It's a very complicated problem I feel doesn't really have a solution. To be clear I'm not knocking you, I agree with you, I just worry about how it plays out writ large.
If one person says and insists on air that "WWII began when Germany invaded Poland," but someone else insists on air that "WWII began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria," do we force them to acknowledge the other viewpoint as valid? Do we say only one is correct? It seems a bit ridiculous I admit, but just substitute the example for something more stark I guess. Do we have to decide "well this is debate and this is other thing is fact" and see where the chips fall? Feels like we're trading problems there too.
Imagine trying to say "coal and petroleum are bad for the environment and contributing to climate change." "Certain outlets" balk at the claim and say "you're wrong and lying and corrupt and bribed, it's not leading to climate change and even if it did it's not enough to matter." To me that's patently absurd, yet they downplay it all the time and throw all sorts of nasty allegations out there. Where's the line? Do we fine them? Censor them? Let them be because "it's a debate," even if their claim is incredibly fringe and lacking quality evidence? I don't know the answer to be honest. I'd love to pull the plug on them but that's a dangerous door to open.
I hope this stream of conscience makes sense. I'm enjoying this conversation!
Much of the nihilistic cynicism towards news media is specifically because of half-baked media literacy. No media literacy means you blindly trust the consensus reality; fully-baked literacy recognizes that while all publications have some spin, some are more accurate than others AND that finding the common elements of stories with opposite spin is a decently reliable method to find truth; half-baked literacy says "they're all lying to me, so I'll pick the one I like most."
True media literacy is recognizing that even with you picking up pieces from multiple news orgs, you are still being shepherd to the desired narrative.
For example, if every news org is pro-coca-cola, then the omission of a report on it's harms causes people to inversely assume it's harmless. In other words the low coverage is a signal so called "full-baked" media literates often fall into the trap of listening too. This is worse than the half baked because they actually believe they are informed and somehow end up less skeptical of what's presented.
At least this has been my observation of people who think its not about the garbage dump you get your garbage from, but the variety you get when picking up junk from a multiple garbage dumps.
The answer is to treat all outlets as radioactive and to by default trust none of them. Only direct overwhelming evidence from primary sources should be your guiding light.
It's literally impossible for everyone to be media literate. It's neither taught nor easily offered or incentivised as a skill to learn, making this argument irrelevant.
None of the reasons you mention cover what I observe every day in news (tv and printed) from all sides: stories not fitting the narrative being sinkholed, hit pieces on political opponents, puff pieces on friendly political figures, half of the truth always being presented (never both sides of an argument). The ideological bias is obvious and I don't believe this is honest journalists being coerced into this behaviour. In fact things like the various NYT drama spread over twitter when someone writes anything that deviates from the dogma shows this seems to be coming from the newsroom, not the editors or advertisers.
Journalists are welcome to burn their own reputation, it is theirs. But don't blame others.
The OP's bullet points are a real "softball" picture of the dynamics of the press and journalism (though the press is not necessarily more corrupt than a lot of institutions, it just claims more).
Notably, the OP doesn't mention "cultivating sources" in their bullet points and that's a big source of corruption of individual journalists.
In more detail: one of the most valuable thing a given political reporter on either a local or national level can get is "scoop", the opportunity to break a story first. The valuable source of scoops is ... the very people in power at whatever level the reporter is operating on. So a reporter wants to have these powerful people like them. And that effort to be liked can easily result in the reporter spinning a story to the liking of these people.
This dynamic is discussed fairly often in analyses of the press I think.
I have ranted to friends and family for decades about the lack of media literacy and the lack of understanding for the newsgathering and reporting processes.
I'm glad to see others continuing those rants because I gave up shortly after j school and transitioning careers.
A Gallup analysis published in March 2020 looked at data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, 2014, and 2017. It found that 130 million adults in the country have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab.
I don't disagree but it doesn't matter in this case. In fact, this is _precisely_ why (especially local) newspapers targeted "5th grade level" vocab and syntax, or lower. It's been the unofficial standard since long before the study cited.
It absolutely matters for cognitive ability. You might be reading the equivalent of children's books, but if you can't understand the deeper message, you're going to have a very hard time telling right from wrong.
The analogy I use for software developers is that the difference between a jr and sr developer is that a sr can evaluate 5 different database technologies and choose the right one based on the current use case. A jr developer chooses whatever is trending on hackernews.
It's the same for math and science. Most Americans aren't capable of anything beyond a 6th grade level. The lack of literacy and numeracy in this country explains a lot about where we are today.
Is there a good list of resources for media literacy you could recommend? I had been thinking of tackling this problem and am curious on journalist's take.
I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with non profit trade groups, as they're generally full of people with very tight butts about journalistic integrity and fewer advertisers/grant committees to please.
Honestly though the goal is to get a good lay of the land for both how a story goes from whiteboard/notebook brainstorm to print, and the general shape of the industry.
Small but impactful example: headlines are often written by a different person than the article. This leads to a lot of conflict, which is healthy in terms of producing quality journalism, but potentially confusing for the consumer who may not understand why.
The main goals would be
- Understand the roles of reporters (gathering), editors (verification), managing editors (suits), publishers (sugar daddies) and their roles for a single given piece, and within the org at large
- Media conglomerates disproportionately dominate local news. It's not just Fox and CNN or the NYT/WaPo, and the impact is far more damaging than the more obvious corporate influence).
These days I tend to stay away from the news for the most part, in an attempt to retain sanity. You don't need 24 hours of news. I read up for about 2-3 hours a week and feel more informed than ever.
Here are a few resources who probably can get you set in a better direction than I would:
Columbia journalism review
Nieman lab
Poytner institute
This is exactly what it looks like to me as a layman—that editors/publishers are the real problem. They choose what stories to run and the edits to those stories, but also choose what type of journalists to hire and fire, which helps guide toward a certain narrative or bias. The latter point is basically what Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent if I recall.
> there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued
After learning the Bayesian way of thinking I feel more and more certain that this whole “objective news” idea is just plain wrong. There simply is no objective description of reality at that level of abstraction.
Note though that this is not the usual postmodern viewpoint: reality is not a social construct, or at least that construct is heavily constrained. There is still untruths and outright lies.
> 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.
The question is, which change would be more practical and more realistic. Is there any plausible world where media literacy wouldn’t be an important skill?
I appreciate you sharing your on the ground knowledge and insights, but if it was more than 20 years ago I would also cautiously imagine that the new generation of journalists may not behave the same.
People should be more educated, but blaming misinformation on uninformed people is like blaming climate change on consumers for driving and not recycling. Why doesn't 'real' news get more views and better advertising money? Wouldn't a trustworthy brand be more valuable for advertizers? Why don't more media orgs have independent funding? Are there any reporter / user owned media?
I wouldn't say misinformation is caused by 'uninformed people,' it's just that people tend to click on garbage. It's a slide into tabloid-ness as media focuses on their marketing ROI.
> And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business
At this point the news companies are all desperately concealing the fact that they barely have reporters, and are mostly getting news from a wire feed or parent company.
I mean, that's the whole argument of Chomsky's manufacturing consent. It's not that there are people at the top dictating what does and does not get published, rather that there is a system of incentives in mainstream news outlets that discourage dissent from mainstream politically favorable opinions. Sure, as an up and coming New York Times reporter, you can stick to your guns and want to report on controversial issues, but if it's really controversial and against the consensus of most of your liberal colleagues, then you might just not be up for that promotion.
If someone thinks that's not true, ask yourself: do you really think that reporting on vaccine anomaly data, or Ukraine corruption will get you more or less upward mobility than reporting on shooting hot air baloons or whatever media orchestrated distraction is happening at the moment in the NYT?
Did you work during the Trump era? Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth.
That’s when things went from bad to worse and I abandoned the mainstream media entirely.
I was not a fan of trump, at all, but even I noticed this. If trump scratched his butt in public, figuratively speaking, the media jumped on him for it, and would then decline to cover any story about whether butt scratching (figuratively speaking) was ever appropriate. The media also cast his supporters in an incredibly dark light, which was worrying because that was roughly half of voters who voted for a major candidate. Media coverage was hysterical at times (at other times, their concerns seemed appropriate and valuable).
If you really think that this started with Trump, you must not have been paying attention before. The media (conservative media in particular) hounded Obama about some extraordinarily stupid things. Famously there was a significant controversy one time about the color of his suit [0]. I honestly can't remember whether Bush 43 got similar treatment. Maybe the prominence of clickbait/outrage journalism didn't come about until the end of his presidency? Or maybe the incidents have just faded from my memory.
I don't remember that one, but I do remember fox talking about how obama was "disrespecting the office" because he took his suit jacket off in the oval office. It was at that point that I realized fox is not a serious news organization, because who could seriously think that was worth talking about? And then when trump got two scoops of ice cream, every major "news" outlet except fox ran stories about it, and I decided to stop taking any of them seriously, because they exist to make money by pissing people off, not to help us understand what's going on in the world.
> I honestly can't remember whether Bush 43 got similar treatment.
Probably, but the main thing at that time was 9/11 and the Iraq war. Media was pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative hard, and woe be the person that disagreed.
That Slate article is actually pretty fair to Bush. But others from that time, which I cannot find, were not so fair. Nuc-u-lar versus nuc-lee-are certainly gave my left-leaning extended family reason for an hour of Bush-bashing at one of our gatherings. While I thought then, and still do now, that the whole thing was ridiculous.
Many news organizations happily threw out their journalistic integrity to "fight Trump". Honest reporting became taboo. You were either FOR or AGAINST Trump, and anyone not choosing a side was just secretly on the other side.
Some of the stuff they covered was ridiculous, too, but they guy was an absolute machine for creating gaffes and outrageous behavior. Giving him the same treatment as any other candidate would still have looked like "picking on him".
If anything, they didn't pick on him enough for some things—I still can't believe the man became President after suggesting his supporters might assassinate his opponent, if she won. And that wasn't spin or bias, that's just what he did, the whole thing's available for anyone to watch. When he did that and his campaign kept trucking along without a hitch was the moment I decided our democracy itself was in danger (which turned out to be very right—maybe I should join a think-tank or become a political commentator or something, I also got a ton of the course of Iraq more-correct than most commentators)
…by covering the nonsense of the Trump show, they lessened the impact of the news of the real evil of the attempted overthrow. Instead of being presented as the danger it was, it was reduced to the season finale of the Trump show.
Trump was a birther FFS. He was part of that lovely group of people who thought Obama was the antichrist for wearing a tan suit or eating arugula. He made media worse, not the other way around. They sullied themselves by pandering to his and his supporters' insanity. This happened way before he became president.
Before that they dumped on Bush I (I remember the ridiculous attacks on Quayle)
I'm sure they did it to Regan too, and Carter before that, and Ford before that.
But I would agree that any pretense of "balanced" or "fair" reporting got thrown out of the window with Trump. It's like they aren't even hiding their intentions anymore.
You can find unflattering footage of anybody's supporters.
I was never a Trump supporter, but as someone who has friends and family who are/were supporters, I resent the situation where people think like you do.
In fact, I think that attitude is part of why these people end up voting for Trump. They know what the cool kids on the blue team say about them when they aren't in the room (hell, even when they are in the room). Not to give all Trump supporters a pass, but they're not all (or even most) the cartoon character you have in mind.
I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I unfriended them. I believe in morals. I believe in God. There's no way I can be friends with people who, at best, only pay lip service to those concepts while using them to further patent evil.
To be clear, I'm not really on the "blue team" either. But that's a team that hasn't been taken over by the worst of its fans, nor is it motivated by things such as xenophobia, willful and prideful ignorance, and malice.
I think the view that you are advocating for basically bends morality to accommodate the fact that so many people have to do and believe x. I'm a religious person. I don't believe in changing the criteria just to avoid an unsavory conclusion about people.
(To be clear, I mention the God thing not so much as a "holier than thou" thing, but in allusion to the fact that these differences cannot be bridged--I find it incredibly idiotic when people say things like "we need to talk to each other more to stop the division". Such a thing would only fuel the division, in my opinion.)
Your examples are so many degrees removed that I do not think they are apposite. For example, people who supported Trump did so with full knowledge of his attitude towards immigrants, asylum seekers, etc., his rhetoric about building the wall (which many of his supporters cited specifically as their reason for supporting him), his "birtherism" re Obama, etc. Thus, they can much more strongly be said to affirmatively support those things than, for example, an American taxpayer whose money goes to help the Israeli government bulldoze Palestinian homes, or do any of a number of other foreign policy things that qualify as "evil shit".
So indirection washes away the evil? Is complacent support that much better than affirmative support?
Compare actively supporting "birtherism" to passively supporting blowing up brown kids with drones.
I think you're better off looking for common ground with the people around you, rather than putting up barriers based on which politician panders better to them.
Edit: Case in point: we disagree here. I don't hate you for it, I'd hope you don't hate me, and I think this is a fine conversation to have. The alternative is we could each say fuck you and go our separate ways, and the world is a slightly worse place for it.
> I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I unfriended them. I believe in morals.
Ironically, the behavior you describe is immoral in my view. I also am a religious person, and I also don't believe in bending morals or that talk will heal all disagreements. However, with political opinions, the primary reason otherwise well intentioned people support bad things is that they don't understand that they are bad. Shunning someone actively makes that situation worse. Sure you can't win people over by arguments, but you can influence them gradually, and if they are your friends, you should want to do that for their own good.
I understand your perspective, but I do not think that they do not understand that the things are bad. From what I can tell from conversations those people, they, for the most part, just don't give a shit about what's good and bad.
Added to "don't understand" and "dont care" is a third option: "don't agree", based on different upbringings and cultural values, some of which you or I would find abhorrent, because of our own upbringing and cultural values. But I think you should recognize that there is a good chance you'd have the same beliefs if you had the same life experience.
> But I think you should recognize that there is a good chance you'd have the same beliefs if you had the same life experience.
What's the point of this line of thinking? Ok, maybe we'd also join the Taliban if we grew up in orphanages in Pakistan after Russia invaded Afghanistan. So?
The thrust of your arguments here (the article and the life experience thing) seems to be to not hold anyone morally accountable for anything.
The point is to recognize the humans on the receiving end of your judgement. They aren't inherently bad people. There was a series of events that led them to where they are, just like you. They are capable of all the same things you are.
Once you recognize that these people are human, you have a chance at maybe effecting some kind of change. Looking at them as animals means you will never effect any positive change, and you'll probably contribute to an even worse us-against-them kind of environment.
Agreed, I did the same. I decided a couple years into his presidency that I'm fundamentally morally incompatible with people who could support such an abhorrent asshole. Not to mention their incredible propensity for confirmation bias, which is frankly reason enough on its own to remove them from my life. I lost a few acquaintances and one friend during the latter Trump years. I value my friends highly, but I regret nothing, and would happily do it again.
It is good to see someone else doesn't believe that we should start moving moral goalposts just because society starts sliding into depravity.
What would all these people objecting to this do if they were in a time and place where some real shit was going down? Lynchings, genocides, etc? I guess they'd stand by and be ok with it and rationalize those things.
That was my point in another part of this thread though: we are in a time and place where real shit is and has been going on.
Just look at some of the numbers for casualties in the middle east as a result of US adventures over there. And most of us are standing by and funding it.
Trump is distasteful. But castigating people who feel like he has something to offer them where nobody else does isn't doing anything to improve things, it's just further galvanizing them.
But the ones who aren't cartoons don't really do enough to counter the ones who do. Just a bunch of whataboutism and "anything to own the libs" mentality.
And honestly being supporters of a person instead of a policy or a position is itself a psychological failing.
> You'll get no argument from me on that front, but I think that's a pretty bipartisan failing.
Not really? Has there been any cult of personality like Trump's not only among Dems but also among Republicans, aside from him, in American politics within living memory? (awk phrasing, but I think you get the idea).
Maybe Reagan? But even then, it wasn't this level of incredibly personal devotion.
Think about it: we never used the terms "Obama supporter" or "Romney supporter" in 2012, or "Obama supporter" and "McCain supporter" in 2008. And people supporting those candidates didn't wave flags with candidate names on them, etc.
I guess I was thinking more in the sense that people follow parties instead of picking individual issues.
But on supporting people, I think Obama definitely had devoted fans. Bernie did as well. I don't think Romney or McCain had the kind of draw to build up a big fan base. A lot of candidates that come along just aren't very exciting to anybody but their corporate handlers.
It's not all that surprising that an Obama or Trump character gets a strong following. Both of them reached out to people who felt like nobody in power cared about them.
> I guess I was thinking more in the sense that people follow parties instead of picking individual issues.
Yeah, we definitely have a problem in this country with limited options. I think a sizeable majority likely want at least one or two other parties in the mix.
> Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them is sufficient to expose them as bad people
You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people, as if they have no other motive than to do evil. I didn’t like him either, but give me a break and try to let go of that media narrative. His supporters were just people. Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight
Absolutely this. Media had my neighbor yelling in my face and threatening to fight me over our differences in opinion over masks. Objectively he's not a bad guy, and I told him that I think we have more in common than not, then went inside.
We really need to stop this cycle of hate. I want to feel safe in my neighborhood and get along with folk. We don't need to agree, but we need to recognize that we are Americans and on the same damn side in the end.
I believe this "further your own goals" thing is a particularly American thing.
There's a saying that Americans vote with their pocket-books. It does appear to me that whatever other policies they claim to espouse, when it comes to the crunch they vote for tax reductions.
I suppose that's partly because of pork-barrel politics, and the huge tides of money that wash around US election campaigns. If all the politicians are bought and paid-for, then they can't be trusted to handle taxpayers' money properly.
That's the "basket of deplorables" thinking. You'll hear less-dressed up terms like "garbage people," like someone ought to be thrown out with the trash, applied to huge populations. It's kind of wild.
> You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people
So? You judge the moral and intellectual merits of things by how popular they are? That's your call. I don't.
> Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight
Not really. Only one set of nutjobs actually stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election. You've bought into a narrative that minimizes what is an insane fact.
Washington D.C. is a high crime city, but you can safely walk in the National Mall at any hour of the day or night alone, and people do. If it were anywhere else it would be a place be a place most people wouldn't feel safe at when alone late at night in a city like DC.
Know why?
Because Capitol Hill and the Mall are secured six ways to Sunday. It is the seat of the US global empire. Congressmembers and high officials are common sights all around DC and they move around pretty freely. It is common to see them around town. It would seemingly be easy for extremists to find these people and intimidate of harm them, and yet this almost never happens.
That's because DC itself is highly secured, at least where the government people live and work. Congress and the Mall are a secure fortress within a secure city. There are soldiers, air defenses, snipers, and heavy surveillance everywhere.
The J6 protesters had no guns, no supplies, no secure communications, no central command. They were no match for capitol security. The police officers who allegedly died that day are not listed at "line of duty" deaths, i.e. no one says they were killed by J6 protester violence. Capitol security shot and killed an unarmed woman protester, the only death attributable to direct violence. This was also not the first time protesters had occupied the building.
I don't claim to know what actually happened on J6, but it is quite obvious that many of the media narratives about it are highly incompetent at best.
You can only lie to my face so many times before I start to question your credibility.
? This is just dumb. Who cares whether they were armed? The point is that they had the motive to do wrong and they took action in furtherance of it. They don't deserve leniency for being various forms of incompetent.
It's pretty disgusting you'd make the moral choice to peg the media as lying instead of being appalled that people stormed Congress and fought the capitol police.
QAnon nuts don't represent all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals. Black and white thinking is stupid in this day and age yet it seems to persist
Not all of the people who stormed Congress believe in QAnon, nor did I even cite that as a reason at all, so who cares? Can't really see why you brought it up except to try to strawman.
> QAnon nuts aren't all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals.
Logical error here; your point would make sense if someone said "all conservatives are QAnon believers".
The problem isn't "black and white thinking"; it's somehow shrugging your shoulders at the fact that a former president of the US incited a mob to storm Congress in an attempt to stay in power, as if this is some kind of third-world country. "Oh but don't hold people voting Republican accountable for that", you argue. Why not? Party hasn't even held him accountable and are likely going to nominate him again.
The ideals of Qanon were implicitly accepted into the American right, and have been working their way into the mainstream. How do you think MTG got where she is?
The Republican party is the party of conspiracy nuts. If you don't like it, then kick them out. But you can't, because a significant percentage of your group would be gone, and a larger percentage don't disagree with much of what the Q-tards believe.
MTG got where she is because she's a representative from a small, hard red district. The whole country could absolutely hate a representative and it makes no difference because it's the populations of those small districts that vote.
It seems you don't read and are the one that is fucking obtuse. Your link says 25% (not a larger percentage) agree with some "central tenets" of QAnon (as do 16% of the population as a whole), the central tenets that is mentioned in the article being a pedophile ring in the government, which to be quite honest is not that far fetched considered the whole Epstein ordeal, so not surprising to see these stats.
It's easy to see why such a large portion agree with that CENTRAL TENET (capitalizing so you can read it when you skim this).
If you actually go into the study you might even see that compared to the 25% of republicans, 14% of independents and 9% of Democrats are also QAnon believers. So to say that it's solely a Republican issue is disingenuous no matter how the media paints it (even the article you linked over exaggerating its source).
Don't be so fucking obtuse and learn to read past headlines
Now you're being deliberately obtuse, and/or disingenuous in your response.
> the central tenets that is mentioned in the article being a pedophile ring in the government
The central tenets (plural) of the study the article references are as follows:
-The government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.
