Media trust hits new low(axios.com) |
Media trust hits new low(axios.com) |
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We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’
Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. (shouting) You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’
I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!…You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’
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The only way I see people regaining trust in established media organisations is if they were “watching them burn”. The distrust is so built in now that to be trustworthy they have to be actively engaged in blatant self sabotage before we can overcome our collective cynicism. For us to trust them they must believe the “truth” they wish to tell us so much they are willing to self-immolate in-front of their audience otherwise how can we possibly tell it isn’t yet another marketing campaign for someone pulling the strings we haven’t seen yet.
This is exactly the goals of their strategy
Here's a video of him directly asking politicians at a city council meeting about corruption with a local developer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99IeGqIIHj4
They have since approved a project that was competing with the corrupt developer and the corrupt developer is facing federal charges: https://apnews.com/article/f7a7fdb3057548009072601729a2dc2c
Yeah, agree, Stossel is great, and even if heavily biased, he's what journalism should be about: exposing malfeasance.
He used to be part of the media establishment, but I guess got cast out when he decided to be an actual journalist.
I don't know whether it is better to lean into our political biases or to just not play the game at all.
Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Jimmy Dore, Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi might not be _your_ left but they are certainly and firmly on the left.
I hope you manage to find whatever peace it is you're looking for in life.
If you "knew the people", you would know that about him, it's not particularly something he attempted to hide, which is why I make my comment of not being able to understand why you're paying for him. Why would you pay for somebody's outright lies?
In the advent of social media being a megaphone and a news source nowadays, media organizations ceased to own the monopoly of news.
It doesn't help matters that old media is busy cannibalizing the very thing that built its brand: quality journalism.
Very common to see media organizations these days report government speech as facts. Investigative journalism is nothing but an old fable now.
I wonder what a social media landscape would look like if we managed to implement UBI. Effectively we would have any number of financially independent news sources and aggregators.
This is of course the same thing as "subsidies" but without professional ethics etc.
It's going to be interesting looking for a new news model for the coming decades.
This article lacks any self-reflection at all. Summary: media good, public bad, trust your ruling elite.
maybe I'd have trust in media, if they provided balanced view from various sides and not push their agenda, also hiring any kid which can type sentence with autocorrect, but make basic logical errors doesn't fill me with trust in such media
Coincidentally, this seems to align pretty well with countries that don't have a bunch of media outlets owned by the Murdoch empire... curious.
Which one is that exactly?
The couple of western democracies I am familiar with all have similar problems with their mainstream medias.
The UK has the problem at a smaller scale. Other western countries have problems with trust in media but I'd argue they don't have the same level of invented reality as the US.
That about sums it up. The lies are fine, the problem is that nobody believes them. But let's imagine that the media wanted to regain the trust of the public by being more trustworthy.
Here is some advice:
Acknowledge bias. Too many in the media try to portray themselves as truth-tellers, and everyone else has hopelessly biased propagandists. Just own it. Be clear about ideological positions and points of agreement and disagreement with other political actors.
Acknowledge uncertainty. The truth is out there, but we often don't know what it is. Be willing to delay judgement until the facts are in, update conclusions when new evidence surfaces, and treat some "facts" as tentative when they're based on weak or the balance of contradictory evidence.
Criticize allies. If somebody is lying to support a conclusion you agree with, call them out. The ends do not justify the means.
Praise opponents. When "the other side" says something you agree with, say so, without any caveats about the other stuff you still disagree with. When they tell the truth, acknowledge the honesty. If they argue in good faith, engage with the ideas in good faith.
In the end, this stuff is not that hard for people that actually care about the truth. It doesn't seem like the media does anymore. Instead, they're mostly engaged in tribalism: signaling loyalty to the tribe, disseminating dogma and asserting the moral superiority of the tribe. No wonder trust is so low.
And what people can do is educating themselves about news literacy, to better get the git out of the opinionated-purposeful-news (and sometime misleading).
