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.
“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)
-Thomas Jefferson
Arguably the best place to help you pick better media outlets.
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.”
― Michael Crichton
3 or 4 conglomerates are often 85%+ of the news sources.
As soon as the fairness doctrine died, real journalism was crushed by corporate greed.
Hard to tell which did more damage, since they came so close together. Possibly one would have been fine if the other hadn't happened.
An organization who has incentives aligned with providing journalism for the people?
It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled. -Mark Twain
Yes.
So really, the news is that it isn't 100% of Americans.
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?"
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
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.
There was a good episode of Freakonomics on NPR concerning negative bias in the media and why people respond to it. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-u-s-media-so-negativ...
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.
"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..."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
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.
https://www.newsweek.com/video-mike-rogers-held-back-he-lung...
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.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the...
Blog: https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/
Book: The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium: https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public
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.
> 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".
> 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.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...
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!
[This is also a way for me to discern news I should be listening to!]
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
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 is Extremely Dangerous to our Democracy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
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.
There’s been many times when news articles have been easily discredited by simply looking at the original source(video, image, research papers).
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.
All of it is profit motivated.
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.
Thanks.
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.
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.
Obvoiusly they do.
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.
Title is editorialised however, its mislead or adopt a particular view.
But making readers adopt a particular view is basically their purpose.
"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]
Feels very demoralizing.
We are currently building it and will be rolling it out to our 10 million users around the world in a few months.
If anyone wants to be involved, you can contact me by filling out the form on the bottom.
Still, to cite a recent example, the reporting from most news outlets on things like the Kenosha shootings and trials were outrageously bad.
We never discussed it in the context of new media but it feels quite relevant.
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.
Is that "deliberately mislead"? It depends on what exactly you mean by that. Don't agree and shift the meaning.
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.
The days of subjectivity are over.
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.
Who the hell doesn't understand profit motive, advertising sponsors? You don't have to be Noam Chomsky to have a hunch that something is off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-republicans-target-trans... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/transgender-teena...
MSNBC doens't generally run 'propaganda' for Pfizer, so much as they will avoid stories that make them look bad as they are big advertisers.
During a pandemic or war, the news system will close ranks and the stories come out differently but there are civil reasons for that.
And FYI I'm not denying propaganda exists, but it's of a very different nature that most of the bias in the press.
If all we had to deal with was state supported propaganda it would be frankly refreshing.
You seem to be talking about the general existence of media bias, for some reason.
Almost everything that someone posts is an anecdote, and you can't expect everyone to come armed with reams of well-researched facts.
I don't know what purpose you think what you're saying has, but it seems negative for discussion purposes and for fact-finding purposes.
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.
Part 1: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Amer... Part 2: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Amer...
Some thoughts:
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.
Even Seymour Hersh has been smeared to discredit him now he dared speak against the establishment.
It is not journalists' role to be a mouthpiece for the government, but to challenge it.
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.
https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1589606899569377282?s=46&...
Democracy is dying and "both sides" believe the other is the "enemy".
It's going to get bloody, folks.
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-ass...
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'.
That's insulting. There are thousands of investigative journalists doing real work every day. Do some research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_journalism
> Seymour Hersh
His recent story was very sketchy, but he has always spoken against the establishment. The government has been smearing him since 1969.
Whereas if Watergate happened today they'd just say it's justified against Russian spies or something.
This colours my attitude to his Nordstream "revelations".
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.
And neither Snowden nor Assange are journalists at all. Snowden stole some docs and Assange runs a wiki. Assange also collaborated with Russian intelligence.
If you have no evidence of this, you're spreading misinformation.
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.
There can be a huge discrepancy between what your experience is and what is being reported. Most people will tend believe what they see and know.
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.
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.
There is no need for a conspiracy for the media to be misleading.
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.
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.
Do not trust them blindly is all I can say.
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.
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.
So have I
> The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity
It’s not controlling, but there is little doubt that reporter’s and politicians partipate in quid pro quo
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’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.
Superhuman coordination and execution abilities along with extreme secrecy as needed.
This.
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.
Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I
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.
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.
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.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchdog_Journalism>
Organisations and institutions include:
- On the Media, WNYC Studios -- center-left: <https://onthemedia.org>
- Poynter Institute <https://www.poynter.org/>
- Columbia Journalism Review <https://www.cjr.org/>
- FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) -- left/progressive: <https://fair.org/>
- Center for Media and Democracy -- conservative: <https://www.exposedbycmd.org/>
Amongst many others.