-There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.
-Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.
Quite obviously that's significantly more extreme than your ridiculously watered-down interpretation of the survey's questions.
More interesting tidbits:
-43% of QAnon believers are Republicans, compared to 19% of Democrats.
-QAnon believers are 2.7x as likely to be conservatives than liberals.
-QAnon believers are 4.6x to get their news from far-right sources than from mainstream news outlets.
QAnon is predominately a right-wing problem. Trump rallies were rife with Q imagery. It also permeated the January 6 riots.
In your mind, "both sides" is valid. In reality, "both sides" is complete horseshit. The right is full of morons and assholes, and imo intentionally obtuse and/or disingenuous people such as yourself fall squarely into the latter bucket.
They represent all conservatives who vote republican. Literally, in congress and as our last president. If you vote for a qanoner you can't say they don't represent you.
Nah, about 15-20%. Hillary's "basket of deplorables", as stated (IIRC "about a third" of Trump supporters was how she put it—her entire point was that most weren't actually awful). That was just true. Generous, even. The rest were along for the ride for various reasons, often because they felt compelled to vote for the candidate most likely to support a pro-life position.
Maybe not 46%, but c'mon. No Democrats ever came up to me at a restaurant and told my three year old they hoped Daddy was smart enough for vote for Hillary. I don't recall any attempts by Democratic supporters to run a Trump bus off the road. I've never seen the equivalent of "Fuck your Feelings" flags flown by liberals. Remind me of the years long conserted effort on the part of liberals to claim a Republican politician was born in some other country. How many of that 46% you refer to believe to this day that Obama is a secret muslim or Kenyan? Please be honest.
Really? Recognizing that people who vote out of bigotry and ignorance are trash is what led to that? Calling out people who openly and proudly believe in conspiracy theories is what led to that? Assuming you aren't a Trump supporter, what would they have to do in order for you to believe they are bad and need to be called out as such? Start lynching Blacks en masse? Firebombing the offices of lawyers who represent asylum seekers?
My impression from this thread is that you'd make an excuse even if they started doing those things.
It is of course ironic you take a condescending tone while trying to convince me I am judgmental and condescending.
I don't engage with any social media, and I'm out there in the world plenty. I read the news, I've spoken with people. We can all hear what Trump says, we know his policies.
I have had Trump supporters say to my face that asylum seeking children getting separated from their parents and never seeing them again is A-ok and deserved because it was the parents fault for trying to escape their country and come here. Those are the people you're defending. You think speaking further with them would make me despise them less?
> You really think 42% of the US are bigots who will lynch blacks and firebomb lawyers?
Why do you think my hypothetical is about literally every single one of them engaging in those things? If the Proud Boys and such groups started getting more active and doing such things, do you think most Trump supporters would care? Or would they keep at it with their far-right politics and support for him?
You don't engage with social media? What are you and I doing right now?
I've had terrible experiences with people on the left, but unlike you I don't paint half the country with the same brush. It's not an accurate representation of realty and completely unproductive.
You're basically doing the same thing the worst people on the right do - condemning millions of people because of the beliefs of a few.
And if you adopt a moral framework that emphasizes those common ideas in defining the category of “bad people” (or perhaps “deplorables”) then you’ve got a powerful justification for elites to dominate ordinary people.
It’s an inversion. We used to hate GOP voters for working on Wall Street and at McKinsey and laying off workers, while bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. But now the target is the traditional views of nationality, sexuality, etc., that GOP voters have in common with those laid of workers and Iraqis and Afghans.
> Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth.
For that to be harmful, it doesn't even have to be all journalists, just enough of them that people come across that bias often enough to be familiar with it.
I'm certain that many journalists value the truth and fairness over party, but I'm also certain that too many journalists put party/ideology over truth and fairness (in many areas), and the news organizations have become more tolerant of bias.
There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for decades, and how exactly this works. With a mountain of examples. So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through."
Though of course this is the wrong reaction; it has always trickled through. Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols.
Every piece of information is produced with interests for audiences; objectivity is a pink unicorn Santa Claus, something you really shouldn't believe exists after you're, like, 8. But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims, and who are not organizations whose literal existence depends on state licensing as a corporation. Not to say that there is no structural pressure in the independent realm; ideology still exists, years of socialization in the country of origin with their (often folly) "self-evidence" myths exist, the need to eat and make money somehow still exists. But the pressures are much, MUCH fewer than in the case of corporate and state news.
First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements.
Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
Saying this is a "spin" seems like an attempt to undermine the comment.
> Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind of wooden interpretation of words and lazy disqualification is what leads someone to the "black and white" spin you're accusing the GP of. This falls in line with the type of _gotcha_ logic that insists: "Well you said x, and x means X regardless of rhetorical device usage." and "OP has expressed sentiment in Y, which leads me to believe he's actually Y and therefore not $CREDIBLE".
The point is, engaging like this deprives the dialogue of nuance, rhetorical freedom and grace. If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
>I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
This is still too extreme. "Lying" requires intentionality and implies maliciousness. It suggests that people who work in media are mostly evil people with the primary goal of misleading you. It both ignores and shows ignorance of how the media industry actually works. It also removes any hope of actually fixing the media industry because the only solution according to this mindset is getting rid of all the lying journalists. It doesn't leave any room to understand or address the incentives that actually got us to our current situation.
Disagree. "Lying" is objectively deceit, or intending to deceive. It can be, and often is, malicious, but to ascribe all lying as malicious is a step too far.
It is pretty funny to see this reply from you. You are guilty here of the exact thing you were criticizing in your last comment. It is "Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what [I'm] saying".
I never described "all lying as malicious". I said it "implies maliciousness" and you said it "often is, malicious". I don't see a disagreement here.
I think the tension we're walking here is to keep one hand grounded in the fact that words can have a discrete, objective meaning *while also* allowing for individual freedom of expression. Modernity vs unhinged relativism.
I lie to my children when I say that the TV needs to recharge after their morning shows. A way to divert their attention elsewhere, but not out of malice.
One form of obvious lying is the modern headline. Now that clicks drive revenue many story's don't even come close to what the headline suggests. I do think this is maliciousness, they're telling a lie to draw you in to make money off of you.
This is an example of what I'm talking about. Journalist by and large are not in favor of editors slapping misleading headlines on their work. You are ascribing this practice to maliciousness when it is actually a reluctant response to incentives.
Yeah, it does baffle me when audiences that are supposed to tackle complex topics everyday (and complexity in general) have to fallback to black and white explanations in social aspects.
What do you think is the proper response if someone steals of loaf of bread? Would you label them a dishonest irredeemable criminal and throw them in jail for life?
If there was an abundant, inexpensive, legal supply of bread and all the thief had to do was value honesty more than free bread, rather than continuing to steal, across decades, thousands of loafs of bread, yes.
I think it's ok to take the illustration to that extreme, given the postulation that you say someone thinks that you should destroy a person's life over one loaf of bread.
> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, ...
is exactly what you call a "wooden" statement. But even when the author meant "by and large, the media lied", the statement is a dishonest exaggeration it is. Of course there are media that can be caught lying over and over again, but there are sufficient large, conscientious news outlets to suppose it is a dirty spin.
> If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
Discrediting all media equally is part of polarization, and letting it go isn't helpful. Discussing it as if it were true, as many seem to do, is a symptom that it has gone too far.
They're lying though, that's the problem. Not 100% lying, but ignoring facts that contradict the narrative they have ongoing with their readership (so they don't look like they were wrong), and picking out those that contribute to their fantasy.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've just seen first hand (1) the real information on the battlefield (2) the public affair office's briefing to medias, which is factual although omits sensitive things and (3) the media's subsequent reporting which largely ignores what the PAO said and goes on with their made up interpretation. It's frankly sickening. They're writing fantasy.
"Even though this, and all information quoted in this piece, is readily available to any reporter with access to Google, countless references to the dangers presented by phosgene are giving the public anxiety over the decision to execute the controlled burn. To pick one example from many dozens, a Newsweek story, titled Did Control Burn of Toxic Chemicals Make Ohio Train Derailment Worse?, includes the following sentence: “Phosgene is a deadly gas that was used in chemical warfare during World War I.” The report goes on to quote – and we kid you not – a TikTok video from an “entrepreneur” for more insight.
> For clarity, 40 ppm (parts per million) is equivalent to 0.004% of the composition.
Lots of things are dangerous even at concentrations measured in PPM. For example, the level of Phosgene that’s “immediately dangerous to life” is 2 ppm: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/75445.html.
Maybe the point is that this 20 ppm quickly turns into less based on further dilution. But there’s a lot of analysis required to support the post’s assertions that the author just skips over.
I think there are two interlocking arguments: first, a historical argument: news organizations substanitally misleading the public is basically normal, in most countries and time periods. Second, the structural argument: why exactly should we think that a news organization should be capable of providing the basic facts?
If you consider the decades of scolarship it takes to clarify extremely well doccumented events, like the outbreak of the first world war, it's clear that even with a mountain of evidence, and all the time in the world, the 'basic facts' can be stubornly elusive even with the best of intentions.
The idea that an accurate picture should be able to emerge before 9-o'clock, in a newsroom, in a haze of conflicting reports, seems pretty incredible to me: and historically, that's not what has happened. So 'accurate news' is neither something we should expect, nor something we have a great deal of evidence of.
This comment is well intended, I'm sure. I always respect anyone trying to 'stick to the facts.' Unfortunately, it's just not history. Easy to google history. You are simply not familiar with how this all works.
The most valuable asset of a new organization is trust, and thus they are often bought as propaganda platforms.
But propaganda is tricky, you need people to keep paying attention which means the most overt spin is to be avoided. Done well you shift the narrative over decades not just swap positions on day one. Fox News is the most well known US example, but you don’t want to just preach to people who already believe your message.
Thus you want to control the widest possible selection of media.
The Fox horizontal integration is brilliant. They pull in people with sports and other complimentary content and cross-sell the profitable propaganda.
The New York Post is a great example. It was the sports and bookie newspaper - they’d publish Vegas odds and have tabloid news. They slowly transformed into a giant editorial paper and funnel into the broader Fox ecosystem.
They have an effective, free product. I need to pay to read The NY Times, but Fox is free and the sponsors are all low quality high margin stuff. Radio is prostate pills, TV is old people drugs and gold, etc.
Fox calls itself "Fox News". Only when they're pressed and presented with evidence that they're liars will they hide behind "That's okay, this is all just entertainment!" excuses. Their viewers don't think they're watching made up stories for entertainment. They're convinced that Fox/OAN are the only news agencies that tell the truth.
I’m not a fan of CNN, but they do a better job at distinguishing the difference between news and editorial.
The Fox issue is they conflate the two. I used to watch alot of TV news and the actual news content was pretty good on Fox on national issues, but their affiliates were usually pretty awful.
The news product produced by the networks until circa 1999 were a superior product in every way. Cable outlets have always danced with these issues as a TV channel that says the same thing all day gets boring.
CNN isn't good, but it's not even close to being equivalent. I doubt there's a single news org that doesn't let their bias slip from time to time, but let's not pretend that makes them all the same or that there aren't some much much worse than others.
Do you watch professional wrestling by any chance? They are in essence the same business model. Most people know both are largely fake, but some people actually believe. It’s the entertainment industry. Capital influences everything.
Most western audiences of professional wrestling know its scripted/practiced/"fake". Most western audiences of Fox News think it's all real.
Interesting, I worked in Saudi Arabia for awhile...most of the Africans and Southeast Asian laborers were all 100% convinced that professional wrestling was real. Pro wrestling is HUGE in developing nations.
The difference is that a lot of the old wrestlers and promoters hate Vince macmahon for goingnto court and admitting Pro Wrestling was fake during the steroid trial, but the likes of Tucker Carlson has gone to court and has testified that hes an entertainer and people still believe him.
Seems like a cynical take by someone that knows what they watch is largely fake, and they want to apply the same rules to the other side so they feel better about their exclusivity to confirmation bias enabling programming.
No, the underlying business model, get people to watch your product in order to maximize ad sales, is basically the same. The incentives are therefore essentially the same. Money talks.
Personally, I don’t watch anything. I read across a broad array of print sources and prefer to trust specific journalists rather than entire organizations. I try to get most information from primary sources, or to triangulate information from multiple outlets which are preferably maximally uncorrelated. This is much easier than it may sound. And think tanks and academics are often better information sources than entertainment news outlets.
> The incentives are therefore essentially the same. Money talks.
Are you implying the NYT never publishing anything that upsets their readership? Every week #CancelNYT trends because they "platformed" something their left wing audience didn't like.
Even Fox News lost viewers because they dared declare the 2020 election free and fair, and in favor of Biden.
> there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
No, not for propaganda. If you want people to have a certain perception and position on a topic, selective reporting of topics and the presentation of them is far more relevant. This certainly does qualify as misleading.
Lies are even more ineffective since they often can be directly disproved, which biases people to believe the opposite. You want to present your spin in a certain blur.
Many prominent sociologist pretty much explain the mechanisms media and advertisers employ in detail. To say this is a fringe position is misleading too.
Yep. This is a cynical counsel of despair. "Don't try filtering truth from lies. Everyone does it. Just lie back and think of England."
There is a difference between withholding information, selective emphasis, and outright lies. They are all bad, but they are equally bad. If you want to make things better you attempt to differentiate better from worse actors.
TLDR; all media, and all people, are biased, but they are not all equally biased. This bias can produce false beliefs. If you think false beliefs are a bad thing you promote the better actors and condemn the worse.
Also some news media actually reports on events that hurts the cause of their collective political leanings, some just don't. This isn't apples to apples.
I was living in the US but spending considerable time in Europe in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.
Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.
At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.
It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)
> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.
Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.
"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."
This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors might be way off, but I think those two things are quite different. Lying is making statements that the speaker knows are false.
An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court.
To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.
Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.
I think your "quite different" distinction is incorrect. The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one. There's a gradation from plain lying your face off, through mixing in a few truths with your lies, through lying by omission, through presenting true facts in such a way as to make the reader believe falsehoods.
The tactic most-used by newspapers is lying by omission. Newspapers routinely "spike" stories that aren't aligned with the paper's political agenda. You can search the paper's output, and you won't find a direct lie; but a parallel search for truth will also fail. Truth is to be found in the gaps.
"The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one."
There is if you look up definitions. Lying involves falsehoods. You can mislead someone using selective truths without using falsehoods. That's why the article etc was about misleading, persuading, etc and not mentioning lying (aside from the commentor I originally responded to).
Yep. Lies are not the same thing as being dishonest.
You can use lies to be misleading, or manipulative, or dishonest but you don't need to, and it's usually more effective if you don't (or at least don't entirely).
If someone can't see how a person could be misleading without lying they're going to fall for a lot of bullshit.
The way I classify them is lying is "outright lies". "intend to mislead" is manipulation. The nuance between manipulation and lies is that manipulation usually distorts a collection of facts through rearrangement, omission or massaging those things to create a view that is not factual, which I think may also relate it as implicit lies. Lying is stating explicitly counter-factual things. I prefer the distinction of using manipulation over implicit lies as I think it communicates the narrower focused maliciousness of it, where lies don't always have that same level of "premeditation", for lack of a better term.
Then what distinction was being made? Knowingly providing an incomplete picture, focusing on one side, or selective editing are intended to misled. They are not "outright lies" nor "counter-factual".
I am interacting in good faith. A lie requires a falsehood. There is a difference between a lie and deception - they aren't perfect synonymous. The example from your cited definition is really a poor one since it relies on a saying more than a factual use of the word, and the example itself does imply an actual falsehood in that someone lied during the marriage vows or during the marriage.
But wait, let's look at the instant replay. You claim that lying and deception at the same. So why would you get involved in this conversation to say that? According to you, their use is interchangeable and makes no difference.
If you have something to add to the actual conversation and not about definitions, then please do.
There is concept called a "lie of omission". I did not invent that term - it's older than you and i combined. Intentionally witholding information to deceive a person has long been considered a lie.
There is a difference between telling a lie and being mistaken, no? If you are learning something and give the wrong answer on a quiz, are you lying? Both of those are falsehoods that aren't intending to deceive, and most people wouldn't count those as lies.
There's a couple other concepts I suggest you look into: adjective and category. "Bird of prey" is still a bird no? "Person of interest" is still a person, no? "Box of chocolates", "bag of food", "bottle of whiskey", and "bowl of soup" are all containers no?
Again, anything to add to the actual discussion? Aren't you the one that was complaining about semantics?
Lie of omission is an atypical use and is inconsistent with the definition that I posted earlier. You can cherry pick your definition while ignoring the one I posted and use typical examples that don't correleate to this atypical use that changes the very definition.
If I withhold information from you it may be misleading, but it quite simply is not a lie. Now please stop trolling and actually contribute to the conversation about distrust of the media instead of focusing on the very thing you complained about - semantics.
It turns out this is a very old discussion. There is a concept called a "lie of omission". Here's a wikipedia page about the entire concept of lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
A question for you: if you make a mistake or misunderstand something then share it, are you a liar?
I don't mean like your current actions - the part where you are pretending that you have never encountered the notion of lying like this is clearly itself some sort of lie. I mean like say you apply some math rule incorrectly on a test. Should you be kicked out for lying to the teacher?
To lie is to tell a deliberate falsehood - to say something you know to be untrue. Sometimes this is taken to be acceptable - to tell a "white lie", e.g. in response to, "Does this dress make me look fat?"
Saying something incorrect, but which you believe to be true, is no lie.
> but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy.
Isn’t… isn’t that a pretty black and white spin on the idea of sociology? Do you have any studies to share that indicate “politically colored armchair philosophy”?
A curated set of facts or as you call it “incomplete, but not counter-factual” is not the truth. All facts are the truth and that’s what non opinion news should be reporting.
"But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims"
I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.
Audience capture is probably the biggest driving point behind media bias, whether the media is commercial or independent. Walter Lippmann put it wall 100 years ago [1]:
> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
I'm not trying to dispute or detract from this point, but I'd also like to add that there is also a simple motivation behind media bias that can't be ignored: people wanting to shape public opinion to their own worldview - be they journalists or people who own the presses.
> There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways. There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's. His version of the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street. And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which stains the white radiance of eternity.
I recommend giving the book a read at some point if you have the chance (there's also a free audio book up on YouTube). It's a very thought provoking journey through how public opinion gets formed, and the myriad of different elements at play shaping them.
I'd go even further and say the the motivation isn't specifically to shape public opinion to your view, but simply to present the content in a way that doesn't create cognitive dissonance with your personal view. If you personally don't believe that a piece of information is relevant, then you leave it out. That piece might not be relevant to your own view of the subject, but could be crucial to an opposing view.
I wonder how much of the advertising market is what drove the strong, pre-WWII, anti-communist push. Prior to the holodomor even authoritarian statist communism hadn't been responsible for anything on the order of what capitalism had done.
Some support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare#Seattle_Genera... "Even before the strike began, the press begged the unions to reconsider. In part they were frightened by some of labor's rhetoric, like the labor newspaper editorial that proclaimed: "We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country ... We are starting on a road that leads – NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!"[6] Daily newspapers saw the general strike as a foreign import: "This is America – not Russia," one said when denouncing the general strike.[7] The non-striking part of Seattle's population imagined the worst and stocked up on food. Hardware stores sold their stock of guns.[8] "
He actually has a fairly interesting segment on the reporting of strikes:
> The underlying trouble appears in the news through certain easily recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike, disorder. From the point of view of the worker, or of the disinterested seeker of justice, the demand, the strike, and the disorder, are merely incidents in a process that for them is richly complicated. But since all the immediate realities lie outside the direct experience both of the reporter, and of the special public by which most newspapers are supported, they have normally to wait for a signal in the shape of an overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter. Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these feelings. But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings. Their feelings may be that their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping goods they need in their work, that there will be shortage and higher prices, that it is all devilishly inconvenient. These, too, are realities. And when they give color to the abstract news that a strike has been called, it is in the nature of things that the workers are at a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to say, of the existing system of industrial relations that news arising from grievances or hopes by workers should almost invariably be uncovered by an overt attack on production.
It brings in contrast the public response to workplace shootings, or even the rarer instances when the entire staff of a workplace quit at once.
We quickly found out about a bunch of the nuance of the Half Moon Bay shootings, and appear to be doing things to make those workplaces and living places better (though of course this doesn't help the larger problem of agricultural labor practices). And I think most readers get a vicarious sense of justice out of mass quitings. But yeah strikes, and unionization in general, make bystanders nervous.
There's quite a few independent UK journalists who are refugees from editors that started spiking their stories. Jonathan Cook and John Pilger both had to leave The Guardian.
> Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols.
Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. Even among the non-postal "decentralized" distribution protocols. The old saying that people become leery of media reporting when they see how their own specialty is botched applies to even the credentialed bloggers when they step out of their lane just a bit.
I've personally noticed fact reporting biases when, for instance, reading a story on the same event from Fox News and CNN. But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
> Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation.
That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore.
The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.
> But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
> With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.
Definitely agree. But it's also difficult to fact check even if you do distrust. Even educated bloggers and readers can have difficulty accurately interpreting information, and what that information indicates, if technological advances make their knowledgebase outdated.
> Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
In some cases, such as when the source of particular facts all originate from the same person, sure. Or when everyone's article is just a rewrite of the AP News or Reuters release. But in the general case we all can know who won the superbowl, and by what margin and what plays.