Claiming it is a central part of someone's identity, and article of faith, and that they can't be argued out of it, is dead wrong. It is the result of misinformation being spread by the news media, refusal to retract incorrect articles, clear bias and manipulation. If that behavior stopped, over a long period of time trust would be regained.
They are correct that it isn't just the US, it is all across the Anglosphere. Just today:
1. In NZ at newshub an article claimed not that the evidence supporting use of Ivermectin in cases of COVID-19 wasn't compelling but that there "is no evidence that supports the use of [Ivermectin] in the treatment of COVID-19." I know that's a lie because I have a folder of scores of research papers on this topic.
2. Fake news about a Hospital in Oklahoma backed up by Ivermectin overdose patients. Not retracted. Amplified by Rachel Maddow.
3. Same newshub (and other outlets) posted about a backlash against David Seymour. That's true, but they took an ideological position against David Seymour. They could have taken an inverse ideological position arguing that David was fighting against institutional racism on behalf of underrepresented people in need that happen to not be Maori... or better yet remained neutral. My stomach turns every time I see this government use race as the determining factor in who gets special treatment, instead of "poverty" or "low vaccine uptake" or any other property... I don't argue this point for myself (I'm highly privileged) but for countless underprivileged of other races like Indonesian or Malaysian or Palestinean who need help but get turned away because they aren't Maori.
That's just today. This shit has been going on for years now.
At this point, most people will never again trust the media for the rest of their lives.
It took a while to realise this. Am glad I read it.
Just seems poorly thought out.
Look at this thread describing all the politically-motivated media spinners caught in a blatant lie.
Unfortunately science has said a lot of controversial things, not because it has failed but because it’s a new “thing” and must be studied and examined. So media have reported correct everything but the infos, at the beginning, were a bit misleading, like for the UNHCR with “no mask, then yes mask” or the story with AstraZeneca vaccine or the third shot etc…
Plus the “Afghanistan gate” where all media were reporting “Kabul can resists 3 months” and 7 days after it was in the Taliban’s hands.
And don’t forget all the infos on Facebook and other media, people are getting their infos on socials unfortunately, not because they’re more reliable but because they can confirm they’re theories. I mean a no-vax on FB will receive more no-vax infos due to the algorithm biases, so he will keep getting infos and trust in FB.
That’s not good by the way, we need more great journalists and newspapers!
But yes, I find certainty puts me off. Its the big axiom for every superhero movie out there. (IF we are certain that that guy there is a bad evil person about to do bad evil things then, hell, yes, Hulk can smash, or shoot him with an arrow / laser / Hammer). All good.
Any possibility that he is not evil ... or that he has a valid agenda. Well we are back in the real world again.
I can sponsor an open source project whose work I like. Likewise I can (and have) sponsored musicians.
Why couldn’t a corporation sponsor someone who for example makes youtube videos about fashion, or a tech blogger for that matter?
This is an extremely weird and disturbing conclusion. Orwellian even.
What’s needed is for news organizations to not only report facts, but stop telling stories in ways that only benefit their own ideological systems.
That’s unlikely to happen with existing brands that have effectively now chosen a side, because they have cultivated an audience that now expects them to keep delivering.
It might happen with something new.
If you aren't a mainstream politician, you literally have to buy ads to get coverage. Outside of politics it works this way as well. Heck, just look at games journalism.
News channels also hate absolutely anything that takes attention away from their content and their advertisers. Thus video games, dungeons & dragons, religion or anything else that holds the attention of masses of people are to be branded as societal evils.
The best thing that literally everyone can do is stop watching and focus on what's important in your life. Build the community around you.
This is not a new phenomenon; it’s been happening for a looooong time. Look at the difference in how white and Black newspapers reported on the Tulsa race massacre [1]:
”More Than Two Hundred White and Colored Men, Women and Children Were Killed in the Bloody or Horrible Race Riots at Tulsa, Okla.”
vs.