You'll also find journalism beats at various outlets, though those tend to focus more strongly on business side (often dismal for old-school print).
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.
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
There are better examples of what you're saying, not saying your point doesn't have merit, just that Hersh is a bad example.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-report-julian-assange-...
He published the DNC hacks which he acquired from GRU which he deliberately obscured by pointing to Seth Rich.
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".
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.
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.
(Assuming you're right that there was non-stop coverage, I don't know.)
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_r...
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.
Unless I am asking the taxi driver about traffic problem in their work area, or rider behavior, or...
We have become citizen journalists. We have to research our own news. I think that is not a bad thing.
I write journalist because if an establishment journalist can get away with single-sourcing something, why can't I?
YouTube is a cesspool of hot garbage, but there is also plenty of good information.
The key part in my opinion is to have the ability to collect, sift, confirm, and then make deduction.
Alas, we no longer teach fundamental thinking skills in schools.
Control this and you can control the world.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Otherwise, you are asserting that a bipartisan intelligence committee of elected officials are all lying.
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 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.
There's way more.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.
Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not if they are not specialized science reporters.
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.
I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?
Journalists are welcome to burn their own reputation, it is theirs. But don't blame others.
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.
Media literacy should be mandated in school.
Just try for basic literacy first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
That’s when things went from bad to worse and I abandoned the mainstream media entirely.
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.
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.
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.
I don't have any interest in supporting USAToday, so I will never make it past my fifth article of the week.
Same's happening to the physical product; mostly a thin wrapper around state/national news from Gannett corporate.
I almost wish they would pick up a template website though, because theirs is super buggy (I'd likely get the print version anyway).
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.
https://www.benton.org/public_interest_obligations_of_dtv_br...
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.
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.'"”
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).
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).
https://www.nytimes.com/section/world https://www.nytimes.com/section/us
https://AstralCodexTen.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
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.
you’re on HN. surely you have the imagination.
edit: apparently not
>CNN settles $275million suit from MAGA hat-wearing Covington Catholic student after stand-off vid
I'll always remember this moment as a statement of fact that news organizations deliberately mislead us.
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.
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers"
Makes you wonder who remains to be trusted, the governments are not reliable at all times either in most parts of the world.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/jefferson-s-preference-for...
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.
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.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Media-of-propaga...
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.
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).
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?
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.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
https://deadspin.com/how-i-made-a-dumb-video-making-fun-of-s...
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.
Either way its always been a factor, and was likely worse before the age of information.
The big problem now is there are multiple competing false narratives, instead of just the one in the paper.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/564013066...
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.
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
> 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.
[1] Public Opinion, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html
It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...
In the years before the internet we had newsletters and amateur radio. https://media.tenor.com/9k_DNT8tBA4AAAAd/simpsons-i-wish-to-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Many credible books on that topic to read.
Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!
What is your evidence such a system exists today?
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.
[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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X2211509...
> 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.
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.
[1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/d...
Trickle through to HALF the population. Frankly it's shocking that 50% don't think information they receive is a component of some narrative.
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.
You are correct. Its a hardscrabble life.
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.
It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.
"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]"
It's not one uniform block, it's thousands of people with different intensions and 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?
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"
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.
Hasn't Trump been talking about the 'fake news media' for 5+ years? And don't half of Americans lap that stuff up?
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).
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.
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.
Which ones prove systemic, deliberate deception?
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'.
All of that said we should strive to be better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
https://web.archive.org/web/20131025035711/http://www.carlbe...
https://www.quora.com/Did-CIA-Director-William-Casey-really-...
> [...] 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.
[1] Street Without Joy, pp. 331-337
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".
A moment's research shows this to be false -- eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_prog...
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.
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.
Sorry for the bluntness here.
I don't think it's a good idea for journalists to proclaim that they are abandoning objectivity. https://reason.com/2020/06/24/journalists-abandoning-objecti...
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.
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.
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.
Works best when you get news from sources that are not tightly connected.
For example: NYT (American) + NPR (American) + DW (German) + Aljazeera (ME) + Reddit (people "on the ground").
Different financing/revenue models, different ownership, different continents, different cultural biases and norms, different perspectives.
Nothing is perfect and free from influence, but the broader one's consumption, the more angles one can work with on a particular topic.
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.
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.
But it shall not be confused with journalism.
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.)
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2021/07/26/l-a-times-needs-to-st...
and usually these days when you find an LA city councilmember with an FBI indictment for corruption, they had an LA times editorial board endorsement.