All US news stations covered Trump's campaign at least 20x more than Sanders.
All US news stations covered Hilary's campaign at least 5x more than Sanders.
That's without even getting into the hit pieces, the lies, the questions sneaked to Hillary in advance.
That style of narrative warping is repeated across every topic that might hurt corporate profits. There's facts, and then there's repetition, presentation, sentiment.
Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern train derailment - one story on page 20, with no context linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock buyback last year, no context about their lobbying against the very regulations that would have prevented this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't even name the company.
US media is absolute unequivocal dogshit across the board. It's utterly indefensible. That half of American's have any faith at all in corporate news is astounding. Trust them for sport coverage, sure - but that's entertainment friendo, not news.
> Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern train derailment - one story on page 20, with no context linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock buyback last year, no context about their lobbying against the very regulations that would have prevented this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't even name the company.
And all of the investigative journalism sites that would report in this detail on events like this are asking for donations to keep going. The advertiser support isn't there.
I don't really believe that non profit news is any more objective if that is what you mean by independent. They are beholden to their donors who can afford it. This will often be large foundations set up by corporations and extremely rich people. There is even a tax incentive that a corporation or foundation/trust can use to get a tax break while ensuring that the non-profit publishes things that align with their own opinions. I actually think the "charity" sector that operates in journalism and politics is extremely corrupt and serves no public interest.
I actually don't think it's possible to solve the problem of funding being able to influence journalism. Although there are independent journalists like on substack (which could be what you mean) I am not convinced that is much different from corporate media except the journalist is more like an LLC or sole proprietorship.
Independent does not mean objective. Independent journalists are generally not dependent on corporations, states, or publishing organizations to fund their reporting. Independence is a gradient rather than black or white. If he does publish something through a MSM outlet, he is generally paid for the piece published. Substack is one of many examples where funding is direct from readers or patrons. Good independent journalists are transparent about their biases since everybody has them.
There are plenty of for profit podcasters & writers out there that make money and honest living with small paypal subscriptions (before patreon was even a thing), plus small one-time donors and the like.
Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1.
They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources.
So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.
Maybe some non profit news organizations are objective?
I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA.
Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.
Thanks for this. Nice to see it at the top of the conversation. Two words: Operation Mockingbird. The big news outlets get daily intelligence briefs. This isn't even controversial. But the real problem within that setting is self-censorship. You don't get the job unless you've proven than you know what not to say. Many credible books on that topic to read.
Seymour Hersh is the Journalist/Investigative Reporter and he does not mess around.
Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger outlets would not publish it without source information etc and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking to his word of "Not revealing sources".
That's appeal to authority. And it's a good hypothesis, we shouldn't discount it, but ... also not take it as gospel.
It's pretty clear that to get to the bottom of this we either need some leak or enough politicians in Congress who take this seriously, and get people to testify under oath. (Of course it'd be a good start to hold accountable those who lie to Congress, like Keith Alexander and James Clapper.)
> There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for __millennia__, and how exactly this works.
Fixed it. There are historical evidence that this has gone on in some form or fashion in ancient empires (e.g., Roman, Egyptian, Chinese), be it written or the town crier.
There have always been people who knew this was going on, spoke up, but were considered crackpot, conspiracy theorist, or simply beheaded.
Saying "this has always happened" loses what's interesting and relevant about the mass media tranformations that began around the early 20th century and now dominant our media culture (see Manufacturing Consent).
I think it's interesting that this is a highly upvoted comment considering it leans on sociology as an academic study as a source of truth for its claim. The social sciences have long been harangued by HN for not being "real science", but I've seen exceptionally little pushback to the claim above. Why is this?
[To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of what forces influence media that influence people. I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.]
> I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.
HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either.
The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.
Here's the thing though, the top level comment isn't citing any sources, isn't giving studies that can be criticized on its merits to determine if it's a correct conclusion, particularly if you yourself have explicitly said "Most conclusions may be wrong". There's no reason for you to upvote this if you believe the above poster is most likely relying on a false authority.
Nothing he says relies on sociology. It's just a random interesting anecdote from his background. He's not appealing to the studies or any authority, but simply rejoicing in the fact that society at large is coming around to a conclusion that's been somewhat evident for him to years. And society's not coming around because of some study or whatever, but because of lived experience.
At least to me, it seems people push back on sociology claims that focus on individuals or member groups, not so much on organizations like companies. Part of this I believe is due to the personal nature. Part is because it can be seen as stereotyping, or has poor study design.
This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.
Once people acept media bias the next jump they make that this is a partisan issue. It's easy to understand why, particularly now when there are major news outlets who deliberately lie.
But the problem is way more insidious and pervasive than performative partisan issues, which are generally manufactured culture wars. Those issues serve two purposes:
1. To make people angry and keep them angry. Angry people are "engaged"; and
2. To sow division and prevent class solidarity.
One of the most wildly successful examples of propaganda is the idea of the middle class. This serves to demonize the so-called "lower classes", typically labeling them as lazy, criminal, morally bankrupt and drains on the state.
There are only two classes: labor and capital owners.
Yet propaganda has been so successful that labor will defend the interests of billionaires to the detriment of their own interests. The number of people who would die on the hill of opposing Musk and Bezos paying slightly more taxes is depressing.
Media is a key tool in this endeavour. It's why you see wall-to-wall coverage of the China balloon (which literally does not matter at all) and a virtual media blackout of the environmental catastrophe and massive corporate failings that underpin the East Palestine train derailment.
Media represents and advocates for corporate interests and systemic interests.
What a naïveté. Independent journalists are even more beholden to their audiences, if they start talking up something those audiences don’t like, their incomes dwindle. I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence.
> I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence
Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.
Not those that value truth. They are pandering to contrarians and people who need the world to make sense and have order hence all the nefarious plots behind everything.
Do you mean when he apologized for adamantly saying that Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and it was only 'dishonest types' that were pushing the narrative that Russia was going to invade? I mean, when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong in such a biased (an anti-discourse) way I kinda stop following anything old boy says so you are going to have to give me more details about what specific walk back of his you are referring to?
> when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong
I see. So, when he retracts and apologizes for a mistake, he can't be listened to anymore. If he doesn't retract a mistake, he's one of the Bad Guy independent media who never corrects a mistake. The requirement then is to be 100% right about every take in his career.
I wonder how that standard holds up to the corporate media who, just as a single example, told everyone the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian op, likely changing the result of our Presidential election, whereas Hunter years later admits the story was real and the laptop was his?
> nefarious plots behind everything
The "nefarious plot behind everything" is that our government is corrupt. Just like most governments around the world, and just as has been largely the case within empires for millennia. To frame government corruption as a wild conspiracy theory requires ignorance to much of human history.
Taibbi admitted he was wrong on Ukraine because there's no other way to spin it, he was out of options. He's still giving his new and largely right wing audience what it wants:
"Elon isn't right wing, give me one example of that"
> So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through."
But most sociologists are totally in on the game. It used to be that the mainstream media narrative was opposite of what the sociologists preferred people to believe, and at the time you had academics talk about Manufactured Consent, and False Consciousness etc. These days, the press is more aligned with academics, so they prefer to keep it shush.
Here is an explicit example, published just a few weeks ago:
> The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents
From the abstract:
> Low-income Black fathers have been portrayed in the media and in research as uninvolved and disengaged from their children. The current study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 2578) to examine adolescents’ reports of relationships and interaction with their biological fathers. The results showed there were no significant differences among Black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, and Other fathers for adolescents’ perceptions of closeness or interaction with fathers.
Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.
The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.
Imagine reading a paper which “debunks” a “myth” of lack of involvement of women in corporate boards or C-level position, which simply excludes companies that have zero women on boards or as C-level officers from consideration. It would be hard to view it as anything other than deliberate deception. This sort of ignoring of obvious factors is, however, extremely common in published sociology research, and the academic community is extremely good at pretending to not notice deliberately lousy scholarship, when it aligns well with political opinions of 90% sociologists, and attacks anyone who tries to bring attention to it.
> Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.
There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study.
> The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.
Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this.
> But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists
If Matt Taibi get Keshloggied it would not amaze me if his former colleagues bury the story or even spin it as a good thing. I don't predict he will actually get killed but ask yourself, would you be surprised if he was or does a part of you half expect it at this point?
He certainly won't be working a corporate gig anytime soon. Where will his income come from in the future? Nevermind what is he going to do to make ends meet, how will he afford going places to interview people and perform research? You can't realistically be a journalist sitting around at home in your underwear (unless you work for the NYT writing provoking social criticisms about something you just watched on Netflix).
And this is a very famous award winning guy with published books to his name from a time when people still used to read and pay for books. What is going to enable more people like this going forward? Seems like a pretty stressful life actually.
The culture war is also a media project of the powerful and journalists who are dedicated to fighting it are serving their interests as much as anyone is. He'll be fine.
There is no payoff, except for the duty of the profession.
This is unfortunately the one thing that society seems to be lacking dramatically these days. From policemen that don't rush in to rescue children in danger of being murdered by psychos, to administrators that feel that doctors should get time off to "reflect" on X person getting killed by a cop (cancer doesn't take days off... grandma's back pain doesn't take the day off). Duty is severely lacking across all layers of society.
The tone from the top seems to be encouraging this. Now, "its ok to be soft" instead of "power through, people depend on you"
We need more Taibbis and Intercepts, willing to do their duty.
Taibbi is making a great living by being a reactionary on podcasts and fringe outlets. Journalists are suckers. He hasn't done "journalism" in forever. Editorialism is where it's at.
Taibbi is publishing a ton on the links between government agencies and Twitter right now, by doing the work of poring through thousands of emails. He's been doing it for months.
His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.
Kinda seems like he’s more doing PR for musk than journalism. He’s posting stories aligning with musk’s interests on musk’s platform using data supplied by musk.
I watched a debate panel with several journalists who were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had full access to everything because an engineer sat in the room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to believe that the database couldn’t have possibly been pre filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the journalist literally claimed that they couldn’t have possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase myocarditis that quickly.
I know we’re in tech and have a closer understanding of technology than experts in other fields but it was kind of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the data they were being shown could be manipulated and I feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their credibility.
He is posting emails and communications that have literally nothing to do with Musk. They are comms between people who used to work at Twitter and politicians. How is that doing PR for Musk? I don't understand.
Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.
You are right though that there is a certain level of trust here in Taibbi's reporting and fact checking.
Musk wants to paint himself as the savior of free speech and pet of that is by casting Twitter 1.0 as some sort of nefarious agents of the government who were trying to control all communication. The Twitter files are trying to reach the same narrative conclusion.
I’ve also read the Twitter files and the stated summaries on the tweets routinely didn’t match the linked evidence, or stretched it to the weakest but still technically possible conclusion.
> Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.
While calling this out as a conspiracy is kinda laughable given the content of the Twitter files, I want to make it more clear that I was appalled by the journalists being certain that the data couldn’t have been manipulated and then giving examples of how it would be impossible that were actually relatively trivial to implement. They also claimed they had access to “all” the data when that was patently not true. They had access to a gate kept version of the data which they could not verify, and I think that’s an important point given that one of the major critiques they have about Twitter 1.0 and the government is a lack of transparency. I also found this suspect when Musk and the journalists involved like Taibbi claimed they were going to show “everything” and instead of a database dump they keep linking excerpts of documents. Maybe they’ve finally done a database dump but after the first 5 or 6 Twitter threads where it was all cherry-picked I stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt
He's publishing it because it is more of the same reactionary crap that he's getting rich off of. The difference between him and an actual journalist is that a journalist would wait until they were done with the investigation to write a story. He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his existence.
I guarantee, if he wasn't getting fluffed by Elon sycophants on Twitter he would back to Covid conspiracy theories or whatever else get the attention of rubes these days.
Reactionary is a term commonly used by communists to described enemies of a revolution, interesting choice of language.
I understand that you feel he is getting rich but do you have knowledge of his personal finances to make this assertion? Or even some sort of a basis for this intuition you can point people towards? Please enlighten me with some napkin math.
Meanwhile, the slacks and emails he posted are certainly real.
> He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his existence.
As opposed to journalists who don't need eyeballs to justify their existence?
Ah, going with the attack on character of the commenter angle and the 'words they choose to use'. Wow, this discussion is definitely not HK worthy. And this is coming from me a low quality kinda shit poster.
How does one make a great living by being a guest on free podcasts? And which fringe outlets are we talking about? Joe Rogan? He has more viewers than CNN.
"Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"
How most of the mainstream media, in the US at least, nauseatingly wrote about the WMD theory which was the main stated reason for the US to go to 2003 Iraq war. That region is still reeling with consequences of that war and not to speak about trillions of $$ spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and nuclear contamination and so on and on.
It's really hard to blame the media for the Iraq war, the Bush II administration wanted to go to war, particularly in Iraq and were happy to beat the drums as loud as necessary to get the public's backing. Who can ever forget Powell lying in front of Congress, but that what was necessary to seal the deal and the media was more than happy to report what they learned.
It was the media's fault but not Bush and Cheney's? I don't remember where I got the information that led me to join the largest antiwar protests in history in 2003 but a lot of us knew Bush was lying because of the media.
I didn't say it was media's fault alone, but their share of responsibility is a large one. How else would the Bush administration have gained the support of the public? By transmitting their falsehoods through popular private media corporations such as CNN. And the media were all too happy to lap up the narrative fed by the administration without bothering to investigate deeper.
Not investigating deeper is different than outright lying for propaganda. "The President Said X" is newsworthy though maybe lazy reporting. If X is a lie it's on the president.
This is hilarious because all reputable media won't even report on most of the progress because they can't independently verify the information given out by the parties at war. Thus we get this big lack of actual news about the war which can't be filled by people on Twitter and Reddit translating from Telegram and random videos.
I don't know where you heard that. The media keeps reporting that Russia is losing the war, or may be losing it,* but that it is likely to drag on for a long time. No one that I have heard from since the first weeks of the war has ever said or implied that it was about to end.
* As Russia changes its aims, the definition of "winning" changes. This is a separate way Russia can win: declare victory with whatever territory you have seized and call for peace negotiations.
Whoa now, remember we’re not just talking a mountain of examples, but “literal” mountains of sociological studies. You should try asking for longitude, latitude and elevation!
Do you think syndication of at least Fox, CBS, and ABC stops and starts with the specific clips that were gathered for this video clip? There are 7,000 stations... are you saying the fact that VH1 isn't saying this particular message means, "not all media..."
What a disingenuous argument. Proceed, I won't stop you.
> it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge
So that makes me wonder how this is getting out. Is it a news organization such as an opposing organization, or outspoken journalists? Is it democratized news reporting via forums and social media?
In news there's journalism and there's reporting. This story is reporting, it doesn't use many adjectives and doesn't have much of a point beyond the statistics represented. It allows people to form their own opinions based on their own experiences around the details of this story.
Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.
Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"
> Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.
Even your definition of 'reporting' can be (and is) easily abused to play to narratives, by the simple and necessary act of determining what is "newsworthy". Reporters will go by their biases and beliefs on deciding e.g. which homicides are "random" and not worth reporting, vs. which are indicative of systemic issues in society, and so require national attention.
Well let's steelman journalism a bit; journalism provides context.
Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this morning."
Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government is looking to roll back more regulations, which are expected to increase fatality rates by 6%."
>Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%.
See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your premise which proves with any certainty that the increased speed limits are the cause of the change in accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it as part of the basic record of events we call "news", rather than as part of the opinion discourse.
This was even a good faith example. If you were trying to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.
If you were going to take this in bad faith, I'm surprised that you considered "3 people died in car accident this morning" to be reporting. If you wanted to be pedantic about it, stick only to the facts, and avoid speculation/opinion, it'd have to be written like so:
"A person who our reporter spoke with who went by the name of Bob Dylan and claimed to be the coroner of James County, said that three individuals passed away recently, and he said he believes that they died due injuries similar to those involved in car accidents. Our reporter also asked the James County Sherriff's Department to corroborate, and a person who claimed to be the spokesperson for the James County Sherriff's department said that there were three individuals in a car accident last night, and they were taken to the hospital."
Anyways, I wasn't trying to write a rigorous example for each, I assumed that the reader could fill in the detailed. I just aimed to give the gist of what it should look like. You'd talk to experts, cite papers, etc.
I think you're wrong here. The idea that a news article should be a "basic record of events" is ridiculous. In this toy example, the most we could quibble with is the words "Due to" and those may be appropriate if there is a reasonable amount of evidence referred to somewhere in the article which suggests an association. In fact, I believe in the case of traffic accidents such a link is sufficiently well documented that the casually refer to it isn't a great sin.
I think this idea that we need to somehow strip all news of even the vaguest hint of a perspective is actually pretty condescending to the average news reader, imagining that they are so stupid and credulous that merely seeing a bit of bias is going to immediately warp their brains.
"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents are up 12% since last year when city council rejected the proposed budget increase for more snowplows and ice control to meet the city's growing transportation needs."
"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents overall have jumped 12% since AG John Smith added driving-without-a-license to the city's informal do-not-prosecute list."
In our toy example, all of these could be simultaneously true, and the data given does not support one cause over the other. Note that the "due not" need not be present, the intended implication is still clear. (For bonus points, read these examples again, imagining that overall driving increased by about 12% due to people working from home less.)
Sure, there are a million consistent imaginary stories. My point is that _if_ a journalist has a reasonable sense that the speed limit regulations are related to the article in question or that the reader may want to know about them, then they should mention them. Indeed, all these other imaginary scenarios should also be mentioned if there is a reasonable case they may be involved in the increased rate of accidents.
The idea that the journalist should present only the directly related "bare facts" is so silly that I can't even take the suggestion as coming from a place of good faith.
If, in your own words, there's a million consistent imaginary stories, which one gets the special designation of "reasonable"? If there are multiple possible stories that are all plausible explanations of the same data, then how is picking just your favorite one and reporting it adding value?
That isn't what a reporter should do, though. They should report on the news and related information, not just their favorite narrative. I'm not defending shitty reporting, just pointing out that the "bare facts" approach is ridiculous.
Knowing stuff is hard, reporting on stuff is hard, understanding what is read is hard. The solution to these problems is not, nor could it be, restricting one's attention to the "bare facts." Indeed, these are often quite hard to identify and agree upon. We should expect and cultivate a little sophistication in ourselves and our fellow citizens.
For this to work properly, the journalists would have to be experts in the respective field, or would at the very least have to possess enough of an understanding to make these judgements. But reality has become far too complex for that, plus these articles are being written under severe time constraints. Ultimately, what will happen is the journalist using their personal or the editorial biases of the publication to create a narrative consistent with their world view. Whether or not that narrative has any basis in reality is not really their concern.
The question when becomes whether there is any value in publishing these most likely faulty narratives compared to simply reporting the facts. I would argue that there is actually negative value in the former, because the audience ends up less informed than if they had never consumed that piece of media.
> the journalists would have to be experts in the respective field, or would at the very least have to possess enough of an understanding to make these judgements.
This is why journalists will often attribute cause and effect interpretation of facts to expert sources.
Hmm, I like the thrust of your point, here, and I do think that when people think critically about the news, they aren't "stupid and credulous".
But Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that educated, informed readers readily fall victim to, so it's clear that the media seems to have some kind of privilege of credulity.
I wonder if it's really an effect of people reading media primarily for entertainment - isn't there some old saying about "people who read the Times are less I formed than people who read nothing at all?"
In your steelmanned journalist example I think the discerning reader would be saying, "Is the agency themselves saying more fatalities are expected, is it the opposition, etc" The choice to omit is part of the narrative, because if people pick up that you're casually and selectively quoting opposition but making it sound pre-determined and official then they start viewing you as a folk singer.
Ah, yes. I remember getting the annual morning news paper every April 1st.
Seriously though, within a city, they had morning and evening editions (12 hour lag) hundreds of years ago. For national stories, the lag was more like a week, then dropped to 12 hours when the telegraph was invented. Also, back then, there were orders of magnitude more newspapers (multiple in each big city, and at least one in small towns), so most modern censorship techniques simply would not work. Yeah, Elon Musk would have owned a paper, but (by law) only one, and multiple other wealthy tech people would own papers in the same market.
It's not so much that as 'everything he says is a confession'...He's pointing out fake news, because he's one of the biggest sources. He can't be wrong if he's to blame.
The actual news on Fox News, i.e. not Tucker and the rest of the talk shows, is not fake news, even remotely. Absolutely has a conservative bias, but not to the extent it would qualify as fake news. It's even listed on Wikipedia a reliable source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Wikipedia reliable sources list is basically implicit whitelist, and there is implicit blacklist, news sources from countries with hundreds of millions of people banned from Wikipedia. All this is contradicting its core content policies. Reliable sources based solely on being Western, such as being located in the Western world, having a Western worldview, being owned by Western entities, or aligning with Western national interests or security policies.
Fox News is the clearest example of mainstream propaganda that I've ever seen. I take a pass through there periodically just to see what the aren't covering. Which isn't to say places like CNN don't sometimes pull that same stunt, but it's much more prevalent on Fox News -- they'll completely omit even really big stories that aren't what they think their audience wants to see.
Ground News is a great site to help you understand which networks are covering which stories and ignoring others. It's honestly eye opening the number of big stories omitted by the other large non-Fox networks.