“Two Whites Dead in Race Riot” and “Many More Whites Are Shot”
All factual headlines! But some of them pretty egregiously support one particular ideological position. This was a full century ago.
[1] https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/05/tulsa-race-...
It was when the New York Times decided to start capitalizing black but not white I knew they were done being objective and had turned to activism.
Their explanation that all black people worldwide share a common culture but all white people do not is just absurd.
They’re not a serious news organization and haven’t been for some time.
!
Ironic timing considering how just earlier today we were discussing how Rolling Stone's story about gunshot victims being left waiting because of ivermectin overdoses was determined to be false. Talk about a perfect example of a credulously reported story that made it halfway around the globe, retweeted by MSNBC anchors and foreign news outlets, all because it played into the prejudices of journalists and the narrative they wanted to promote. And the whole thing was based on the commentary of one doctor, who apparently hadn't even worked at the hospital in question for months.
It's remarkable that journalists can complain about the public's declining trust while fiascos like this happen on a regular basis, and Axios and their contemporaries either downplay it or sweep it under the carpet.
Previous discussion of the ivermectin hospitalization story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421638
We have to remember that the media is like this because this is apparently what people want to consume. The old, traditional way is not one that will keep the bills paid. The incentives are all out of alignment with no obvious way to fix them.
I think the worst part of this is the authoritarian tendencies that are creeping in as people try to maintain a guise of being trustworthy as others begin to look for "trust" elsewhere.
But their audience is decreasing, so I'm not sure that it's actually what people want. It seems to me that it's more of a "cashing in" thing. They built up trust for generations by mostly reporting factually with little bias, and the current generation is cashing in by abusing that trust to advance their personal politics (short-sighted as that may be), support "the system" (conspiracy!), or both.
Especially when their revenue depends on it.
It is a net of trust.
What do you mean by a ‘net of trust’?
Is this a bad joke? Distrust of media is largely brought about because it is (mostly) in the private sector and therefore always puts the sustainability of its business model above objective reporting. We've known for a while now that negative news sells, clickbait sells, and media organizations are all too happy to push it out there if it helps their struggling bottom line.
This article seems to think that trust is it's own fungible but inconvertible substance (the media has lost theirs, so someone else needs to give them some), rather than something that derives from an objective reality.
People trust repeated liers all the time. And truth telling institutions are rarely most trusted popular ones.
In order to be effective news source, you need to separate truth and opinion. Reporting stories even if they're uncomfortable for their own customer base goes directly against their business interest (revenue, clickrate, etc.). So echo chambers get louder. Trust is earned by consistently confronting difficult facts.
Ends up as
> CEOs have long put themselves forward as the people able to upgrade America's physical infrastructure. Now it's time for them to use the trust they've built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure.
Who's trusting most CEOs?
Being charitable, I guess people are trusting people who are actually able to put money into their hands and food on their table, rather than people who make promises or give abstract benefits or who take money from them?
The survey data itself sounds plausible, and I've got no immediate reason to question the numbers. But when it comes to interpretation and next steps, Edelman very much has a point of view that predates whatever the data has found.
In other words: This article itself contributes more to increase mistrust in the media than it increases the trust in the media.
Especially considering this quote from the article: Axios has a stated mission to "help restore trust in fact-based news".
There is no explanation given for why trust is diminishing or what CEOs are supposed to do to fix it.
As far as I can see the problem is that media really has always been ideologically biased, but the advent of social media and the ease of getting news online has made this obvious.
We can’t ‘fix’ the problem because it’s not broken. The only solution is a kind of upgrade that current media organizations simply aren’t built to deliver.
This attitude here, is a source of the problem by itself. If traditional media outlets would just put truthful information out without trying to get it "accepted," that would go a long way in rebuilding trust.
When you are aware of the ground situation and see articles in the Washington Post that are clearly completely false, misleading, and spinning facts with a clear purpose of advancing a narrative, (and trying to be "accepted"? by whom?) that completely destroys any remaining trust that you might have built up over the years.