Because... Editors couldn't possibly have motives that similarly contain bias, corruption, out other such common frailties of the human condition?
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.
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).
Eg keeping people bickering about racial issues instead of agreeing on the aspects of policing which need reform, or from focusing on class issues.
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 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.
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"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210901220929/https://www.nytim...
Later this was changed to "as well as ivermectin, a drug primarily used as a veterinary deworming agent."
https://web.archive.org/web/20221203221548/https://www.nytim...
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.
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.
[0]https://archive.is/OC7xu [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-proje... [2]https://archive.is/oHWLR
Herman and Chomsky have written about this phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project#Historical_ac...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...
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.
Russiagate is a recent example:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/03/reveal...
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:
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
Watch this 10 minute video by Glenn Greenwald that goes over in detail how the NY Times misleads and lies:
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.
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...
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".
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.
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.
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)?"
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.
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.)
"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"
Perhaps smaller polities would be less controversial. Perhaps mass democracy or democracy generally is disfunctional.
Like, how often is there a viewer who actively watches both/switches between the two?
It's very polarizing.
I can't think of any way to fix it culturally. One party thinks the other is deranged and lying.
Will it get worse? Will it get better? Where does this lead us?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think people reading opinion as news is part of the problem.
But you don't have to be biased every time to be biased. Trust is based on consistency.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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?"
FWIW, your second group reminds me of Carlo M. Cipolla's "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity": https://web.archive.org/web/20130216132858/http://www.cantri...
> 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.
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.
I'm merely pointing out this broad inconsistency.
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.
I know broken clocks and all, but just because you disagree with someone most of the time it doesn't mean that they are wrong about everything.
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.
"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!
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".
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.)
[0] https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113
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.
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.
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 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.
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/railroaded
"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.
Sigh."
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.
Your comment makes no sense with Matt Taibbi's statements. I'm not sure you understand what he said and corrected.
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?
"Elon isn't right wing, give me one example of that"
- Endorsed Ron desantis
- Told everyone to vote Republican
- Tweeted out "I am a Republican"
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.
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.
Cherry-picking.
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%."
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
This is a case study that several researchers we have are actively investigating as we look to buy ads on that network.
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.
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.
Yes, I suppose I do sound like a "woke moralist".
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 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.
> 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.
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] "
> 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.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_tan_suit_controversy
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.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/09/why-does-bush-go....
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.
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 II and Chaney
Before that they dumped on Clinton
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.
Before that, there were revolutionary pamphleteers.
The Trump hysteria was a reversion to the norm.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a disingenuous argument. Proceed, I won't stop you.
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.
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.
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.
One more point.
Companies never ever have evil anti user dark patterns enter production because of code reviews, do they?
That said, I believe you're thinking of Fox News.
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.
Certainly makes me feel warm and fuzzy that our news orgs are looking out for us! :)
Do you not understand how horrifying a comparison this is?
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.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
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.”
> He added, “I hope we can get along.”
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerth#Career (last paragraph)
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."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-bi...
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.
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.
:). My apologies, I've misread what you wrote.
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.
His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
What makes the citation correct or trustworthy?
Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?
Yikes.
(You’re spelling “ideological” incorrectly)
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.
The Onion does a better job than Fox.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news-bias/
It's dishonest. End of story.
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
This is why journalists will often attribute cause and effect interpretation of facts to expert sources.
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?"
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.
Your grasp of English seems fine, to me.
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.
> intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public
persuasion is not misinforming is not misleading.
> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war ...
This is literally the definition of lying.
You can intentionally mislead someone through the selective use of truths without using any "counter-factual" or untrue statements.
* used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression. "all their married life she had been living a lie"
Google "define lying". It says this:
tell a lie or lies.
and this
(of a thing) present a false impression; be deceptive.
---
Intentionally misleading is deceptive, even if it states only facts.
His Twitter lovers and haters mostly haven't, and are generally making judgments based on "social group" rather than the factual record.
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.
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).
If someone can't see how a person could be misleading without lying they're going to fall for a lot of bullshit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your source is spinning the definition of lie, for some reason.
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?
Saying something incorrect, but which you believe to be true, is no 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.
The word lie, requires an intent to deceive.
This isn't being debated.
"There is concept called a "lie of omission"."
And that's why it's a concept and requires additional words to convey. It's not included by default. This would moee generally fall under deception.
I'll ask again, anything to add to the actual discussion?
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.