When the shows that draw the most eyeballs and are aired at the times most people are watching news at all, the morning shows and prime time, are almost entirely made up of half-truths and outright lies, I think it's fair to say Fox is an unreliable source.
Fox and Friends and Tucker Carlson are lying to viewers every day.
There's no way to distinguish between the fake news Fox broadcasts and the non-fake news. It's not like Fox puts a disclaimer up on the screen saying which stories are for entertainment purposes only.
Actually, he did call Fox News fake news at one point, although yes it was due to them running a story about polls that were unflattering to him.
However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.
He was his own anonymous source to news media. Though I don't know whether the Enquirer should count as news media, per se. Given news was not its focus.
> However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.
That doesn't make him, or any other source of information, more trustworthy than the corporate news media.
Nowadays "fake news" is just a derogatory term against the news media in general, but the term used to mean something. If you remember, back to the 2016 election, there were literal fake online newspapers that sprang up and published essentially election clickbait. These sites had news-y sounding names, real-looking content, and were designed to look surface-level like legitimate news sites, until you dug a little deeper and looked around. People started calling these sites out as "fake news" but Trump quickly adopted the term, and nullified it by using it as a simple insult against actual mainstream news sites. But it originally meant "actual phony news sites".
> The term “fake news” became mainstream during the US election campaign, when hundreds of websites that published falsified or heavily biased stories sprung up to capitalise on Facebook advertising revenue.[1]
> Mr Trump and his supporters then adopted the term to describe media coverage critical of the President, especially that of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.
The problem is that the popular, "scandalized" understanding of "the media lie!!" doesn't have the nuance of sociological and political theories.
The sociologist notes will note that the media serves the interests of the powerful while still reporting some number of facts. The most extreme of the scandalized public will say "the media lies - they say X so Y must be true and X must be a plot". This produces a whole of truly bizarre thinking (often on the right but no doubt on the left as well).
That’s just cynical blah blah that ignores the pretty obvious cause.
It’s pretty easy why trust in media has eroded in my lifetime (I’m a 40 something). We deregulated and allowed for consolidation of ownership of print, broadcast and eventually online media.
That changed the dynamic. People will always correctly call out right wing talk radio as an example but the problems with media are more subtle as well. Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. If you were around in the 90s, you’ll remember how the OJ Simpson drama was a transformational event - which would not have happened in 1982. Serious journalism gave way to circus.
Our wiser predecessors learned in the 1920s and 1930s of the danger of mass media. Right wing nutcases like Father Coughlin, demagogues like Huey Long, America First, and more extreme left wing labor activists bear a strong resemblance to the characters in modern media.
> Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment.
One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.
The issue, to me at least, is what people are choosing to trust/believe instead. I find they're not being critical and looking at multiple sources, they're just instead putting their faith in other untrustworthy groups (see: Alex Jones).
Objectivity is easy to access if you're not totally censored. Propaganda works by concealing alternative opinions - once you know the trick, it's easy to hack, even a weak effort can work.
Sounds weird, but one of the easiest paths to objectivity is not to seek objective sources. One can look at multiple sources with obvious opposing spins to form your own understanding. Even the sources labeled as most objective tend to miss the nuance behind the main few arguments.
I gave up on the dream of "objective news" when I was about 18.
I had been taught that The Times was the most objective news organ here; it did carry an aura and style that seemed objective. I realized that what the objective "facts" are turns out to depend on your point-of-view, and it's harder to know what that point-of-view is if the organ is pretending to be "objective".
Ever since, I've preferred to get my news from sources that wear their bias on their sleeve.
We've just gotten to the point where views are not cross pollinated. Local news is not really local are much as it's controlled by a couple of companies with their own agenda so the same view is presented over and over and over again. In addition they've convinced the populace that the other side is evil so people have become tribal and only watch "their news" and that just feeds the loop. They don't have to conceal anything, it can be right there in front of them and it won't matter because they won't believe it because their tribe tells them it's a lie.
The 'powers that be' bias is a bit different and takes mant forms.
Aka institutional powers (aka Dem/GOP), individual institutional powers (aka stop a story from embarrassing a colleague Executive), Natoinal bias (aka stories during wartime are not quite the same), 'Civil/Public' bias (aka stories about vaccines during a pandemic), Corporate Institutions (aka advertisers, don't want to upset them).
Funny enought those tend not to be the one's we get the most in a huff for, rather, we fixate more in the ideological narrative stuff because it's more visible.
You don't really see the 'national bias' at all unless you're outside of the country. You don't see the 'corporate bias' bedcause it tends to be displayed in terms of 'stories that don't exist'.
Using this thread to yet again pound the drum of local news. I don't work in media; I've just found my local newspaper subscription to be extremely valuable.
Your local news organizations will be biased in some ways, yes, but it's easier to keep track of the writers who lean one way or another (smaller journalist teams). Since they're regional they can't skew too far on either end of the political spectrum or they'll anger the residents and lose subscribers. Their accountability is higher, because people in the community generally know what's going on around them and will call the bluff in op-eds or the paper's social media group. And, of course, the reporting is actually relevant to you! They don't need to rage-bait you for clicks because most of the reporting has tangible bearing on your life.
Subscribing to my local paper has kept me both informed and grounded, so I'm very nervous about the prospect of the medium being abandoned for declining profitability. I've yet to find a more valuable source of news.
My local newspaper is owned by USAToday and their site is some kind of white-labeled USAToday wordpress template that's shared by a bunch of other formerly-independent local newspapers which are apparently now part of the USAToday portfolio.
I don't have any interest in supporting USAToday, so I will never make it past my fifth article of the week.
Gannett is the parent company; they own USA Today and dozens of local papers. I worked at a Gannett paper for a few years, at the time, we had a corporate-managed templating system but were able to make fairly significant modifications to it. That eventually transitioned to the one-size-fits-all approach you see today.
Same's happening to the physical product; mostly a thin wrapper around state/national news from Gannett corporate.
Well that's upsetting. My local paper has been owned by Advance Publications since the 40s, but it doesn't seem to suffer the same quality issues. It's even won several major awards, both for individual journalism and for the publication as a whole :)
I almost wish they would pick up a template website though, because theirs is super buggy (I'd likely get the print version anyway).
I agree with the sentiment, but local papers are dying. My hometown paper is still locally owned, but I suspect it will be bought up by Gannett or some other national outlet soon. As it is, the paper is ~90% AP Wire stories anyway.
I can remember seeing Walter Cronkite on a PBS panel discussion warning America that this would be the end result of the deregulation of media ownership.
If a small number of people are allowed to own the vast majority of media outlets, those media outlets are no longer going to represent the interests of the public at large.
Back when all television/radio was broadcast over the air, there used to be this quaint concept of broadcasters having to prove that they serve "the public interest" to receive and retain an FCC license to use the public airwaves.
Of course the news has always been partisan. They were just honest about it in the past. Look how many newspapers have Democrat or some variation of Republican in their masthead. The real scandal is the recent fiction that journalists are unbiased.
> Stations that did run an editorial with a given partisan viewpoint were even required, by law, to allow an opposing view to be aired in response.
Sure, but the Overton window was quite slim. Many things were simply never discussed. Homosexuality, interracial romance, adultery of politicians, as just a few examples.
The "alternative perspective" gave the illusion of a full airing of views, but it simply wasn't so.
Early SNL (1970s) turned this into a bit on the news segment, with Chevy Chase introducing someone to respond to some (non-existent) editorial of theirs from a past program, to provide alternative viewpoints, as was their journalistic duty (which respondent invariably had mis-heard some word and so was responding, passionately, to entirely the wrong thing—that was the joke)
the public interest is dead, look at the sentiment here on HN. everyone has taken red pills from either Peter Thiel, Joe Rogan, or some influencer at the listener's socio-economic level, who propagandizes them about the Individual and how you cant trust anyone but other bros who also dont trust anyone.
Edward L. Bernays published his book "Propaganda" in 1928. Even that only came after his earlier works in on a similar theme in the early 20s.
I clearly remember questioning my father at the breakfast table (where newspapers were read) about the veracity of some story I barely grasped at age 5. He explained to me that not everything you read in the papers was true, and some of it was made up from whole cloth. My 5 year-old-self was stunned, why would someone go to the effort of producing a newspaper only to make up what was in it? What I'm amazed at now is that only about half of an educated, first-world nation have figured this out.
“[George] Creel urged [Woodrow] Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate "not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'"”
I am not in journalism per say however as I've spent a decade in advertising I work with media companies a lot.
Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways. Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional to pull something like that off even if they wanted to.
There are however many internal and external pressures on organizations that shape narratives in a specific ways and journalists are human beings (they're biased based on their own experiences) so reporting always has a slant. That is worthy of critique and is healthy.
The debate on media generally has jumped the shark. IMHO it's not the answer that many folks (that tend to be conservative) want to hear, but meaningful diversity of opinion and experience would help balance this out. You want news with a working class, middle America viewpoint? Then you need to help some % of those people get into media. (This is just one such example of course).
"Global cabal" might be a stretch, but it is a fact that there are large-scale government projects underway to deceive, mislead, and control the narrative via journalism.
I recently came across an amusing connection [1] to Bernstein's piece and its highlighting of Joseph Alsop. The author of the following is Bernard Fall, who certainly is otherwise pro-West and anti-communist, later KIA while on patrol with American troops in Vietnam.
> [...] the American press gave a completely distorted picture of what happened in Laos in the summer of 1950, with the Washington Post and the New York Times being among the worst offenders. [...]
> Press dispatches bore such news as "Viet-Minh troops advanced to within 13 miles of Samneus city" (UPI), and even the staid British agency Reuters headlined on September 3 that "the Royal Laotian Army was today preparing to defend the capital of Vientiane"; while on September 5, an editorial of the Washington Post, citing the "splendid examples of alert on-the-spot reporting" of its columnist Joseph Alsop spoke of "full-scale, artillery-backed invasion from Communist North Viet-Nam." All this was just so much nonsense. [...]
> Two weeks later, the letdown began. Even the New York Times report in Laos, who, until then, had swallowed whole every press release circulating in Vientiane, noted on September 13 that "briefings have noticeably played down the activities of North Viet-Nam in the conflict. This led some observers to believe that Laotian political tacticians were creating a background that would soften the blow if the [United Nations] observer report on intervention by North Viet-Nam was negative." Indeed, the Security Council report of November 5, 1959, did fail to substantiate the theory of a Communist outside invasion of Laos. [...]
> There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that certainly North Viet-Nam and perhaps even Red China, gave military and political support to the Laotian rebellion. But their aid was in no way as overt as originally suggested in the alarming reports spread around the world by American press media, some of which went so far in their affirmations as to accuse almost anyone who doubted their stories as being either a blind fool or "soft" on Communism. Joseph Alsop's "Open Letter" to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life (both of which refused to be stampeded by their less hard-headed colleagues) is a prime example of this attitude. [...]
> While the British and the French--whose sources of information in Laos already had proved more reliable the year before--awaited more hard facts to go on, Washington took up the cudgels in full, both officially and in the press. In a somber column, Mr. Joseph Alsop spoke of the "yawning drain" which Laos was likely to be engulfed in; compared the 1954 Geneva settlement to the Munich sell-out of 1938; and called our Canadian allies who had staunchly defended the Western viewpoint in the international cease-fire commission (the other members being India and Poland), "approximately neutral."
This was written in 1964, so over a decade before Bernstein's expose.
Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways.
Agreed, the problem is that there is also palpable, verifiable distortion of facts and "imposition of narrative" within a substantial portion of mainstream and "alternative" news.
We face the problem that many people can't go from "journalism is objective" to "journalism is a mixture of multiple agenda-serving narratives mixed with facts that still isn't a 'grand conspiracy'". Moreover, a substantial portion of media one step from the mainstream really like the "grand conspiracy" narrative because it binds people to them as "truthers".
Why do you say diversity of opinion and experience are not the answer conservative folks want to hear? It strikes me as strange, given that the vast majority of media outlets in the US are left-leaning.
Optimistic news - elevated degree of skepticism of any 'produced information' is fully justified, seeing as news organisations are driven certainly by commercial agenda, and frequently also by political agenda which they are - as a rule - far from being transparent with. We need citizen and independent journalism, and better yet, trust in our own direct lived experience, to balance out of 'information diet'
My lived experience is I sit safely in my suburban home with my children, comfortably collecting a salary to argue points of planning for software development. I work from home and very rarely leave the house. I am unwilling to go down to the local protests or whatever to “see what’s up” because I’m essentially willing to accept zero risk to my person while my children are growing up.
I need accurate news to know what’s going on in the wider world because my day to day is so insular, and I’d hazard I’m not an anomaly here. It’s annoying because I feel like half of my friends are crazy but I’m not sure which half it is. My wife is glitching out and believes all sorts of crazy stuff but heck, maybe it’s true. Maybe the world has always been like this, and I’m just old enough to realize that the news media is bullshit. But it just felt like the older journalists that have retired now were less desperately and smugly trying to convince me that they’re correct than the ones working now. I wish I felt like I could trust literally anyone beyond my immediate family.
This is pretty much the end result of capitalism - the atomization of the individual and alienation of workers from one another. All interactions and interpersonal relations are now mediated through our relations to the means of production and the capital markets.
There at least used to be a remaining vestigial substructure to society in things like churches and civic organizations. As we've slowly grown into a society of unbelievers, the churches have splintered into myriad heterodox sects, and we've supplanted much civic engagement with work and internet use, this substructure is failing.
Chapo Trap House touches on this frequently, but their recent episode called Arrival (ep 706) had a pretty poignant example. It was commentary on a series of NY Post and Times articles about the supposed drastic increase in crime, and how people, especially those who live in the burbs, are starkly disconnected from the reality of the world. And specifically because of some of these factors I outlined above.
I have slowly formed a trusted circle of programmers on Discord of various political stripes that are able to keep each other somewhat in check and connected to reality WRT the happenings in the world over the past 7 years or so. It has definitely helped keep me grounded in the past few years of covid and suburbia driven isolation and a drastic increase in media consumption.
Yes, there are no liars in socialism. And there certainly isn't any state boots on your neck. Everyone gets a nice car, good friends, and honest state propaganda, comrade.
Capitalism and socialism are extremely broad descriptors of essentially who owns the means of production and to whom does surplus value flow. Neither necessitates a state nor do they prescribe anarchy.
I am not weighing in on the article or any commentary with this statement…You don’t sound healthy and might want to do a little self evaluation. Never leaving the house, not trusting anyone, thinking your wife is glitching, all sound outside the norm, even if what you are observing is true. You should still be able to do basic risk analysis and leave the house.
Maybe I was being a little dramatic and hyperbolic for effect.
I don’t mean I never leave the house. I go to concerts and the zoo with my kids and whatever. I went on vacation across the country the other day. None of those things are helping me discern what’s going on in the world, unless “Disneyworld is a fun place” and “the ocean is a nice place to laze around” count as my lived experience.
Because, to first approximation, this is true. Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda. I'm not sure why Americans believe that objectivity in news reporting is even possible. Other countries don't seem to have as much of an issue with this, since you typically have news sources that are either owned directly by the government or are published by political parties.
There's news podcast I listen to ("Raport about state of the world" - Polish only sadly), and host always tries to advocate for both sides when asking questions and often there are guests from the both sides, that present their point in calm, collected manner.
Then there's our state TV, which will tell you that EU is devil, opposition is devil, basically everyone is devil apart from ruling party, which is presented as (quote) "National Champions".
We must expect and educate next generation to expect truth-seeking in journalism, because otherwise we have no future.
I don't speak Polish so I may be making unwarranted assumptions here, but "showing both sides" isn't always so great either. It's better than the opinionated state news you describe, but "both sides" doing their little talk is the exact reason climate change deniers have so much fuel.
Sometimes, something just isn't true and the other side doesn't get equal attention to defend their points. You can calmy explain how lizard people inside hollow earth run Hollywood to turn our children into gay frogs, but these people shouldn't get any air time, not even to be made fun of.
Thing is the lizard-people theory is ridiculous at its face and it could be argued that giving someone like that airtime would harm the lizard-people conspiracy. It's the more mainstream (but still niche) beliefs that are vulnerable in this one-on-one environment, like a debate on man's effect on climate change. There's a pretty general consensus that we are contributing to the change of our planet's climate, but hosting a "both sides" debate on something like this makes it seem like it's an open question. And a motivated bad actor who wanted to shift the needle has many tools at their disposal that an honest person doesn't - lying, misleading, misrepresenting research, or simply pulling the "just asking questions, do your own research!" line.
Sorry to be clear we're both in agreement, I just could see a both-sides-er chiming in that actually a debate on lizard-people would be a bloodbath and therefore everything actually should be presented this way, and wanted to added another issue.
Additionally for another real-world example with more immediate consequences we can look at the whole "vaccines causing autism" issue - something that was completely fabricated by a now-disgraced ex-doctor called Andrew Wakefield, but which gained traction due to being presented to the public as if we just don't know for sure (when we did, and his "research" was utterly eviscerated). Wakefield was basically laughed out of the medical profession, but due to the legwork the media did he's managed to establish himself over in the USA and his work effectively kick-started the modern-day anti-vaxx movement.
> and it could be argued that giving someone like that airtime would harm the lizard-people conspiracy. It's the more mainstream (but still niche) be
Not necessarily. The thing about arguments is that it’s like businesses. What determines your success isn’t if you have the best product. It’s that you have the best business. Marketing , connections , etc. The best product , and likewise the best argument, doesn’t necessarily win on merit alone. You just have to make it look good enough for it to be viable , even if the idea isn’t viable at all.
I’m not saying that I could get on TV and argue about lizard-people. But there certainly is someone who could and that’s enough.
Yeah it's a good point, if you have someone totally inexperienced up against someone who knows the tricks (some of which I mentioned) you could see some odd results. I feel like there are a few issues which are gonna be a really tough sell, and the whole "the royal family are lizards" is one of them. David Icke has spent much of the last couple of decades on that and is still regarded as a kook.
That's right and you need some sort of boundary of what are you willing to discuss. Eg. for the guy I mentioned it's very clearly justifying Russian invasion, but then he's open about it.
Of course it sometimes creates other problems. In the end I think root problem is almost complete lack of responsibility for lying to wide public(not even legal responsibility, but just social). As climate change denier you're free to repeat the same disproven BS over and over, without no evidence and nothing happens.
Interpreting "objective" to mean "fairly representing both sides" is a large part of what got american media so fucked in the first place.
If one side says cook at home as much as possible for your family to be healthy, and the other side says go down to the ditch and drink the pond scum, what are you doing by representing both sides there? One of the important duties of journalism is making editorial decisions that drinking pond scum isn't a balanced opposition to cooking dinner.
Journalist practice for decades has been going incredibly far out of its way to find an alternative "side" for any perspective that's presented. They then do a lot of work for them making it seem as reasonable and mainstream as possible.
This is exactly how you get fringe reactionary political views elevated to the level of national concern.
I like google news because I can see both right and left takes on stories, and which stories are only covered by one side. It also has international coverage, which is nice for instance where Israeli media had by far the most accurate reporting on the nature of Covid-19.
I use media to find out what America believes, and where it is headed. Your list of sources is going to leave you surprised fairly often. My goal is to not be surprised.
Beware "people on the ground". They are a terrible source of fact checked verifiable info.
Personal opinion is not news. It's merely one person's unfiltered view of the world. And because it's uncurated by a trustworthy filter, it's impossible to know whether it's worth your attention, much less serious consideration.
The same strategy holds: one never looks at a single data point as "truth".
Once again, even in a Reddit thread, the goal is to triangulate. This may include, for example, seeking out info in other sub-Reddits (moderator bias), seeking more niche sub-Reddits, etc.
Where two liars are speaking, you cannot split the difference and synthesize truth. I also like to check with various sources with differing agendas. However, I view this as a way to stay abreast of the the various agendas.
This is still very much an issue in many countries with government owned "nonprofit" media. Even in countries with low amount of corruption and high freedom of press.
>> Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda
Yes, but not really the issue... thats why there is an editing process. If an org has a proper editing process then a lot of that gets accounted for.
Most of the skewed stories come from organizations that don't employ trained editors, don't have a clear editorial workflow, don't have a corrections policy, and don't have fact-checkers.
I would argue that medium to large orgs like CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, Bloomberg, WSJ, FT, Guardian, USA Today, Texas Tribune, LA Times, SF Chronicle, New Yorker, Vox, NPR, Houston Chronicle all have these processes in play and are reliable.
(Yes, there are always stories with issues that get though out of thousands and thousands of otherwise solidly reported pieces. No system is perfect.)
> Yes, but not really the issue... thats why there is an editing process. If an org has a proper editing process then a lot of that gets accounted for.
Because... Editors couldn't possibly have motives that similarly contain bias, corruption, out other such common frailties of the human condition?
My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow works. You may not even be aware there is one. There is. It usually accounts for a lot of this. Not perfect, most systems are not - but it goes a long way to providing better reporting.
Think of it from a coding point of view.
Many people think that some developers write code directly on production, to their personal style, and thats it. That certainly happens.
Other teams have coding standards, style standards. Tabs versus Spaces. CamelCase for Class names but something different for variables?
The commit their code, and do a pull request and someone else reviews it. Edits are proposed or demanded. Code is reviewed again, then maybe it goes to production. Its been known for production code to have issues, but generally after going through a process most are prevented then if the developer was able to merge in code without review.
The larger orgs I mentioned have a involved editorial process for editing stories.