I think this Ivermectin debate has nothing to do with Ivermectin, but about big pharma attempting to usurp power via several government agencies who also want power as they are now being put in charge of things they were never designed for and are not well constituted to handle (things your doctor should be in charge of).
I think this Afghanistan withdrawal was intentionally botched in order to try to get American support for going back in, by sick-minded money-hungry monsters.
You have to listen to many people and then figure out who you trust and on what topics. The most trustworthy and intelligent voices are podcasters. But each has their failings and none should be held up on a pedestal. I trust Glenn Greenwald, but not on topics regarding Socialism. I trust Bret Weinstein, but I don't trust his judgement of other people (he seems far too forgiving and trusting of others) [I took the vaccine and don't take Ivermectin]. Those are just examples.
Perfection.
We're in quite a pickle, and I don't know what to do, but I now know to be extremely suspect of axios.
There are many small teams on YouTube and other places that are building up a community of patrons to sponsor their efforts, both in news and other areas.
It is through these efforts that I see a replacement for the mass media emerging. Their dedicated non-advertiser driven source of support allows them to take risks that are simply not possible otherwise. They can tell the truth without worry of offending corporate overlords, or other institutions.
For me the realization that the mainstream media was not fulfilling their role anymore was:
- following 9/11, when *none* of the mainstream outlets had the guts to question the decisions to go into Iraq and all aligned to sing 'hail to the chief' in base fear of being called anti-american.
- in 2005, when the danish mohamed cartoons crisis came and went and most the American main media cowardly caved in to pressure and refused to publish the cartoons [1] [2] [3]
What worries me is that we do indeed need some social apparatus than can speak truth to power, and there isn't anything yet that I can see that will provide that: the internet style wannabe replacement (blogs, YT pundits, etc...) are just too diluted for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_that_reprin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cartoons_that_Shook_the_Wo...
For some examples, you will not find any high-level media people (senior editors, senior reporters) at any US institution who believe the Vietnam war was an act of aggression, who believe George Bush Jr was a war criminal, who believe consumerism and economic growth are not a net good in the world, who believe the USA is most responsible for the state of the Middle East, who believe Cuba has often been a force for good in the world and the illegal embargo against it should be lifted, who believe Israel is an apartheid state performing daily acts of aggression against Palestine, who believe that its fair and good for people who don't work to be poor and miserable, and so on.
You don't have to accept these views as true, but you should still note that CNN and The New York Times and Fox News and Breitbart all agree on the bedrock narrative of the USA's fundamentally noble role in the world, its fairness to its citizens, its desire to do good, even if they disagree on a few specifics and may or may not think there were some mistakes along the way.
To me it seems that having people distrust this media is like having people distrust Pravda in the USSR: absolutely crucial if they are to think of a better world. Now of course, some people stop trusting the NYT and move to trusting flat earth groups on FB, which is worse. But I believe that the great good that comes from realizing you shouldn't trust those in authority simply because you've been taught to will see a slow but fundamental shift in society. One that news organizations and PR firms and other propaganda machines will fight tooth and nail, as this article shows.
Even a world where, say, 90% of media is impeccable, but 10% is bullshit, is like a poker game where 10% of the players are shamelessly cheating while loudly telling you the game is rigged. They are correct: they broke the game.
It's really, really hard to compete against shameless cheats and liars.
It's just one line but they've spent the whole post talking about how media is not trusted and then end it with a clearly opinionated bottom line.
How does this help?
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust...
People need to first take responsibility for the governments they elect. Then they need feel like "We the people" are in charge. Not some nefarious organization that we have no power over.
We need smaller, more local, more connected, more transparent governments.
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately it seems that power only ever gets more concentrated at a higher level, there's rarely a decentralization of power, so local governments have less and less influence over people's lives and matter less and less.
