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.