> My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow works.
I think you have it the other way around. The bias is institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias point of view out of the organization.
Look at how tightly political leanings are tied to news outlets.
If it were as easy and objective as you say we would get a lot more random pieces out of outlets instead of the rather rigid ideological publications we see in existence today.
Even Reddit subs and hacker news, which are much more random than news outlets, have pretty clear political leanings. With sufficient samples you can even break down the subgroups within the community.
News orgs don't have nearly the internal diversity required to possibly remove such bias. They are homogenous.
>> I think you have it the other way around. The bias is institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias point of view out of the organization.
That appears to be your opinion, likely that of many here. However thats not how it works.
I have worked in media for 20 years and have had the opportunity to see how many editors, newsrooms, and publications in general work. I have sat in editorial meetings where coverage and stories are discussed. I have been present when editors and writers go back and fourth on stories.
The problem is that for any given news org, you and most people do not know what it takes to publish a story at some of these places. Thats NOT a criticism of you - I think we'd all be better off if folks knew how it worked.
So, does the representation of said news room consist of a group that votes in line with the same distribution as the general population or does it lean significantly to a single side?
Money is on, it was homogeneous. Which means, You can't even see your own biases as other points of view were culled in creating and nurturing the org structure.
> Its been known for production code to have issues, but generally after going through a process most are prevented then if the developer was able to merge in code without review
One more point.
Companies never ever have evil anti user dark patterns enter production because of code reviews, do they?
These kind of broad questions about "the media" seem to be almost useless. It's like asking a Philadelphia Eagles fans if they have a positive opinion of most football teams.
I personally am quite certain that some news orgs are deliberately misleading and pushing agendas. Some are doing absolutely heroic work investigating and reporting. And there's a huge spectrum in between. Are "most" being dishonest? Idk how to even measure what "most" means.
Just because it's impossible to be 100% objective all the time doesn't mean it's impossible to be somewhat objective with the goal of being as objective as possible. The alternative is just go full ideological, and then you no longer care about the truth, only pushing a narrative to confirm the biases of your paying customers. Or sensationalist just to drive clicks and views.
Nobody believes in perfectly objectively reporting.
This is more about the rising belief that there is a massive conspiracy by them (the liberals, the Jews, the military industrial complex, the star chamber, take your pick) to systematically distort news in a coordinated way so as to realize their plans for world domination / genocide / fascism / destroying the family (circle one).
I don't think those conspiracies are what are driving this kind of distrust. In my experience, the most common belief on that end is simply that the reporting is meant to keep people too busy bickering over meaningless issues (in the sense that the bickering itself won't accomplish anything of substance) to prevent them from actually organizing and acting against real problems which would be inconvenient for those who benefit from those problems.
Eg keeping people bickering about racial issues instead of agreeing on the aspects of policing which need reform, or from focusing on class issues.
The tens of thousands of reporters, mostly young liberal arts majors?
It’s the “meant to” that makes it a conspiracy theory. Tell me that news is unhealthy, or that each individual actor has self interest in promoting some agenda, and I think it’s an interesting topic.
But as soon as there is a person or group out there secretly “meaning for” some result from the actions of tens of thousands of people, that’s by definition a conspiracy.
I think it’s just human nature. We are wired to believe that “there must be some explanation”, and it’s easy to lean into a sentient God or an evil cabal.
IMO the truth, that it’s a runaway uncoordinated emergent behavior with thousands of actors pushing and pulling in different directions for their own reasons, is a lot scarier.
'meant to' by incentive structures and culture in how these companies work, which are set by the 'higher ups' who benefit most from them. For example, a popular anchor (say, Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow) will naturally also be popular and influential within their associated organization. They benefit from pushing a certain perspective, and so they will of course influence the organization to further move in that direction.
While there isn't some hidden moustache twirling mastermind carefully directing all of the media about what to report and how to report it. Practically, I don't think the distinction matters too much because they all share the same incentives and they are individually deliberate in applying those same incentives.
As a broad example, Tucker and Rachel both benefit from appealing to their respective base's political views. They also benefit greatly from the bickering between their bases, thus it suits them to further push that divide (if they actually get issues addressed they have to constantly figure out what people want next to stay relevant). Similar incentives apply to politicians, so they do the same. Both Tucker and Rachel also benefit from being close with the associated politicians, so they tow that line too. The result being that they act in concert without explicitly conspiring with each other to do so.
> But as soon as there is a person or group out there secretly “meaning for” some result from the actions of tens of thousands of people, that’s by definition a conspiracy.
There are many interest groups pushing to influence mass behavior in many kinds of ways. Some do so transparently, others less so.
We've overloaded "conspiracy" to mean at least two different things: the traditional definition of secret plotting to do bad things and a more modern derogatory connotation involving far-fetched conspiracies like politicians being lizard people.
Something can be a conspiracy and also be true and it is reasonable to investigate the extent to which reporting is influenced by different interests.
The first approximation is: a typical journalist working at a serious news organization has some amount of bias but at the same time tries to be objective.
So it is approximately false, they don't deliberately mislead.
My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't.
I stopped reading CNN due to their terrible headlines, but I just went at the top headline is "Animals are reportedly dying after toxic train wreck. What it means". Well CNN has reporters, why is there hearsay in the title? Could you just look through some records or conduct a quick survey to figure out the truth of those reports.
I would point to the general way that in the USA the balance of rights is tipped away from people and towards corporations, e.g. very little sick pay, very little paid leave, very little parental leave, very few rights for employees, Healthcare provided at the whims of employers and insurance companies. etc
It's hard to take this comment at face value when the content on CNN and Fox News is so different. I wouldn't really argue against CNN being interested in maintaining the status quo, but Fox News is reactionary.
Fox news is reactionary against progressivism, leftism, etc... but the status quo in the US is pro military, pro oligarchy, pro gun, pro life, conservative, white and Christian. The "leftist" party in the US, the Democrats, can at best be described as center-right, there is no true left with any real political power.
The Democrats are pro-war, pro-capitalism, only nominally anti-gun, pander to the Christians as much as Republicans, and don't even side with labor anymore, as we saw with Biden crushing the railroad workers' strike, which was even supported by supposed progressive firebrand AOC.
> My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't.
I don't put those 2 channels in different categories at all. And certainly they don't divide from each other along lines of objectivity. They are both in the News Entertainment industry. Neither cares in the least about objectivity.
The only split I see between them is their mutually exclusive audiences.
Fox News is actually in a better place because they don't seem to be hiding the fact that they are there for entertainment and audience-building. They both care about their ratings first and foremost, but CNN is still trying to keep some veneer of serious journalism.
As a test: I haven't watched it recently, but how has CNN mea culpa'd over the news that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? A "serious news organization" should have had a real period of soul-searching over that. I bet it was barely a blip on their radar.
Yes I know that traditionally media has been used for propaganda, but I'm surprised by the reactions in this thread and those who find what seems like fairly objective reporting as biased.
Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news sites that are deliberately misleading? If this propaganda is so rampant then where is it? (Note: I'm opinion articles excluded because they are uh opinions).
Given enough time - NYT will generally correct a deliberately misleading story - so tracking down these sorts of changes requires use of internet archive.
Here is one!
On a story about Joe Rogan and his covid treatment - the NYT said "he was treated with a series of medications including ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug"
The first version of the article, calling ivermectin a "deworming veterinary drug" is intentionally misleading as it is WIDELY used internationally in humans for all sorts of issues.
It is on the WHOs list of essential medications for HUMANS, it is the 420th most commonly described medication in the US for HUMANS, the inventor won the Nobel prize for how it helps HUMANS.
Luckily, the NYT changed it to be less misleading - but the point stands. They intentionally misled their readers.
> Luckily, the NYT changed it to be less misleading - but the point stands. They intentionally misled their readers.
It's telling that even when they issue a correction, the corrected language is always quite clearly still misleading.
They did the same thing with the 1619 project. One of the original articles stated:
>"...one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."
Many prominent historians evicerated them for this fabrication.[0] The NYT responded in a manner scarcely discernable from lying[0 again], after which they were subject to a second eviceration[1], and only then did they issue a (weaselly) correction[2], which was presumably the smallest change they could manage.
>"...one of the primary reasons *some of* the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."
Which, of course, is clearly intended to suggest the very same lie.
You don't have to be deliberately misleading. You can intentionally omit certain stories or pieces of stories, and focus the bulk of your coverage one way or another to the omission of perhaps the wider truth. You can find expert opinions going every which way on every topic, so who you bring in as an expert to give an opinion also has weight to the narrative you are creating. In fact you have to do these things in many cases, because you have a finite amount of journalists you can hire or experts opinions you can reasonably draw on to cover a limited set of stories; news orgs don't scale to infinity. Perhaps in some cases, good access to sources depends on maintaining a friendly relationship toward these sources in terms of what you are publishing about them. Maybe you also don't want to jeopardize your relationship with your advertisers.
Herman and Chomsky have written about this phenomenon:
The basis for the entire piece is false, as many historians have said. People within the Times have admitted as much, and have even silently edited the piece without issuing corrections to remove some of the most blatant falsehoods as an attempt to save face.
The Times has lots of good journalism still, but is a propaganda laundering outlet. Falsehoods are published there so that other journalists, lawmakers, and academics can reference falsehoods in the Times as truth. This has happened in the past, just reference how they were used to launder misinformation with regards to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Let's go Brandon -> this is probably the most obvious of the stories.
Pretty much all of the followup stories re: the Abbot formula factory in the NYT and WaPo say that the factory was closed "in response to the FDA investigation" instead of the reality, which is it was closed "because the FDA needed to investigate."
The difference? The factory wasn't closed due to an FDA finding, it was closed so the FDA could find something. Big difference.
Those two are pretty simple.
Another trend is calling pretty much everything "voter suppression." Is asking for an ID voter suppression? Apparently it is. What about not allowing random people to collect and deliver ballots? Yes. What about making rules and regulations about ballot drop-off sites? Yes, voter suppression. The guardian is notorious for doing this.
There is so much. Any time there's a war, the NY Times manufactures consent, Iraq war and weapons of mass destruction for example, more than half of Americans thought Saddam had nukes.
Misleading can also be what the NY Times doesn't cover. For example, the Columbia Journalism Review published a scathing report on how the media misled on Russiagate and NY Times and other MSM just tries to ignore it:
Yes, the utter malice that has been displayed by the NYT over the years is mind boggling - yet they still seem to have this reputation as "the gray lady" as if they should be held in upmost regard. I get it that people want to trust in our institutions - but seriously, people need to wake up and stop taking things for granted. At least display a slight does of healthy skepticism every now and then.
Yeah it’s insane. Perhaps because their articles unrelated to foreign policy and politics are usually very well written, people assume they can trust everything
I don't think its individual 'truth failures' driving such a largescale change, but rather a gradual big-picture slide. For a softball example, an article on the front page of Hacker News right now is "Study Suggests Fructose Could Drive Alzheimer's Disease." See enough articles making such declarations and where they lead, and you gradually start dismissing them as probable junk without even opening them. It's not because you've carefully debunked past studies, but simply because what was implied (major breakthrough) and what happened (nothing) don't jive.
So a better example for your search might be to go back to the Internet Archive, and grab the NYTimes from a year ago. And start reading the articles, and see if things ended up logically leading where the articles imply they would. Beyond this I also don't think you can, in good faith, disentangle opinion from fact. Yes we SHOULD, but it's not like people carefully scrutinize a headline or article to assess whether it was categorized as opinion, and then largely disregard it if so. People treat opinion and factual reporting, more or less, the same. And sites intentionally interweave them in order to drive clicks. So you can't have your cake and eat it. Generate clicks by publishing junk, and people are just going to remember you publishing junk.
(parent author) Thanks for everyone's responses. I think there are some solid examples that folks provided that definitely give me something to mull over.
>Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news sites that are deliberately misleading?
How about their "reporting" on the jews and certain activities with them in a European country before the US entered WWII? Just do a modicum of research and if you are not thoroughly repulsed by the character of the NYT...
Newspapers have a problem with quoting law enforcement as if it's fact. 2 Hugh examples:
NYT quoted a Russian asset at the FBI claiming Trump's campaign had no clear links to Russia. Then Trump's own kid released the "later in the summer" thread. Newspapers quoted MPD about George Floyd's "medical emergency".
It's right in that they don't often feed you with provably false stuff --at least not at the time of publication (such as Hunter's Laptop being Russian misinfo but now owned up to by Hunter himself) but yes, they lie by omission, innuendo/leading and half truths. Similar to how quite a few social programs are based on small unreplicated studies that sound good on paper --the intent matters more than the results or reality.
> The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.
I don't think it's true (why would it be), and even it is true, it is stupid to assume that it is true. It only can cause harm, but no benefits at all.
What do you not believe is true? That print space in newspapers is limited so you have to report selectively and your news organisation may just find one category of articles more relevant or interesting or important than another?
Bad take. For one, any time you try to evaluate "the media" as a single entity, you've already failed. Secondly, the first example of "not really lying" is most definitely a deliberate lie.
The entire point of the article is to damn with faint praise. The NYT is no worse than infowars. Both may mislead and omit extremely relevant information but actual lies, no. It’s a knock on the NYT and by extension the entire news media journalism complex.
Which is stupid. Infowars is an absolute sham from top to bottom and the leader of Infowars is an absolute monster who will spend the rest of his life paying restitution for well-proven slanders. And has never produced a single "scoop" of verifiable value in it's history.
Meanwhile, the NY Times has made a few mistakes or let some bias slip through by the human beings who work there and produce thousands of relevant and accurate stories per year. Many of which are of vital national interest.
Because the data was completely misrepresented. VAERS is unvetted raw data from the public. Anyone who has experience or imagined a malady after self-reporting that they received a vaccine dose can make a report to VAERS. Portraying VAERS reports as conclusive causation is most definitely lying.
The headline presents the conclusions as unambiguous: "New Vaccine Data Shows Alarming Number Of Stillbirths And Miscarriages Caused By Covid Shot". Aside from referring to "covid shot" as a single thing and the 8 different vaccines available.
This is really simple. Media are now in the service of advertisers. Or more specifically of people who are willing to spend money to target particular people. For example, the NYT targets the wealthy, which is why they frequently have stories about "how much will $900,000 buy in a home"? By targeting the wealthy, the NYT and other media present a view of the world that is very much at odds with the way many if not most Americans experience the world.
There is another set of media that sells access to the "less well off" in America. Here's looking at you fox. It is hard to call them media because what they do is foster outrage and sell that. This audience is targeted by those with political agendas.
Who pays for your media determines how you see the world and what you see of the world. Period.
Not really, it's clear demand for Christian stuff in America is huge. Yet the media avoids this like crazy.
One of the biggest movies of all time is "The passion of the christ" there.Yet most media in America is highly liberal and arguably anti-christian.
It's not about the money clearly, its not about the money.
American Corporations have undergone idealogical capture. There is no other reason Disney risked and lost their self governance by going up against Desantis.
This maybe changing though. My firm is actively beginning to re-evaluate its social activism after 15% layoffs (more layoffs incoming too). The next big phase is regaining our market in the "heartland". I'm in strategic meetings with a lot of executives, that are becoming screaming matches over the direction of the firm.
This isn't a refutation. If the markets for christian stuff and <everything else> are sufficiently disjoint then it can and probably is perfectly rational to choose the bigger <everything else> pie rather than trying to compete for the Christian market. You see "ideological capture," other see the market at work. Somehow I also doubt passing laws in Florida to force Disney to make Mickey Mouse less woke will have the intended effects but it probably feels exciting to you all the same.
To be clear I also think its a bit ridiculous to have Disney operate as a local goverment of a town. But I'd say that if Disney was a feed supply company and not a media/theme park outfit just the same while your (and Ron D's) concern seems to be that "Woke Disney" specifically had that jurisdiction.
It's idealogical capture.
Example: Hallmark doubles down on LGBT content, president splits to create the Great American Channel with pro-christian and anti-lgbt content.
The GAC channel is one of the channels with the fastest increase in subscribers.
This is a case study that several researchers we have are actively investigating as we look to buy ads on that network.
I don't even understand, if the guy was able to leave and create a new channel to serve this audience how is that an example of what you call ideological capture.
An important part of business is targeting your offering to the intended market -- it sounds like the intended market for Hallmark is not the same as the intended market for Great American Channel. If Hallmark content is so objectionable to its viewership that they lose all their viewers to Great American Channel, surely Hallmark will pivot, or go out of business.
Or do you think Ron Desantis has to pass a law forcing Hallmark to make the kind of content which the Great America Channel shows? Is that your solution here, a command economy for basic cable?
Hallmark is a traditionally conservative channel, this is extremely well known to marketing arms of other firms. It's rapid switch to LGBT content was idealogical capture because a large amount of its executives,employees,and target market did not want such things.
Hallmark is a company that was ideologically captured. Imagine a meat company, that forces its president out, to become a vegan company. That meat company underwent idealogical capture, and now works against its original goals that were profitable. Notice how this is different than a pivot, a pivot is executed when the company is not profitable.
The Great America Channel was created and supported by many many ex-hallmark channel employees including executives, actors, finance, and more. It's subscribers increasing every day. Our firm fully expects it to become the new "hallmark" channel within 2 years.
I guess I figured there was some import to the idea of ideological capture. If by that you mean leaders can set direction of their company, some can disagree and leave and found a competitor, and the winner can prevail in the market, then, that’s what I call market capitalism and what you call ideological capture I suppose.
I just don't get it. To me "ideological capture" would imply no alternative in the market, basically there is an inefficiency which is explained and maintained by ideology. And yet, this entire anecdote about the Hallmark channel is about how a guy quit from working there and founded an alternative channel to exploit the inefficiency, and apparently is succeeding!
Disney also employs a lot of LGBTQ employees who were quite understandably really pissed at DeSantis. There's a line to be toed between "public liberal good boy points" for PR and the benefits of self governance, and I think Disney made a decent compromise.
Its certainly an interesting case study (as someone being trained for an executive position), I think about it a lot.
You are really fucked as an Executive here. You're social activists employees will undermine and subvert you. Florida will use State power against you.
Maybe the Federal government might intervene in your space, but they probably won't care.
My conclusion and many executives at my firm is target the social activists for layoffs.
I've combed thru so many social media profiles in preparation for next restructuring/layoffs at my firm.
Just can't risk it in the current economy. The general feeling is the economy is going to get worse before it gets better.
This response makes logical sense, but it deepens my hatred of capitalism. Activists who oppose losing their human rights to a proto-fascist governor are silenced by a company because they're getting in the way of profits, the number one priority for any company or individual. Morally terrible.
I don't think you really hate capitalism. You hate people on the other side of your beliefs.
I think capitalism is whats keeping the tenuous peace right now.
Afterall the market research shows roughly 50% of americans think Desantis is on the right track. If that's the case half the country thinks you are a "fascist" or "villian".
Without capitalism, you'd probably be living in an America that would have been far more to the right.
I consider myself a socialist. I'm not sure what capitalism has to do with keeping the peace though, or what it has to do with DeSantis (who follows early patterns of fascism MUCH more closely)
The point is not the culture wars (see comments below). The point is that having media that is based on targeted advertising causes our society to fracture. QED.
He said this (I believe) in the context of the French Revolution. Possibly also as a dig to Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson was most likely advocating for a rounded education that did not rely solely on topical information. He was an ardent supporter of free press and even considered it more important that functioning government.
I never watch or read any news, I'm just sick of them reporting on things that have full unedited videos without posting the full unedited video. One example is the Floyd case. The full bodycam video was available for almost half of a year before it was pushed in the media during the trial. My extended family exclusively saw it through the professional news filter, which means that those who watch bluer news organizations came to the conclusion that he was murdered, and those who watch redder news organizations came to the conclusion that he overdosed. I'm not saying that everyone should "draw their own conclusions" or "do their own research" whenever there's a new video, but it helps to keep a clearer head when you've seen the evidence and are now waiting for expert analysis, rather than seeing the evidence pushed by a relatable authority figure who's already been instructed to be in a certain mood and is only showing short clips at a time.
I sometimes daydream about a "grey news" organization. No hosts, just text articles with confidence intervals next to claims, all sources listed, no editorials, and all interviews and videos reported on have full transcripts next to the full unedited video.
'grey news' not a bad idea but can still be manipulated by editorial.
Org A is the one you want to promote. Only show clips that make org A look good. Org B is the one you want to demote. Only show clips that make org B look bad. If org A does something bad pad it with 'org B' doing the same thing or never show it. If org B does something good never show it.
What is shown to you, and order matters. The talking heads bits most orgs go for along with it just adds color to it. But it is the same editorial process. You only have X amount of time and Y amount to show X < Y. Something has to go. You can pick sides even with that method.
I've also thought of a structure where there's a news organization that's just openly biased, the prime directive is listed on the front page, and each news article is explicitly edited to explain how the article is presented to support the main mission of the organization. Maybe could link to refutations to keep the appearance of honesty.
This of course falls into a funny counterfactual scenario that I don't have a clever term for. "In the world where this solution is possible to deploy, the problem doesn't exist". If you could staff an entire news organization that was so dedicated to exposing its own bias, it would mean you had a critical mass of adults in society that were actually concerned about the truth, and you could just do news the regular way.