- Infotainment - Tribal reinforcement - Irrelevant - Not actionable (and thus, depressing) - Making people think the world is getting worse - Immediate and not well thought out or nuanced
In some ways it's their fault, but on the other hand, the modern reader won't pay for news. Maybe it's largely a business model problem?
It's literally killing people and needs to be disrupted, fixed.
One such group is media - who elected them? How come they have so much monopolistic power over your mind? How come they have the nerve to decide what is good or bad for the elected president and his administration? Who are they?...
... Power structure slowly is eroded by groups of people who do not have neither qualifications nor will of people to keep them in power. Yet they do have power."
-Yuri Bezmenov, describing how to slowly infiltrate the culture of a targeted society [0]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
Media, since it's mass existence, has always had an outsized, unelected influence. And it has never been a monopoly ( baring wartime censorship and control) because there have always been more than one institutions, which have an interest in competing, at least to some extent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edelman_(firm)#Controversies
I would argue that it's the divisive political environment and style of reporting that Axios does (see below) that creates an "uninformed public" which creates that distrust. Note in places like Finland (where there is more consensus politics and more people read newspapers) media trust has increased https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finland_has_highest_trust....
"VandeHei said he wanted Axios to be a "mix between The Economist and Twitter"..."Axios's articles are typically brief and matter-of-fact: most are shorter than 300 words and use bullet points so they are easier to scan"
https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1434591443855753220
* Here are several basic facts
* Here is our best interpretation of the facts given the context.
* here are interpretations that the other side(s) are putting forth, stated in their strongest form such that they would agree with it as stated
* here is our analysis of why those other interpretations are not as strong as our own.
You could maybe rank or sort these based on how many 'other siders' agree with (upvote) their presentation of the other side mixed with how much you agree with the basis of their analysis to choose your favorite sources of commentary.
Every article was made of the 4 exact parts you quoted, but used in bad faith. Especially “the opposing side, in their strongest argument” all relies on subjective interpretation. Words can always be twisted.
Perhaps people are starting to think that having media as a “central institution” is not actually good for society.
Even George Washington had trouble with the press and lamented how often he was maligned and misrepresented in the papers.
“He regarded the press as a disuniting, "diabolical" force of falsehoods, sentiments that he expressed in his Farewell Address.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington and the citation is from a book.
If you need real news, use Bloomberg, AP, Reuters... Yeah that's $1500 per month, and even more importantly, they are too boring to read for an average person, so they wouldn't be popular even if they were free. People who make actual decisions based on news, read them, for rest, there is this "newstainment" industry and it's no problem at all if it's not trustworthy.
On the one hand you blame "MASS media" (whatever that is to you) and on the other you advocate to use AP and Reuters, where most media outlets get large chunks of their news from. AP and Reuters exist so others, often smaller, media companies don't have to do intensive research into everyday news. If something is a target for manipulation, it's AP, Reuters, and similar.
We need to make sure these organs hold to the public interest principle, and also that they can maintain reliable funding.
Owned 56% by the state.
In which sense did it happen? They didn't report on it or they did without "quoting the opposing side"? Specifically in the case of Fillon, the guy was caught stealing from the state in a pretty obvious manner ( his wife was receiving a salary for being his parliamentary assistant for like 15 years, while never having received a pass to actually get in the parliament). There was little of substance he could say, and when he did say it, it was obviously complete bullshit. Yes, it swayed the elections ( he was the favourite to win) and thankfully, that's not the type of person anyone should want running the country.
You think the 82% of Republicans who distrust the media is due to being in the private sector? And that they would trust it more if it was government run?
Do I trust CEOs to run businesses? Yes (at least, more than I trust either the government or the media).
Do I trust CEOs to tell me whether the media is trustworthy? Very much no. (What reason would I have to trust them on such a topic? None.)
Wouldn't publicly-funded media be the same? if a conservative govt wanted to cut the media budget would we not see one-sided negative reporting targeting conservatives?