So much bitterness here in the comments like "duh", "took them long enough", etc. So, honest question: if, you know, a pillar of democracy is by default laughed at, how can then this democracy function? If half the country thinks they are getting brainwashed, and the other half doesn't think they are getting brainwashed (while possibly getting brainwashed right in that same moment). How can such people make educated choices?
They don't make educated choices, they don't make choices at all.
Human societies can be broadly categorized into three groups:
1) The largest group (typically more than half) don't know what's going on.
2) The second group sees what's going on but doesn't do anything about it.
3) The third group (which is really tiny, like 1-in-10000) sees what's going on and does things, or they try to.
The open secret among groups 2 and 3 is that group 1 has to be managed (otherwise they go off the rails and crash civilization pretty quickly. It's happened before.)
So you get things like Religion, Sports, War, etc. all more-or-less to keep "the masses" on the tracks. The invention of the TV was a huge advance for this purpose. Suddenly people are staying inside and not causing trouble! You can even sort of program them: en mass people behave with statistical predictability. (E.g. you can get women to start smoking cigarettes. True example.)
Anyway, from this POV (I read "Manufacturing Consent" at a tender age) the masses have no agency. Democracy is a side-show, part of the management API for the masses.
What we're seeing now (from my POV) is the Internet ripping the lid off of the propaganda control system. "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
Can you support your claims as for these ratios? I can't support my claim well, but I picture people to be more equally-distributed among those 3 groups.
Also, I'd state it more starkly:
1) 1/3 don't know or care about the suffering of people in general.
2) 1/3 wish harm on others or care so little about others that they'll seek even small personal gains at others' great expense.
3) 1/3 at least feel compassion for others, but might not have the ability or resolve to make substantial change.
Why do you think that group 1 is the one that needs to be controlled? Why not the ones seeking harm? I encourage apathetic people to become more politically-conscious, but I don't blame people for wanting to live their own lives.
I do agree that a lot of institutions are just toys: certain religions which talk about peace but whose followers openly and proudly support policies which harm others, political parties which offer team identities but no real change, etc.
Please don't take anything here as a blanket statement against any particular group.
> Can you support your claims as for these ratios?
I think the article we're commenting on is just that, no?
> Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.
That would seem to imply that more than half of Americans didn't realize that until recently, eh?
> I'd state it more starkly: 1) 1/3 don't know or care about the suffering of people in general. 2) 1/3 wish harm on others or care so little about others that they'll seek even small personal gains at others' great expense. 3) 1/3 at least feel compassion for others, but might not have the ability or resolve to make substantial change.
I think you're talking about something else than I am. You seem to be talking about motivation, I'm talking about political power. The OP's question was, "how can then this democracy function" if "people [can't] make educated choices?"
> Why do you think that group 1 is the one that needs to be controlled?
Do you mean my group 1 or your group 1? My group 1 needs to be controlled if you want a complex society. Otherwise they'll destroy it without malice through entropy.
If you mean your group 1 then I don't think they should be controlled, but I would encourage them to try to develop compassion.
I think it's definitely a "duh" that at least some news sources are deliberately misleading us. Propaganda and lobbying are rampant and always have been.
The poll is extremely ambiguous of whether it's talking about some or all or *most", etc. And even commenters here saying "duh" are also ambiguous about that.
> How can such people make educated choices?
Answering in a way that stays in context: by listening to trustworthy news sources. (I don't think this contradicts the poll.)
The purpose of democracy is to pacify people who vote into thinking that they have responsibility or they are somehow "heard" while leaving the people who select the candidates in charge.
"Look, you had a choice between two candidates whom are identical other than social issues both sides have agreed to never actually do anything about, so stop rebelling and protesting in the streets, you got to vote so now its your turn to mindlessly obey your leaders and stop complaining"
Hmm if only the founding document of America was written in such a way as to divide the country into smaller polities that could focus on their own issues, we could I don't know divide the country into 50 geographical areas and have them manage within their borders pretty much anything that isn't defense, foreign policy, or weights and measures. But that's nonsense of course, why shouldn't voters in SF decide the best way for the people of Bismark to live.
voting, which is presumably the cornerstone of the society, is done by this same mass of people, and results in electing people with the most deadly powers in the world, among other things.
Interesting how you conflate "voting" and "electing people". While voting is indeed a corner stone of democracy, as a supporter of sortition I think that elections are anti-democratic.
You're putting people "in charge" (as if people in office were actually in charge) by selecting between a very very narrow pool of pre-approved candidates.
Its true, though. Pick half a dozen news articles from 2+ years ago, then find the current state of information we have on what happened. Its pretty obvious that journalists lie, embellish, misrepresent what their sources tell them, or simply never did basic fact-checking. I realized this a long time ago and its only gotten worse. No one wants to pay for news, and they certainly don't want to pay for news that consistently causes them cognitive dissonance on top of being boring. But thats exactly what the world is: uncomfortable and technical.
This is very old news. The encyclopaedia Britannica article on the subject says a good propagandist knows the mainstream news are untrusted,
and will target their audience through receptive channels, like influencing family or social groups.
There’s a certain subset of powerful people who would love everyone to distrust the media so they themselves can be the truth tellers.
I don’t think the news from major media organizations deliberately misleads people. I think people often mistake News-based entertainment shows for news as well as things like opinion and editorial for news. There is bias but that’s not necessarily the same as being misleading.
How many Americans believe that news organizations deliberately mislead OTHER people?
If you dig a little deeper, how many people realize there are different formats like opinion, commentary, and analysis? Opinions can't be WRONG, but they sure can be BAD.
You can only fact check facts. You can't fact check analysis. You have to apply critique (aka critical thinking skills, or a critical framework).
This is a good insight. When you see people complain about "misinformation," and especially if they complain about "needing to do something about it," your follow-up question should be: do you want your news to be censored, or do you want other people's news to be censored?
I suspect when most people reference "protecting from misinformation," they actually mean protecting you from misinformation, not themselves. After all, anyone sophisticated enough to recognize the problem is surely capable of filtering their own information stream, right?
At least here in Britain I recognise a lot of the news outlets I prefer often print total crap. I wouldn't say there's much of an answer in censorship (for instance the existing limits on what can legally be called 'corrupt' already go too far). But I'd call into question incentives for sure, because some journalists seem to act without self respect in the levels of barrel scraping they go to when clearly trying to contrive a story to conform with some particular direction.
I could elaborate but the short version for me is: If we could decouple editorial direction from funding sources I think we'd end up much better off.
I think a lot of problems would become non-problems if people would admit they read the news primarily for entertainment. This expectation that "the news must supply me with reliable facts" is an intellectually-dishonest complaint from an unreliable narrator. It's nobody's job to tell you what to think, and even if it were, it's not also their job to tell you what's important to think about. An objective press is definitionally impossible as long as "the news" can't include a story about every time a tree falls in the forest. Selection bias is unavoidable, and any expectation of a publisher to avoid it is one borne from intellectual dishonesty, because you can only shift the bias, not remove it.
The most objective way to read the news is to read all of it. Unfortunately that's not usually possible. So the next best thing you can do (short of ignoring it) is to read the most divergent sources, and fill in the blanks yourself. I've seen this referred to as "triangulating the truth" - is there a story on Fox but not CNN? That editorial selection bias is itself additional information that you can use to infer the motives of the publishers, and over time, based on observed bias, the motives of the subjects in the article. And then you can think from there about why they have those motives and what their agenda might be.
...but that's all a lot of work, which is why I'm also an advocate for deliberately ignoring the news for weeks at a time. Don't fall for the "informed citizen" trap - that's how they keep you hooked to the propaganda.
Genuinely surprised its only half because Fox News viewers often think CNN is lying and CNN viewers often think the same about Fox News. Both groups can therefore answer 'Yes' if asked if they think news organisations deliberately mislead. I'm picking those two as being big news channels but I think it holds for other tv and for newspapers too.
CNN is not the counterpart to fox. That comparison is apples and oranges. It’s almost like saying strawberry ice cream is the counterpart to chocolate and implying non chocolate eaters all eat strawberry.
Yes cnn is a newsertainement org like fox, but it’s not the anti-fox. For starters, No one actually cares about cnn except fox watchers.
I'd be happy to update my comment with a better pair if you can suggest one, but I stand by my general point that most people could name a news outlet they don't trust.
Just look at history. The 1930s in europe were like this. You had monarchists, republicans, fascists, communists, every political spectrum represented to its maximal extent with actual organized boots on the ground and people willing to take up arms and die for these causes. Everyone thought the other side was wrong. Things didn't end up getting mended though, people tore eachother apart in world war II and in the years after, and made whatever schools of thought weren't in control of whatever spit of land political exiles, removed or imprisoned or worse.
In the U.S., we didn't make war with eachother, but we hardly "mended" our political misaligmnets from the 1920s and 30s either. In the post war years we simply made talking about communism in the media illegal, blacklisted progressive voices, and ran witchhunts under mccarthyism to root it out of office. Then after mccarthyism, we used the civil rights era and drugs to further alienate political groups from what is legal, proper, and ordained as bonafide american by the ruling class, versus unifying many of these new progressive ideas into our national culture. In later years we divided the labor class into irreconcilable factions, neither of which often thinks critically of the facts of their situation but rather believes the words of their chosen political party leaders as gospel, and never looking back or forward either unless told by said leaders.
If we consider history and our current status, we are at the moment where divisions are being made, and once divided into a group people don't tend to switch groups, they usually die believing that ideology they latch themselves on to. What is next is probably either two things: a period of instability as different groups vie for power (unlikely as the ruling class is unified in its position in the class war above all, and much political commentary is just fodder to distract from the class war), or, radicals will get the hippy treatment, and be pacified by both the conveniences of modern American capitalistic life, as well as the fact that their radical ideology receives no honest voice at all in mass media or wider politics.
If you’re interested in media criticism the podcast Citations Needed[0] is very well researched and covers media issues both in modern day and with a historical lens that shows how media has operated and does operate with relevant source quotes.
> In one small consolation, in both cases Americans had more trust in local news.
This trust in "local" news is often misplaced given how many local news outlets - television stations or newspapers - have been subsumed by larger interests.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Deadspin video of dozens of local news anchors reading the same editorial content handed down by Sinclair Broadcast Group is striking:
There is an awful lot of really, really good stuff put out by local newspapers and TV stations but people ought to be thoughtful about their use of any media.
Except that the purpose of the phrase “fake news” was, in fact, to create propaganda itself. It is certainly not better for the president of the country to be the gatekeeper of truth based on what aligns with their political motivations. It is the very definition of propaganda.
It was journos who started the "fake news" meme. I believe they were complaining about completely fabricated clickbait like "Pope endorses Trump". The journos were seemingly unaware that their own perceived fakeness would be much more salient.
To me, "news" is different than "journalism" (and obviously way different than "opinion") but most media orgs go way out of their way to just completely blur these.
Every "news" article (an election, a shooting, an earthquake, a new science study) is wrapped in spin - why this is bad or good for America, why it's racist or a sign of moral decay, how you should feel, what these other people think about it, who agrees with it.
I gave up and just use primary sources - reading the actual ArXiv paper or gov website or watching the eyewitness video is a better use of my time.
Yes, it is very true that "news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."
But I contend that:
1. News organizations today are less biased than they have ever been.
2. They are better than every other alternative.
3. They are better than nothing.
1. People imagine we had a golden age of news reporting. Never happened. For example, the media sat on the juiciest of juicy stories (JFK's affairs) so that they wouldn't lose access to the White House. What other more subtle ways were they influenced?
2. Where else are you going to get your news from? Facebook, TikTok? People claim that independent sources on SubStack are better, but then they list examples that have obvious and massive biases...
3. Informed voting is a crucial aspect of democracy. If you don't explicitly seek out the news you're going to get it anyway, and those sources are things like ads or political parties that are very much trying to influence you.
I think we have to throw in "news organizations" with "democracy" and "market economy" in the category of "awful things with obvious massive drawbacks, but better than any other alternative".
Like democracy and capitalism, we should concentrate on making news organizations incrementally better rather than discarding them for a worse alternative.
Ok, I see Chomsky/Hermann and Astral Codex mentioned here, but no Martin Gurri yet.
Gurri spent years surveying the global information landscape. Around the turn of the century, he noticed a trend: As the internet gave rise to an explosion of information, there was a concurrent spike in political instability. The reason, he surmised, was that governments lost their monopoly on information and with it their ability to control the public conversation.
One of the many consequences of this is what Gurri calls a “crisis of authority.” As people were exposed to more information, their trust in major institutions — like the government or newspapers — began to collapse.
“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.” - William Randolph Hearst
I think it is undeniable that new organizations are deliberately misleading the public in many cases, not necessarily part of the conspiracy but simply acting as the agent of the government. There are many cases when is became obvious.
It is also easy to find sources that are free from government collusion usually classified either far left or far right whatever those mean.
Differing definitions of "mislead" are going to make these comments useless.
> Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.
The headline defines "mislead" as including "leading via truthful reporting" aka "present opinion".
That is a pretty garbage question phrasing. The idea that journalism shouldn't persuade is a bizarre affectation meant to make journalists appear as special professional class, like doctors. When your kid tells you what happened at school, they're a journalist.
I read a book called "The Fourth Turning"(published 1996) quite awhile ago. It ended up predicting many of these recent events and generally tries to bring awareness of the eternal recurrence of "turnings" in one's life.
> If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas, killing some. Congress enacts mandatory quarantine measures. The president orders the National Guard to throw prophylactic cordons around unsafe neighborhoods. Mayors resist. Urban gangs battle suburban militias. Calls mount for the president to declare martial law.
Civic virtue tends to get lost in the daily news cycles during the climax of a crisis, but it is frequently regained. Moral and cultural standards are increasing and thus the news will have to adapt to it as it always has. People are slowly returning to classic virtues.
With all due respect, you either don't live in the US or are living under a rock if you feel like you need citation. Denying the US's propaganda machine is like denying climate change at this point. The news corps don't tell flat lies, they cherry-pick facts and events, often reporting them out of proportion to paint a narrative; which is almost as bad as telling flat lies.
I recall in elementary school being tested on whether a sentence was a fact or an opinion. It seems to me that most people now would fail such a test, as journalism has become little more than upsold editorials. Any type of conclusion drawing or motivation attribution is highly subjective opinion, yet taken as gospel by viewers.
I mean, talk about delusions --believing your lies so much you don't believe you're lying or believing it's necessary because people are too stupid to figure things out for themselves.
They want to be able to set agendas but also want to be known as authoritative and uhhh unbiased. Both cannot be true simultaneously. Cry me a river!
I noticed there's a lot of affirmation of this belief but very little citations. So I'm going to ask HN: What is the news journalism or reporting you rely on to believe that other news organizations mislead you, and why did you believe the first over the second?
[This is also a way for me to discern news I should be listening to!]
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
That might actually be correct though. I have friends who are republicans who just think that MSNBC are elite-class shills; and democrats who just think that Fox News are elite-class shills. Only some people I know have reached understanding that any corporate news media has serious propaganda agendas.
This discussion was just had on Joe Rogan's podcast about a recent CBC article, which appeared to be deliberately trying to equate the word "freedom" with "something bad and scary" through a guilt-by-association argument.
Propaganda is not something that happens to other people. It is happening to you now. It is in the movies, tv, and mass media. CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, OANN. They Are their own palatable version to their own captured audience. Each viewer believe the opposing political network is the one with crazy propagandized viewers. They are emotional manipulators. The music, colors, graphics, tone and speech are to mislead. Try watching the news on mute and think what you are not feeling and supposed to feel. Do it for a week. 9 hours of news on mute see the opposite side from your believes too. You will be surprised what you will find.
I would really like to know more about the half that don't believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them. Anyone who has had personal experience with an event and then reads the news coverage of it knows this is true. And it's not a new thing. I was traveling in the Middle East back in the mid-90s. I was eyewitness to an event. When I got back to the states I checked what various newspapers had to say and was shocked at how they misrepresented it (though, I found that news sources from Europe were accurate, I'm not sure if that still holds). I guess I'm fortunate I learned that lesson early in my life.
I was a student in high school and did interviews for both a local newspaper and television station.
In both instances they misrepresented what I said, editing or rearranging my words to construct a different narrative, or in the case of the newspaper they just made up things.
The stories weren't even about anything serious, just local hometown feel-good filler stories and the actual, literal, lies that the journalists willfully constructed were inconsequential and actually made me look good.
But I figured if are willing to lie about something so trivial as what they lied about, then it was highly likely the entire system is a sham.
The left/right divide is really bad for our country. The profit motives behind maintaining the divide only encourages it to get worse. CNN wants to shock you with whatever the GOP is doing to put a gun in your baby's crib. FOX wants to shock you with whatever crime is under reported.
To make things worse, the mechanisms and new types of media (YT, social media, etc...) make it so that you essentially cannot escape the media grasp any more. So we're thinking 24/7 on how the left or right is going to ruin the country.
There are good and bad parts about the media, just like everything else. Unfortunately the current political landscape just accentuates the bad and just hammers it down into people's minds. The perception that media is biased is more important for politics than nuanced observation and we are here because of that. People should always be skeptical about what is fed to them but taking these kind of blanket mind alterations are just bad for society. Not sure how to fix it though once someone is on that slope.
If your goal is to lead people than you end up misleading them.
I understand that it's probably impossible to simply report the news ; that the very act of picking what you're reporting is an editorial act. That said, I also think that most of the people who go to work in news do that because they have an agenda they want to flog; the only distinction is that some of them admit it to themselves and the rest don't even understand that they're trying to do just that.
When posting YouTube links, it's considerate and future-proofing to give the title, in the event of future content removal and so that those assessing the link can better base a decision to follow.
I (live in the US) started reading a lot of BBC. At least their agenda isn't to promote some kind of ideology within my own country.
What's frustrating is that almost all news sources I come across have agendas. I used to watch a lot of the Daily Show in the 2000s, but when it was a slow news day, just make fun of Bush.
Later I used to watch the Nightly show with Colbert, but a year into the Trump presidency they got so hyper-focused on Trump that they didn't talk about anything else. I stopped watching.
Now that I commute occasionally, I sometimes listen to NPR. Sometimes they offer news, but most of the time their point of view is just promoting a narrative that I either find uninteresting, or irrelevant. I lean pretty left, but I don't need to listen to a story about a fringe group every time I sit in the car.
What makes it hard for me to trust online news nowadays is click-bait. As advertising dollars going the way of polar ice caps it's gonna get worse, not better.
Seems it will be an ever rotating 50%, lol. During the war in Iraq, it was primarily leftists distrusting the mainstream media. Now ~20 years later it seems to have completely flipped.
IMO, they simply mislead when it works in their favor. That makes it a minefield though and the best way to handle it I've found is to simply turn it off. If something is important, somehow that information will filter up to you.
They are clickbait and narrative drive, almost all of them.
Even those with high journalistic standards can be heavily misleading.
MSNBC has high journalistic standards (and some brilliant minds, with great researchers) and some of their taalking heads have pretty heavy bias and FYI I'm not 'taking sides' here.
The most interesting thing about the 'news' is trying to determine where the bias comes from.
Including Fortune.com? I think we are learning that the more communication we have the more manipulation we have and it's dark . Unity and common purpose require a sence of naivety and lack/assymetry of information. When most people have the facts , it matters more who is promoting something than what it is, and it s full of partisanship from then on.
Don't trust any news organization that doesn't publish opinion pieces, or pretends that the guest editorials they publish are anthropology rather than assistance. They're hiding their bias as neutrality.
What's to "believe" about it? It's what they are, what they always existed for: shape public opinion in a way beneficial for its sponsors. I can see nothing wrong about it, read both a left-leaning and a right-leaning source and you will be able to figure out what really happened, more or less.
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, >>private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education)<<. It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." [0]
I never thought it was malice. I thought it was greed. They'd say whatever made the most money. People talk about news agencies trying to brainwash people to a particular world view, but I don't think that has some kind of left/right bias. It has a "most money" bias.
I don't see how someone could not conclude that at the very least some major news organizations mislead by spinning things to fit their agenda. If that wasn't the case, then you wouldn't see such radically different takes between, for example, Fox News and MSNBC on the same issue.
The bombardment had a funny effect, though: instead of outraged, most of the audience is just desensitized to unchecked bias, fake news, twisted citations and the like. It becomes case of "believing this lie until someone i like with more viewers says a different lie".
I remember being in an after school philosophy club and we were discussing truth. My teacher popped out of his office, blurted out then returned to his office: “all objectivity moves through subjectivity”.
We never discussed it in the context of new media but it feels quite relevant.
Written in fortune.com where they sell their brand to anyone to publish their scam articles
Gee, I wonder why ppl don't trust the news. I would say ppl don't trust anything anymore, because most businesses are about scamming and gaslighting their customers these days.
Well, you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that pretty much all of American MSM is highly partisan, some worse than others.
I grew up in the UK and 70s-80s BBC seemed a lot more neutral, but of course every news organization has their own implicit world view, relative to which they report the news. There is no such thing as an unbiased news source, although there are those that try to brainwash you and those that at least try to keep it factual.
I've always thought about having one news agency/aggregator that are strictly opinions verboten, i.e. just report the fact and nothing else, use as little adjective or subjective wording as possible.
Something happened here at date involving these people. Done. No opinion, no analysis, no conjectures or sarcasm, no calling people with words that either accurately describe them or inaccurately, only official titles and names.
It might just be possible when the rest of the field have clearly departed from objectivity, competition seems low enough.
Note: I'm not trying to engage in political axe-grinding here. I found the below example after about ~30 seconds of looking.
These organizations are fact-forward, but far from unbiased. It's impossible to read an article like this one[0], for example, without a clear understanding of which side of the argument the author is rooting for.
That article is pretty deceptive, actually. Like, how could they bring themselves to include this line:
> "The idea that we have a social contagion encouraging people to be trans in a climate that is this hostile to trans people in so unbelievably offensive," said Chase Strangio, an ACLU lawyer who has litigated against the Arkansas and Alabama laws.
...without mentioning that the number of trans kids has, in fact, been rising rapidly?![1]
Won't work, the issue isn't so much a news organization writes "you should think X about this problem" it's more how they frame information, what information they leave out, and what information they choose to amplify in order to make a certain point, to the point of misleading in many cases.
There's certain words that have subjective connotation which they also use, and it's near impossible to write anything coherent for an audience if you decide any words with subjective connotation are forbidden.
>just report the fact and nothing else, use as little adjective or subjective wording as possible
Wouldn't work. There are too many facts and it is possible to build a narrative just by choosing which facts to show or not show.
Easy example, pick some demographic. Now report just the facts about all violent crime that demographic is involved in. Add in the most news worthy violent crimes of other demographics (the ones other news channels are carrying) to help create the image of impartial coverage, but always ensure an abundance of violent crime reports from the targeted demographic.
Thanks to the size of the total US population, you'll always have a new story to cover even without having to add in any opinion. The US, with 300,000,000+ people, will have a few new leads every single day. The disproportionate coverage, even while sticking to just facts, will be feeding a false narrative just as much as any opinionated coverage would.
Perfect cannot be the enemy of good, it's the direction that we want something to happen, doesn't mean it must be perfect, or even need to be perfect eventually.
In America it's not just partisan it's state sponsored. The American media has a history of being covert propagandists. George Edward Creel was the OG master at slipping in narratives to publications. Creel never used straight-out propaganda like the BBC would have and preferred that "news media" (on all sides of the spectrum) inject state-sponsored innuendo. That's always been how we manufacture consent in the US. At one point Creel had 80K on his payroll and to the best of my knowledge it's never properly been explained how his WWI organization was re-orged.
When one looks objectively at media reporting and takes that objective viewpoint on a sliding scale backwards through various reports, it becomes obvious that their mission is not to report news, but to shape public opinion.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for Large corporations to have self interest and to highlight stories that benefit them and minimize/ignore things that would negatively effect them.
It's not unique to America or to the present day, "There's no news in The Truth and there's no truth in The News" was a saying in some regions of the world not all that long ago.
Dualism is a form of misleading, and many news organizations aren't explicitly seeking to be nondualist sources, so that's a form of deliberate misleading flying covertly under the rest of this.
After being in a story that was reported on and being misquoted even if it's not deliberate they still get things wrong.
Also:
>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Such a shame that this is our state of affairs. If half the public don't trust the establishment, then how stable is that establishment? Last time I checked, chaos is not fun.
The "respectable" ones don't lie, but they do choose what to not cover and what to draw attention to.
For example, the lack of coverage of the train derailment in Ohio. And zero articles since the government said the UFOs they shot down were benign asking "Hey, government, that's it? No explanation as to why you wasted millions of dollars shooting down benign objects? With all your capabilities you really can't find the debris?"
They have to decide what's newsworthy. There's limited time and space. Your examples might be apt, but not because they're making decisions. That's a given for any possible news organization. You can call that a kind of bias, sure. But professional news people will have a pretty good idea of what their consumers are likely to consider relevant news.
Is anyone else concerned that this sentiment may ultimately lead to unshakable seeds of doubt in the general populace? That would be a real thread to our democratic institutions. We see this with all the attacks on voters, voting, and election results.
News, while not a direct wing of the government (usually), is an important core to the social and political well being of a nation, yet in the US it seems there is no counter balance to this trend.
I can't even say I blame people either, its not just "right wing nut jobs" or "out of touch leftists" that feel news organizations are untrustworthy or mislead the public. Its starting to become more common among moderate to slightly left leaning political normals. IE, the average population (in aggregate).
That should really bother people more I feel like. This is a pretty serious problem in the modern age and there's no good answer on how to move forward to get real trust back. Having a government sponsored non partisan news source will immediately get rejected by pretty significant portion of the US citizenry, and private corporations and non profit foundations have their own issues, namely around how they get funded.
Seems there is honestly scant little we can do here, I honestly don't see how you roll this back
There is a simple reason for this. The necessary ingredient in a news story is a conflict of some kind, and the people who feel misled recognize that the conflicts that news orgs present, decorated by mostly real facts, are synthetic, the product of an ideology. In a story, there's a figure-ground relationship between facts and the tension between them, and the people very-concerned about "alternative facts" don't get that others don't believe them not because of the disinformation on the internet, but because they register to us as liars who sprinkle some facts as palatable icing over an underlying lie derived from an ideology designed to produce cheap conflict. In a moral sense, news that uses synthetic conflict sourced from ideology is in effect, false witness.
To me, anything problematic or anti-problematic is a synthetic conflict generated from underlying pre-problematizations. One doesn't have to agree with this assessment to understand it, but pretending to be mystified as to why a majority of Americans don't agree with them only makes the divide irreconcilable, imo.
Spreading disinformation from politically aligned media sources is a fundamental authoritarian strategy. Politicized news is used to generate outrage which excites the electorate into participating in elections.
You can't fix negativity, but you can better regulate media to be accountable without infringing on free speech. There has been a very sharp downturn in factual quality and impartiality of information provided by news organizations over the past two decades in the US and we are overdue for a course correction.
99% of what we see in the news is editorial content. We are being informed of where partisans stand on issues. The actual event is tertiary. The narrative surrounding it is secondary. The primary item is the partisan goal.
"Joe Biden fell off his bicycle", we can believe that much. The other 99% of the content is partisan posturing. Maybe if I were there, I could have further insights, "His aides should have given him platform pedals instead of cages". Thankfully I wasn't there. Even if I had been there, my observation would have still been subjective.
However, there are some narratives and editorial positions which are trivially self-refuting. We can evaluate them from first principles. "A misinformation czar is required to protect democracy" or "We need censorship to preserve a free and open society" If we trust people to vote, then we must trust people to consume and evaluate information independent of state institutions.
Ultimately these discussions revolve around our premises. Our first principles inform us. The specific event can be almost irrelevant in many cases.
There are other crank ideas like those advanced by David Icke. I cannot prove that world leaders are not lizard people, but I'm naturally skeptical. Even if I watched Biden fall, I couldn't prove it. Crank theories don't threaten me, they amuse. Hopefully this is something which isn't controversial for partisans on this site. We could substitute other news items and theories.
I'm more troubled by the users shouting down these delightful absurdities. "My truth is bigger than yours"
From my side they have my deepest sympathy for wherever the disagreement injured them. However, moving forward perhaps it would be best if they didn't identify so closely with editorialized content or specific news outlets? "9 out of 10 HN users chose Brand-X Truth and here's why..."
IDK I've watched this video looking for a "lunge" a hand full of times and it seems like a deliberate lie. An honest headline would probably center around a man getting his face grabbed, but that's not at all how it was reported.
Rare to be able to factcheck an article without leaving the page and disprove it from its own content, but the lies are not rare.
I fully recognize that media is a business like any other, subject to pressures and the biases of its participants. (It’s a product, said a CNN producer friend.)
With that said, is it any wonder, with certain politicians demonizing media at every opportunity, and certain outlets actively seeking to misinform, that confidence has fallen?
I wish I knew the answer. We’re at a dangerous point in the US and also the world where we need to be able to discern the truth and act to pull back from what feels like a precipice.
A relevant idea I stumbled across recently: Gell-Mann Amenesia:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Almost certainly true. Just look at how they dealt with the Epstein story, for example. So many high-profile rapists and child abusers, and it was all swept under the rug. The news organizations are captured by these abusive elites.
50% isn't much. If you ask people if they believe something obviously false (is Obama lizard?) 5% people will tell you they believe it. If you ask them something that COULD happen (did Biden tried to cover up New Hampshire docks shooting (I just made it up)) 30% will tell you they believe it.
There is an infinite amount of things to report on. Every preference is politics. Most news organizations in the US are left leaning white collar interest groups, half the country is right leaning. Hence the results here.
I certainly agree with that sentiment. It is my belief that the modern American press is the enemy of the people, as they rarely do anything but cause strife.
"It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. 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."
The first part of the survey focuses on the question: who pays for news? An executive overview of the opinions is: most (3 in 4) say that news organizations are first and foremost motivated by their own financial interests. However... well over half of people say that they will never pay for news (although this summary obscures a lot of details in the PDF).
So, there's a bit of a contradiction here. News is usually a business first and foremost (government sponsored news organizations being the main exception), and one would postulate that the less reader subscriptions are necessary, the more news will tilt towards satisfying commercial interests (or other sources of income) above all.
As far as trust is concerned, online news and US cable news fairs poorly. The former despite a growing amount of people preferring to get their news online; the later despite being the most used news source currently. "Big 3" network news and (surprisingly for me considering the network decay of local news towards low-quality national-generated junk I've seen over time) local news TV fares better.
Low trust in national news is linked to a negative outlook in democracy and other aspects of the political process.
One aspect of these types of reports that I always wonder about is how much of these actually reflect issues in interpreting news in its core. The current digital era generates tons of articles, much of which is useless noise. So sometimes, I feel that some complaints about media in reality are an inability to sort out critical information from the noise in media (both in news and everything else).
So, an interesting tidbit of this survey to me is this finding: "Americans with low emotional trust in national news are much more likely to find it difficult to sort out the facts in today’s information environment."
Is information overload a huge part of the trust problem? I suspect this is the case. A conclusion I postulate is that (as per the above) too much of the "news" is (to equivalate with food) low-nutrition "junk food" designed merely to stimulate clicks and maybe some base emotional response, but offering nothing insightful or valuable for the long term.
In an ideal world this means people will simply start taking what they're told with a pinch of salt and are little bit more sensible about believing sensational things. However we don't live in such a world. I suspect that what's more likely is that a bunch of people will fall into believing in stupid shit like flat earth or qanon, and will end up following weird conspiracy freaks like Alex Jones or white supremacists like Nick Fuentes.
Another media post, another HN comments feed where more people are upset about Hunter Biden’s laptop than a president cheerleading an insurrection and trying to overthrow the results of an election. Less credibility than the media you despise.
He has to come from the Journal region of France, otherwise he's just a sparkling whistleblower. /s
From the tone of the article it seems like the author simply detests Julian Assange and Weiss puts forward no standard for who can rightly be called 'a journalist'.
Compare Seymour Hersh's codswallop on the Skripal affair with the excellent work done by Bellingcat. It's clear that in this case the mainstream media got it mostly right and Hersh made a dog's breakfast of it.
This colours my attitude to his Nordstream "revelations".
> Compare Seymour Hersh's codswallop on the Skripal affair with the excellent work done by Bellingcat.
Done. Bellingcat exists as a parallel construction for US and British intelligence agencies and its only other purpose is to smear non-state controlled journalistic outlets. There was a leaked email from another source that indicates that even internally, US intelligence agencies don't think that Bellingcat is still a good way to spread information because normal people don't believe it any more.
On the other side, Hersh is a journalist with a long track record who wrote a story that is likely true, although we won't know until if and until comes out. Won't stop nationalists from pretending that they know something that they don't. They love a traitor.
You didn't engage with the truth of their respective Skripal affair output at all.
I could have mentioned Hersh's account of the killing of Bin Laden too. At this point his track record is a lot longer than it is good. I can't keep giving him free passes based on good work done almost 50 years ago
It's not unthinkable that they'd move the transponders for a secret mission, no?
Also Hersh's point about the NATO head being an asset in his late teens is definitely feasible, as that was exactly what the Norwegian government did at the time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lund_Report
According to Hersh the bombs were planted during joint naval exercises. That's a time when lots of people would be surprised to see a ship sailing around with its transponders off.
Your link is about illegal electronic surveillance and contains nothing related to recruiting random Norwegian teenagers as agents in the hope that they would become General Secretaries of NATO 40 years later, and thus somehow (?) able to direct clandestine missions of the Norwegian Navy.
Let's turn it around: Is there something Hersh's source told him that was surprising and could be verified independently?
Edward Snowden was not, nor as far as I know did he ever claim to be, a journalist. He was at best a whistleblower, although given where he now lives and the citizenship he holds, it's clear that nothing he says or does can be trusted.
Being forced to seek asylum in Russia after multiple attempts to go elsewhere that were thwarted by the US (at the risk of major diplomatic incidents) makes you suspicious actually.
I mean it's like people completely forgot that the plane of a head of state was grounded by US allies in Europe because they suspected he might be smuggling Edward Snowden on board.
Edward Snowden has not been exiled in any non-misleading use of the term. He had many opportunities to return to the United States, and could do so today if his current hosts allowed it.
Right, but that’s not definitionally distinct from an accused murderer who skips the country. No one would use the term “exiled” in that case, even if they believe the accusation unjust.
The only reason to use “exiled” is to imply that Snowden is in Russia (or at least outside of the US) by someone’s choice other than his own. That’s what’s misleading about it.
I would have used legal avenues afforded to whistleblowers.
> Contrary to his public claims that he notified numerous NSA officials about what he believed to be illegal intelligence collection, the Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities - legal, moral, or otherwise - to any oversight officials within the U.S. government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so. Snowden was aware of these avenues. His only attempt to contact an NSA attorney revolved around a question about the legal precedence of executive orders, and his only contact to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Inspector General (IG) revolved around his disagreements with his managers about training and retention of information technology specialists.
> Despite Snowden's later public claim that he would have faced retribution for voicing concerns about intelligence activities, the Committee found that laws and regulations in effect at the time of Snowden's actions afforded him protection. The Committee routinely receives disclosures from IC contractors pursuant to the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (IC WPA). If Snowden had been worried about possible retaliation for voicing concerns about NSA activities, he could have made a disclosure to the Committee. He did not.
Are you kidding me? One of most powerful organizations in the world specialized on handling secrets and you want evidence?
They violate the US constitution and you expect them to hand out evidence?
There has been previous episodes of people (proved and documented) of people attempting to speak up and being silenced, imprisoned etc. Any person threatening to go to the press can be arrested for treason.
And if you look at similar organizations starting from 100 years ago you'll see the same patterns again and again: people who try to speak up are silenced in a way or another.
There are likely a lot of social-media agents in the comments. This, like any hot button political issue brings out lots of shills. Check this comment thread, the amount of downvoted comments speaks volumes about the quality of the community voting and the apparent importance of this site for political agents.
The Internet is full of bots and paid commenters but if you look at statistics on americans being interview regarding Snowden you'll find that a whole lot are buying into the propaganda. It's just an easy thing to do and it's socially acceptable, especially in very nationalistic country.
Hersh was extolled for speaking against the establishment. He was smeared for promoting outlandish claims with extremely thin sourcing.
And neither Snowden nor Assange are journalists at all. Snowden stole some docs and Assange runs a wiki. Assange also collaborated with Russian intelligence.
He had a TV show on RT which meant that he was literally on the Kremlin's payroll.
Its sort of interesting to me that in this thread there are a lot of people trying very hard to make indirect connections between Western journalists and Western governments. Here we have a direct connection between a "journalist" and a government and its dismissed as "misinformation".
Not in the US, but I usually see a lot of people saying don't trust the news but it's also not as if they are doing any rational thinking about it. And a lot of the times is just because news are not validating their own beliefs so I think it's even worse than just having bad news.
I don't think it takes much rational thought to realize that the news are incompetent at worst and intentionally misleading at best.
Even without validating beliefs, there are so many cases of news organizations publishing incorrect or misleading information in a rush to cover a story, only to then issue a silent correction weeks later when the damage has been done.
This weakens trust in two ways, first is just people who pay enough attention to notice the correction and gradually lose trust as they see how often that happens. The other is the more damaging, more common way, where someone has read the incorrect/misleading article and internalized the information only to find out much later that the information they internalized was incorrect (without ever seeing the original correction).
One example that comes to mind is regarding the supposed sudden Starlink outages in Ukraine back in October around when Musk was tweeting dumb stuff about appeasing Russia. CNN was quick to report the outage implying that it was unexpected by Ukraine and they were shutdown to blackmail the West into paying. This article was all over the news.
Then weeks later they put out an article stating that it was just 1300 terminals which were being provided by the UK which were shut-off due to the UK deciding not to pay for the subscription anymore, with Ukraine having been fully aware and having swapped them out beforehand with the other ~18000 still operating terminals. But this one got nowhere near the same traction and was still misleadingly headlined.
Data set of one, but the people I met claiming they don't trust the news, all take their news from youtube and random taxi drivers. This doesn't say anything about the news outlets, just about those people and their peculiar ways to "think for themselves".
I think there's a difference between not trusting the news, as in, thinking what they're saying is lies and there's actually a great conspiracy that we can work out, and not trusting the news, as in, thinking that the information that gets conveyed via news outlets is selected and presented to push public opinion in a certain self-interested direction.
I think for the most part, people who take their news from youtube and random taxi drivers fall into the former category, whereas people who vote against the party/candidate recommended (overtly or covertly) by their local paper fall into the latter category. It's quite possible that a lot of people in the latter category would say they don't trust the news as part of a national opinion survey, but they wouldn't ever outright say to a stranger "oh, don't read the stuff printed in the City Courier, it's all lies". Particularly as the news is more and more national, but the political parties continue to attract around 50% of the vote each, I'd generally expect about 50% of the population to have at least this much distrust for at least some of the news.
You’ll quickly learn not to trust the news. Not because it’s wrong – it’s pretty factual for the most part – but because it keeps trying to make you care about the wrong things. Whipping up an emotional reaction to matters that don’t affect you. Ignoring large elephants in small rooms. Talking juuuust slightly past the core issue hoping you won’t notice.
Much of news, especially daily news, is like discussing the color of a bike shed instead of the core design problems of the reactor it sits behind. Because talking about the big stuff isn’t sexy and doesn’t get the clicks.
And even when you do find a source of boring news, you’ll find that most of it affects your life not one bit. It’s just entertainment to keep you busy. In the words of a quote I once heard and can never find again: ”The news doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about”.
The quote is from the book Pre-suasion by Robert Caldini, he points out that what we focus on will elevate the importance of whatever is focused on.
This is part of the reason I don't trust the news, because they all are focusing on the same things for a few weeks and then it drops never to be heard from again. Some examples
When Trump met with Kim Jong Un everything in the news media was about North Korea for weeks, it was painted as the vital question of our times that was a clear and present danger to democracy. 3 years into Biden I have barely heard anything about NK.
Another exmaple is oil prices, does anyone else remember during the Bush years how the oil prices dominated everything in the news and the Middle East was the most important region in the world, to the point that we supposedly went to war in Iraq over oil? Yet when it was hitting $5-6 a barrel I wasn't hearing anything about it. Or how many of us have heard anything on Iraq or Syria since ISIS?
You can look for countless examples but even if it isn't outright lying by choosing what to focus on the media already sets an agenda.
It might be accurate, but that's not the priority.
Think about it: broadcasting information costs something. Nobody is going to pay that cost unless they're getting a return for it. Nobody is going out of their way to provide you with information out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it so that you buy what they're selling (e.g. pharmaceuticals, gold) or vote for their party, etc.
A lot of times that information will be technically not wrong, but that's not the goal.
Probably a selection bias at play. The people you meet who don't trust the news for reasonable reasons aren't going to come out and state it that simply because they don't want to be associated with the people who claim they don't trust the news because the have preconceived notions which they trust any source for (even if random taxi driver) and distrust any source against (even in peer reviewed research). They likely even purposefully consume the news, realizing that even as an imperfect information source it is still an information source worth the trade off between extent of imperfect and ease to consume.
I've had the same experience where it seems people who "don't trust the media" get all their news from some random facebook page or a website along the lines of realtruth-nolies-chronicle.blogspot.com.
In the US we used to feel like the news was more trustworthy even if it didn’t support our views because it maintained some pretense of neutrality and objectivity; however, that broke down as the media became increasingly politicized and sensationalized—a lot of people felt that if the media isn’t going to tell THE truth, they would find a media that would tell THEIR truth (hence your bit about “validating their own beliefs”). So we get fragmented and relative epistemology, in large part because the traditional media decided to be activist even if it meant overtly and obviously lying about things that were trivially verifiable. This is why we need to roll back to a media that aspired toward neutrality and objectivity rather than an a la carte model.
I would say its hard to do any rational thinking about come to the conclusion that the 24/h news orgs are meant to inform you.
The easy angle is product placement [1]. Literally fork over a small sum of money and you get the news org to rave about your product without doing any verification.
There's also how a headline is not written by the author so it won't always reflect the contents of the article.
> And a lot of the times is just because news are not validating their own beliefs
IMO, the news orgs have a symbiotic relation with their viewers. The viewers want their viewpoint reinforced and the news org wants views. So the news org put out a biased product so that their viewers will selectively watch that news org. However, this still means that news org aren't actually trying to inform.
My biggest gripe is how often they'll refuse to link to actual legal documents when talking about filed lawsuits and the like and in general I don't find some of their claims in the article to be as supported by the actual filings.
Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.
I’ve worked in a newsroom. The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity.