I think the real answer that nobody wants to hear is that media at this scale cannot exist without bad actors trying to manipulate it. There is no "web of trust" at the scale of millions.
Edit: mobile typos
Beau of the Fifth Column has a pretty interesting take on events, a strong interest in community networks, and deep insight into what holds society together - https://www.youtube.com/c/BeauoftheFifthColumn
Breaking Points - Krystal Ball is a liberal, Saagar Enjeti is a conservative, and together they seek to cover the important stories that would otherwise go unnoticed - https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints
Knowing Better is an ex soldier who offers long insightful views on a variety of topics - https://www.youtube.com/c/KnowingBetter
Lex Fridman was born in the Soviet Union, worked at MIT in AI, and does interesting interviews with a wide variety of people - https://www.youtube.com/c/lexfridman
MKBHD reviews technology in a fairly credible way - https://www.youtube.com/c/mkbhd
MrPete222 is the shop teacher you never had - fascinating lessons and stories about machining - https://www.youtube.com/c/mrpete222
Phil DeDranco does a daily rundown of the stories that you might get in the media, with a fairly balanced view - https://www.youtube.com/c/PhilipDeFranco
Practical Engineering is an explainer channel about most things infrastructure - https://www.youtube.com/c/PracticalEngineeringChannel
Rebecca Watson provides a welcome skeptical view and calls out quite a lot of BS related to science - https://www.youtube.com/skepchicks
Rebel Wisdom is a project that is actively trying to figure out collective sense making in the modern era - https://www.youtube.com/c/RebelWisdom
Sabine Hossenfelder is a commenter on all things physics - https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder
Scott Manley provides commentary on all things space and rocket related - https://www.youtube.com/c/szyzyg
Smarter Every Day is an engineer who provides interesting explainers about various subjects. He got permission to film and interview inside an active US nuclear attack sub... pretty cool - https://www.youtube.com/c/smartereveryday
Technology connections does in depth explainers of everyday stuff you didn't realize you wanted to know more about, like how heat pumps or lanterns work. - https://www.youtube.com/c/TechnologyConnections
Veritasium was founded by Derek Muller, who was looking for more effective ways of teaching, when he found that traditional education has almost zero effect at removing misconceptions - https://www.youtube.com/c/veritasium
ZDogg is an MD who gives strong personal opinions on all things medical - https://www.youtube.com/c/ZDoggMD
Update: I've made public my list of channels I subscribe to on Youtube, for better or worse
• Quit subscribing corporate media and subscribe to single reporters that are doing real reporting.
• Have zero tolerance for news that mislead you. ”Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
• Try to find reporters that are willing to give you the honest cotext even if it goes against what you expect and does not affirm your believes.
If enough people do this, those lying and misleading for profit will go out of business.
The potential pitfall is that one can end up only subscribing to journalists that agree with ones point of view. I personally think this is offset by the kinds of view points that are attracted to or do well on a space like Substack, but that might just be me.
Seriously, the 4th branch was ultimately funded by ads in the local paper. That shifted faster then they could keep up and the rug got pulled out from under them. And it has flipped politics on its head. It was never stable in the first place.
If you keep supporting what it brings you now, how do you expect it to change?
Journalism and journalists are not doing their part. Under the status quo it should crash and burn and die.
The underlying issues with journalism also make it hard to fight back on Fake News allegations, sometimes the Fake News crowd, regardless of political leanings, actually does have a point.
What's an example of a false fact that's been reported? All the major news players are really careful on this front. They'll report accurately that someone said something that was false, for example.
All deputees use the assistant salary evasive mission loophole, only candidates who are potent competitors are found out by journalists. Meanwhile Macron’s assistant had 6 diplomatic passports and a gun after being fired for mugging political opponents (!), yet journalists uniformly said that it probably was a honest mistake by the passport department.