Yes, Rupert Murdoch, etc. But it’s all emergent behavior. There is no master plan. These organizations are not well run enough to deliberately get stories out in time, let alone conspire to mislead.
It doesn’t require coordination any more than a flock of birds requires some “master bird” to tell it which way to turn. When all your friends are journalists, and all your Twitter friends are journalists, and you have to think about what your journalist friends will think about what you’ve written if you want to stay gainfully employed, or when you’re looking for a job in a few years, no dictatorial Illuminati is required.
That’s the old Chomsky quote from Manufacturing Consent: "[the mass communication media of the U.S.] are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion".
There is no need for a conspiracy for the media to be misleading.
I feel like newsrooms mislead, but more of in a Manufacturing Consent/Hate Inc sense. It feels obvious after reading articles about stuff I know about, and has lead me over time to generally not trust the media as an institution. Organized conspiracies make no sense, but perverse institutional incentives at scale has a lot of explaining power.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy, its just natural for big news corporations to promote news that benefits big news corporations, and to stay quiet about the news that doesn't benefit them
Conspire, no, but the emergent behavior is like stochastic terrorism; if everyone in the chain of production places their finger slightly on the same side of the scale, you can very easily end up with a very misleading result. You can produce misleading news by who you don't cover as much as who you do.
A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.
> A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.
That is a demand from a trans advocacy group. They don't want criticism of the movement they are promoting because it brings up uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's rights, and the medical abuse of children. Rather than addressing these questions, they attempt to shut down any coverage. Much of social media has been censored this way already, and they are attempting complete ideological capture of traditional media too.
> uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's rights
The only right alleged is a right to exclude trans women, and consequentially a right to screen all women suspected of being trans.
> and the medical abuse of children
The children in question want to transition, and their parents or the state want to prevent them; defining this as "abuse" without actually listening to the allegedly abused is the problem.
That is of course just your opinion, and reflects only one side of the issue. It would be a very biased journalism if only this and closely similar viewpoints were to be promoted.
Which is basically what the NYT said in their response:
"We received the letter from GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD sees our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and The Times's journalistic mission are different.
"As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
"The very news stories criticized by GLAAD in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society - to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we're proud of it."
Children also want to only eat chocolate coco puffs, so it gets complicated (parenting is hard) how to care for them when clearly their strongly held beliefs should be questioned.
I was in 2 tv interviews so far and both of them have released footage that totally and entirelly distorted the message to an infuriating degree. This was in a top tier European country, once state tv , once a major private station.
Complete red herring. The question as asked does not require a conspiracy. It doesn't even require all news organizations to be pulling in the same direction.
This line assumes that each person exists in the world as an ideal individual, subject only to their own independent logic, biases, and whims. In reality, we all have concrete material interests which are determined by concrete economic relations. Our logic, biases, and whims—the very nature of our consciousness—all flow from our material and social reality.
These material interests are not entirely individual and distinct; they fall within broad strata based on the overall structure of the economy (e.g., the class of people with the capacity to own a major media organization and the class of people who make a living by serving them). Thus, there is no need for a conscious conspiracy coordinating every aspect of the media machine since the basic character of the consciousness of those involved flows from a more fundamental material reality. At the same time, there’s no reason one can’t become consciously aware of the stratum of shared material interests that one exists within, and I think it would be foolish to assume that the people at the highest levels of power and wealth in the world have failed to do so.
This is mostly due to local news stations being lazy and regurgitating copy without doing any work on their own. The way news works involves stories and information being piped from party to party. Much of it comes from the AP or major national news bodies. Having seen how the sausage is made for these small local outfits, they are often run on a low budget with limited staff, old equipment and little bandwidth for their own editorial work outside of specific local news. Anything larger is likely going to be a copy paste job. The same is true for the weatherman. He's mostly just reading what the weather service puts out.
Plus aren't a ton of local news stations owned by Sinclair? MBA Bean Counting 101 would suggest that if you owned 200 news channels across the country that the first thing you'd do is look for stories that are relevant across all (or multiple) channels then pay 1 person to write it once. Rather than paying 200 people to write the story 200 times.
You'd also likely want to implement standards around language use that would create a consistent product with broad appeal, limit an editor's ability to go off the rails and do something that would harm the brand image, and that limits legal liability.
No it’s not due to laziness. Most local news is now owned by conglomerates or hedge funds that are “streamlining” them, removing their journalists and circulating non-local stories from other sources they own. The vast majority of “local” news - print or television, has been bought up. Sinclair, digital first media, Gannett, Tribune, etc. all own vast swaths of the “local” news media landscape.
The problem there is consolidated ownership of local television. Sinclair and Nexstar own the majority of TV stations in this country that aren't owned and operated (O&O) by the networks themselves. Actual local television ownership is dwindling, and those stations lose network affiliation, because the networks would rather work with large station groups to get more money in retransmission fees (as stations getting paid more money by operators means that the networks can demand more money from all affiliates).
Oh, I agree it's all (or at least mostly) emergent behavior. I also believe that a lot of reporters are misleading me, either because they have their own agenda (which often but not always lines up with the overall bias of the organization they work for) or because they're just overworked and it's easier to parrot someone's simplified narrative then do the real research.
Not directly related, but I've come to really appreciate the idea that a drug cartel is the ultimate example of a conspiracy, because not does it fit the definition really well, but it demonstrates what one actually looks like. There's no shadowy boardroom of hooded figures meeting in some underground bunker, but rather playboys loudly broadcasting their wealth & power with only the barest minimum of deniability maintained at the legal perspective, with the general populace fully aware but powerless to really do anything about it. And yet, it still is a multi-national network of coordinated logistics and execution for multiple tons of product that both the official powers & general public would really prefer to not to be there.
The scary part is that they don't conspire to mislead. They actually believe their own bullshit. It's enforced ideological conformity in hiring and groupthink. If they were organized Machiavellian propagandists, I could at least respect the skills.
Sure, it's emergent behaviour, and it emerges from having an intuitive feel for how to avoid upsetting the wrong people. If you lack finely tuned antennas on such matters, you don't get ahead.
Most of all, you understand the risk of breaking rank. If you look at a story, and think "hey, why aren't others covering this story? Why aren't more people upset at this? Shouldn't this be a big deal?", you either learn to think "No. Everything is all right in the media world." or you have a bad, bad time.
It doesn't require central coordination, a distributed norm enforcement network causing self-censorship is fine. In this case, it's done by Twitter: all journalists are on Twitter, all journalists are petrified of saying something that will upset the other journalists on Twitter, and so they all self-censor to not do that. No master plan needed.
> Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.
But they are not well co-ordinated or executed, that is the reason many people are catching on to the manufactured narratives.
This isn't done by some Matrix-type entity or does it need to be run by something as perfect as an AGI. All it takes is to have the top editors deciding which stories to run and with what narrative.
Of course this break down as the rank and file journalist are the ones in charge of writing the stories and presenting them.
And the people at the top of this aren't by any matter a cohesive group or a big brother type entity rather just people with money and power doing what they think will help them keep money and power.
I think the main argument here is not that they're conspiring to mislead. It's that they wouldn't be mainstream media if they weren't willing to publish propaganda.
There’s misleading snd there’s misleading. I’ve never worked in a newsroom. However it seem natural to me that changed incentivises (i.e. clicks / engagement) would change how content is written.
I’m fairly distrusting in even my preferred primary news source, not because I suspect that there’s some grand conspiracy, but because the system under which modern journalists (seem to) operate encourages very subtly but very consistently stretching the truth. The KPIs are the puppet master.
America believes in in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities because they've done those themselves multiple times.
- nuclear bombs
- the man on the moon
- darpa's internet
Superhuman coordination and execution abilities along with extreme secrecy as needed.
I have problem organizing 2 intelligent people to place dirty laundry in the laundry box or to do their homework on time or to place dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
But there's a mastermind somewhere who can organize something so complex, with so many variables where each depends on a human being of varying intellect and skillset and the plan is so intricate that out of 100,000 possibilities - all of them play in the hand of the mastermind. And the plan includes the two from above, who can barely get a cup of water when they're thirsty!
If such mastermind existed, I wouldn't even be angry for being manipulated - in fact, I would like to continue to be manipulated because if such a person (or group) existed - please, continue! Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.
Why wouldn't I imagine first that there exists a mastermind capable of weaving order out of chaos using divine ability granted to them by the Excalibur Fairy after praying at the Stonehenge?
The story you're portraying doesn't need any kind of imagination, Hanlon's razor works perfectly well there and doesn't require any kind of special ability granted by smoking weed while doing nothing besides looking for conspiracies.
> Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.
Religion shaping culture, and thus the decisions of countless people to go out and actually kill each other is a thing. Divine? I think so.
Culture is programming for the masses. Is culture a conspiracy? Our intel agencies have caught onto this, color revolutions are a conspiracies, but the victims of such revolutions would hardly consider their own deeply held beliefs and subsequent actions to be conspiratorial.
Culture shaping happens now at an insane speed with everything from the search engines we use, to the radio, tv, music, advertisements, and so on. If you can pull those levers, people will act accordingly. Pfizer has advertising dollars everywhere. Is it a conspiracy that people will literally stake their professions on defending Pfizer vaccines?
You are right, and I did not intend to imply otherwise. I just mean that he bases this particular opinion on unfounded claims, as an example that even he can be led astray.
Can you link to where anybody has redefined vaccine, and also evidence that the vaccinated become more likely to catch it than the unvaccinated? All that sounds like complete baloney.
Here you go - maybe you can reconsider your priors for classifying things as baloney now? Gov and media put a lot of effort into breaking our intuitions about their trustworthiness. Your gut reaction is the one we're trained to have.
CDC changed their definition of vaccine and vaccination:
> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.”
> The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
> Merriam-Webster revised its "vaccine" definition to replace "immunity" with "immune response."
This was done when it became clear that COVID vaccines didn't actually create any kind of immunity and thus weren't technically vaccines. Like always in public health they fixed this problem by manipulating language - now it only has to provoke some sort of response from the body. If that response turns out to be useless or actively harmful, no big deal, it's still a vaccine.
Observe that this change totally alters the meaning of being anti-vaxx. Take a substance that provokes an immune response but it's the wrong sort of response and doesn't work, diverting the immune system into wasting time whilst the virus replicates. It is 100% rational to oppose such a useless product, but by subtly manipulating the definition of vaccine they have now trained people to consider such opposition anti-vaxx and therefore automatically irrational.
Unfortunately this problem is not theoretical, bringing us to negative efficacy. It exists and is visible in many studies, but hidden by governments which use a variety of invalid statistical methodologies to alter the raw data, which is kept secret. Nonetheless, they aren't the only ones that can count cases. It's a big topic but some studies and explanations of what's going on can be found here:
The root biological cause seems to be related to the definitional game playing. The vaccines targeted the 2019 Wuhan spike and the antibodies vaccinated people produce are meant to dock with those specific proteins. But by the time vaccination is rolling out big time we are already at Delta, the virus spike has evolved quite significantly and the antibodies aren't so effective anymore. The body doesn't seem to recognize this quickly enough and spends a lot of time producing the wrong sort of antibodies, thinking it's successfully fighting the invader. Unvaccinated people have immune systems that haven't been trained in any way, so their first real SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the antibody learning process immediately and they develop immunity to the latest version of the virus quicker.
This problem is called imprinting and is visible in the booster and bivalent trials. They didn't help reduce COVID cases and even made them higher - actually 100% of test subjects got COVID when exposed in the bivalent trials, but the vaccines were approved anyway because under the new definition they only need to provoke an immune response of some kind, not create immunity. Public health responded to failure by conflating the means and the end.
The media never covered any of this and systematically attacked the independent bloggers and researchers who did. Which is why smart people don't trust them.
Truth be told, it's high time we (everyone not only Americans at this point) have a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to media -all media including or especially the ones you "trust" or are on "your" side.
This is a good thing. For too long the media was trusted as a believable source of acceptable impartiality and truth.
The audience has matured and no longer believe in the fairy truth teller.
Best headline: half of Americans don't know that (many) news organizations deliberately mislead them and all of them are watching cable news.
Aka cable news (one site specifically with the largest reach) is constantly engaging in deception and the viewership doesn't know. Other orgs are also engaged in deception but not with the same level of flagrant abuse.
I believe Fox has the biggest viewership, and are in a huge lawsuit right now about how much they misled people about the last presidential election. Is that who you meant?
My biggest gripe with the news, and the journalist class, is they don't report on themselves enough or really at all.
All media critique comes form comedians these days. Which is kind of grim because sometimes things actually matter and aren't just jokes. Yet Journalist A gets to carry water for criminal X, and Journalist B doesn't say anything about it. Then some comedian makes a joke and everyone moves on. The journalists still get to be journalists. The comedian's are making jokes and were all out here seeing no consequences for anything.
The post truth world of journalism isn't fun.
There's checks and balances in government, but the 4th estate just seems to be a wild lands of bullshit and can't check itself. And those same Journalists seem to think this is a good system.
Anyway rant over. I use patreon to support indie media and news I like. But even that has downsides, filter bubbles etc.
Do you have an example from the last year how CNN deliberately misled? How often does that happen?
My view is that serious news organizations clearly don't deliberately mislead but they have some amount of bias and contain inaccuracies as a result of low-quality reporting.
And I think the perception of "MSM" which is common among the group of people which includes Elon / libertarians / MAGA fanatics / alt-right is obviously wrong and stupid.
The official white house spokesperson said it was a secret message:
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated, "I think the President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."[4]
Because admitting to a typo in an unfinished, now deleted tweet was apparently impossible for the man in charge of nuclear weapons. That's worth a bit of coverage.
There wasn't non-stop coverage: a couple of stories when it came out, and months later some separate coverage of a bill introduced in Congress to require official social media accounts to be archived which was given that nickname.
This is just bad trolling. The Mueller report points out numerous issues within the campaign. I highly recommend reading its executive summary (~7 pages) if you think it doesn't.
Disappointing having to rehash this stuff years later, but then again there was a concerted effort by Trump to rewrite these past years as a witch hunt and a rigged election. The election claims fell flat, and Durham's investigation produced very little to back that narrative. After all that hubbub I have no faith in these attempts to rewrite russiagate as just a political campaign attack.
The entire China narrative is a CIA psyop. Everywhere in the media you see China being portrayed as a massive threat, a looming threat to our national security. Every event in global politics involving China is twisted to fit this narrative by the media lapdogs of the CIA. Nothing could be further from the truth. China is extremely weak both geopolitically and in terms of leadership. It is the most geopolitically vulnerable country in the world besides Yemen et al. It has to import everything from food to intellectual goods. China poses precisely zero threat to us because China sucks.
The China balloon thing is a good example. It was an embarrassing mistake that was a result of disintegrating leadership structure in the cpp. It accomplished literally nothing and never could have. But these huge obvious questions were ignored by the media. Questions like “what did they stand to gain?” Nothing. “Was this deliberate?” Not on the part of ping. “What does this say about China?” That they are a joke of a country.
Look at mike baker on joe rogan. That’s how the CIA answered the rogan question, what are we going to do about this pesky guy who has a larger audience than cnn but isn’t a slimy media executive who would be receptive to our requests to shape the narrative around certain topics? They send in mike baker who handily fools rogan into thinking he’s just a good dude who used to be a spook. And they chit chat and once in a while, when the conversation turns to something geopolitical, mike sprinkles in some CIA narrative. Never believe anything a spook says.
The CIA and FBI are behind this thrust against disinformation. Where was this disinformation frenzy at when it comes to people believing in even more wild shit like the idea that the universe keeps track of your good and bad deeds and punishes you or rewards you accordingly? Or the belief that the position of the stars and planets determines what personality your baby will have or whether or not you’ll be given a promotion? If disinformation mattered as a principle then wouldn’t these things make liberals foam at the mouth too?
It’s so ironic that the liberal camp has become the exact opposite of what it used to be. It is the vassal of the CIA and FBI.
You cannot have politicians and media telling people day in and day out that people who don't look like you or believe like you are the enemy and not have people try and hurt their "enemy". You can't.
What would you call The New York Times's 1619 Project? Historians tore it apart. Non-historian and simply rational human beings did as well. The entire project is a propaganda piece with a goal that requires deliberately misleading the public.
News organizations write articles and headlines to deliberately mislead people if it means those people will click on those headlines, open up an article, and engage with some ads. Is this so controversial that nearly half of people disagree?
This doesn’t come from a partisanship bias, as nearly all well known media outlets, large and small, engage in that behavior. Their content often still has some value, and we need both hard and soft reporting to make sense of this world. That doesn’t mean all this content is motivated or framed by some selfless desire to shine the brightest light on the darkest places at any cost.
I don’t think automatically equating skepticism with conspiracy theory adoption is fair. I can’t really think of any conspiracy theory I buy into.
I don’t disagree, but the impressive syntactical gymnastics you did to obfuscate the motivation (“get clicks”) and the guilty act (“intentionally mislead”) is telling.
Untangling that sentence gets us the much clearer, and I think more accurate, “new organizations chase clicks without any interest in whether their headlines are true or false”.
Skepticism is not conspiratorial thinking, of course. I meant it in the most narrow way — many people in this thread believe, without evidence, that some group of people is consciously coordinating massive distortions of news to further specific ends.
Lot of people think that all the media are lying to them but some random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or globalists is the one true news source.
> random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or globalists is the one true news source.
Seymour Hersh, Jeff Gerth and the CJR, Wemple at the WaPo, Chris Hedges (ex-NYT Middle East bureau chief, ex-NYT Balkans bureau chief during the Yugoslav wars.)
Not to mention recent nonpersons like Taibbi or Greenwald.
You were required to read and believe what these people wrote in order to get your liberal card in the very recent past, but for having the wrong opinions on rising nationalism they get demoted to "random guys."
I don't see a conspiracy at all. Sentiment analysis of the news shows a strong shift to fear and anger. Those emotions drive engagement. People here didn't like when the Facebook news feed was surfacing these things to the top to drive engagement, but seem to be more OK with human editors doing it.
The problem is that people look at some (relatively rare) media lie, decide mainstream media aren't trustworthy and go to "alternative" media that lie all the time.
I realized that a lot of MSM was grox turds when they spent two full weeks of nonstop coverage on covefe and whether it was some sort of secret Nazi dog whistle. If anyone can defend why we needed to spend 2 weeks on covefe though I'm all ears.
A lot of people who come to the conclusion that news is 'fake' have a gateway moment. Mine is from 25 years ago and something rather silly. In this particular case a typo. What we see out of the email dumps on twitter should scare many this is the case. They were having twitter 'take care of it'. To pretend they are not doing this to our media and other web sources would be a bit of a stretch to say the least. Our media is manipulated. Seeing good sources amongst the sea of bad ones is a tough ask.
I'm not sure anyone has ever suggested that Twitter (in general) is a reliable source of information, so I'm not sure why you bring it up. Apart form that, perhaps I am misunderstanding, but you seem to be saying that you decided not to trust the news because you saw a typo in a news story 25 years ago. I'm doing my best to be charitable here, but how can that possibly make any sense?
It is the 'fake item' that leads you to other fake items. You find the patterns and see the uncharitable takes. You see the mockingbird style reporting. It is the gateway moment I was pointing out. You start with something small and it grows. You can not un-see it. A gateway moment for them was a typo. Mine was a repeated story over and over as I traveled between cities and timezones but presented as if that particular news org had wrote it all up by themselves. When it was just mad-lib style fill in the blank.
I bring up twitter and did not claim it was 'authoritative' but to show that behind the scenes our political machine is shaping the narrative. Spiking stories and promoting others. The people who run those orgs are doing it gladly. To pretend the same thing that happened at twitter is not happening at NBC/CNN/FOX/NYT/etc would be a bold claim. Like you point out twitter is not that valuable but they made a point of it to do it. Proper suppression of people and censorship and narrative shaping. The very same people who used to say 'the internet see censorship as damage and routes around it' are the very ones building a censorship news controlling apparatus. Then gaslighting us with 'how dare you question them they are doing it for our safety!'
News is very unreliable in most forms. You can push particular opinions very easily. It is not that hard to do. Our news is basically gossip and talk shows. With news as the thin premise that they are doing.
Here's the reality: The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness. I worked with a bunch of really talented reporters and editors throughout my career, and almost without exception, they highly valued those things. Moreover, many have an anti-authoritarian bent, and that leads to a desire to expose corruption, rather than protect it.
But ...
* I've seen publishers kill stories because they thought it would make advertisers unhappy.
* I've seen senior execs put pressure on editors to downplay stories that painted the region in a bad light.
* I've seen a political campaign refuse to permit a certain reporter to attend their campaign events because they didn't like that the reporter wasn't acting like a PR tool.
* I've seen budgets for "watchdog journalism" become slowly starved, in favor of clickbait.
And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business (who are really trying to make money and exert influence).
Granted, there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued, and unfortunately that's where a lot of eyeballs end up these days, because so many people just want their existing biases to be re-inforced.
But what America really needs is more media literacy, so we can better distinguish the former from the latter. We, as a society, are SO BAD at this. Our B.S. detectors have lots of false positives and false negatives. We look to the wrong signals to determine whether a news report is trustworthy. We fail to evaluate information critically as long as it validates our pre-existing views. We have a hard time separating facts from opinions.
This lack of media literacy is worrisome enough, but now we've got political leaders capitalizing on the fact that we're bad at this and actively trying to delegitimize the media (as if it's a single thing) because it serves their own purposes.