State-owned AFP and most journals being >1/3rd sponsored by the government is clearly helping the mugging of political opponents in France, whether through the use of media, judges or by simple private thugs armed with guns and diplomatic passports.
Edit: Walking through a couple of these I would just pass them by had you not mentioned them. A fair few have that awful youtube, block caps, latest news headlines, must have someone's face etc etc.
Most of this mistrust is coming from the right, despite what many ppl like to claim, NPR isn’t objective or impartial they’re fairly solidly left. All the “institutions” that many like to think are giants in the media are really pretty much just mouth pieces for one side’s politics, the right has Fox News and the left has NPR, NYT, etc. They’re both distrusted by opposing sides for the same reason: they don’t report the news.
This sort of thing seems to have, however, somewhat broken down in recently years. At a minimum I think most people would say these networks are at least smaller and more insular than they were in the past.
If it's all in good faith, this might not be so terrible. If the aforementioned trusted CEOs faithfully and accurately are able to point out media they believe is trustworthy and keep an eye on those outlets, it could potentially work as a way to kick start the rejuvenation of these networks.
Now, this relies on these CEOs being both trusted and trustworthy. That is a fairly substantial assumption in my opinion.
But if it's all in good faith it's possible to read this as not Orwellian at all, but rather more informing a section of the community that there is something they can do for the community, and then asking them to do it.
But the media aren’t trustworthy. That’s how we got to this place. If that gets fixed, then indeed CEOs can celebrate it, but the problem is with the media right now, not the lack of people cheering them on.
Americas understanding of the world could be said to be diverging because of self selection of content in people's respective echo chambers but I don't think it apt to say it's because the media is less trustworthy just because they are less trusted.
Can you provide objective criteria to suggest that the accuracy of the news has declined?
That's true, and it might only extend the trust-issues. You get someone to embrace a not-trustworthy institution and vouch for them, the trust in them will fade away as well.
Then the graphs will look great. Problem solved!
[1] I exaggerate the proportion, but maybe you did too.
https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/people-nation...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
I think it was rather nuanced. Several reasons given:
1) The capitalization of Black has already been accepted by the mainstream - NYT is catching up with the times
2) Other names on American minorities with a shared heritage is already capitalized, like Latino and Asian.
3) African-American is capitalized, but not as inclusive as Black.
At no point, except when referring to some early 20th century worldview, are they talking about all black people worldwide. I read the article as a purely American POV.
What is the definition of "shared heritage" such that everyone but Whites have shared heritage?
1. Black Americans were taken away from their native specific cultures, whether it be Bantu, Hutu, Berber, etc, and unable to propagate the specifics of their cultures within communities. After emancipation, the only extant culture available was "Black".
2. White Americans generally settled into self-segregating Italian, Irish, German, etc communities or regions, and the original idiosyncrasies of these cultures persisted beyond relocation.
This makes a lot of sense, and I think up until the mid-late 20th century, this was fair, but I do think that sense is losing its strength as American society becomes increasingly atomized.
In 2021, it's equally valid to say that "Detroit Blacks" and "Memphis Blacks" have their own (sure, nascent, but real) disparate cultures, at the same time that it's valid to say that American "Swedish Whites" and "Italian Whites" are far more culturally similar than they were a couple generations ago.
I don't know, we'll see where history leads us, I guess. But the change is definitely visible.
We can try to understand
The New York Times' effect on man
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother
You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive
Nobody is claiming a decline in accuracy. What is being claimed that the media is not trustworthy.
Can you provide objective criteria to show that the media is trustworthy?
Keep in mind that I don't just mean right wing kooks. Crazy people come in all stripes and while different camps may not agree on much what they all share is a pride in being in the know. Of being more plugged in by virtue of knowing about for example conspiracies that are somehow simultaneously secret and available via the feed of people you wouldn't trust to watch a hamster.
It used to be that merely being available say on TV or in a widely distributed newspaper was a good first pass filter because it filtered out most obvious malarkey. At the dawn of the internet this increasingly ceased to be so as it became easy for anyone with an increasingly broadly available skill set to reach a wide audience if what they want to say resonates with what people want or worse fear is true.
At least however because making a nice website was harder it was at least SOMEWHAT easy to pick up on the bunkum because it looked like junk and was hosted on geocities. Now one can really and in fact be plugged into a lot of really high quality and up to the minute data on social media and in fact it all looks the same whether on twitter or on slick easy to make websites and we are relying on people with no usable first pass filter to pick out the garbage based on critical thinking skills they in fact lack.
I think its well established without further need of proof that people trust the media less. I suggest its because a lot of people are building their world view on complete nonsense not because the media is any better or worse. This seems trivially true from observation but I don't know how to go about proving it to you in the large.
Are we talking just providing an equal number of sentences from the perspective of each major party? How do we decide which parties get included, here? Do we instead break it up by major ideologies? Again, which ones?
Even if we attempt to go no ideology and just raw facts, the facts you choose to report are a result of interpretation. You could easily construct an entirely factual article that contains no subjective opinions and still be majorly and intentionally deceptive. So not mentioning any perspectives is also not balanced.
What balance is everybody talking about? How is it defined? How we determine what is and is not balanced?
It’s not as complicated as you’re making out.
If I read an article about how a proposed law is bad I’d also like to read an article about how it might be good.
Not rocket science is it?
Unless it's one of a few already highly-covered issues with fundamentally irreconcilable subjective issues where you can pretty much recall all that context with a few words... you have to say what the heck the proponents of the law say it'll do to actually attack it.
However you don't seem to find that balanced. I don't blame you. I don't either.
The problem is the arguments made cannot be equal. They are not the same thing. Even a good faith attempt to make a completely neutral article will very often fall short. Even if the author thinks they did not, others will.
The only 'balance' you can really have is a false equivalence where nothing matters because it's all the same anyway - so why even write an article? It doesn't matter what happens.
Can you not read two articles, and do this yourself?
Unless you count chasing the bottom line as an ideology, that is.
Fox, to take an extreme examples, isn't really partisan. They have just found a juicy business model where they've learnt to titillate the sensitivities of a certain segment of the population to maximize revenue.
I don't have problem with a biased news source, as long as I have enough news sources to dig from and can average out the bias from multiple sources.
That just describes their motivations as not being partisan. Their product is still highly partisan.
Fair enough, but they're not really a news source.
You’ve got to be joking?
For example in the UK newspapers, even the best ones, literally declare their support for a particular party at the start of each election.
Ok, but if this is true [1], and it’s also necessarily true by your previous claims that Whites have different culture than Blacks in general, then why not capitalize White, since it is a name for a culture.
[1] given that Jews are usually considered ‘white’, and many Jews in fact do have distinct cultures - e.g. Brooklyn Jews, it’s hard to argue this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
“In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect, after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding”
In other words, when people read articles about something in their own field of expertise, they are able to pick the misrepresentations out easily. But they assume the rest of the news is straightforward because they don’t know any better and trust the journalist’s reporting as an accurate representation of what is happening.
A knowledge of history, unedited video footage of actual events, common sense, scepticism (of everyone, not just the 'enemy').
I've talked to reasonably intelligent programmers who got upset at a politicians speech they'd never heard. All they did was read a paraphrase of it from their favourite media outlet (who happened to be ill-disposed towards said politician).
A lot of the `events` of 2020-2021 were captured on unedited video. Few people I've talked to bothered to watch it. They relied on journalists. Didn't stop them forming a strong opinion though.
And without a knowledge of history (and mine is admittedly basic), you have zero context.
agree
> (i.e. journalism).
not the same thing.
I suspect people who want to "make journalism better" and people who want to "inform the populace with 'not journalism'" are probably talking about the same thing.
(Not that I agree with this article, the "get CEOs to make people trust news" thing is bizarre)