Ironic that WaPo should call out anybody for being fake this election cicle.
For those downvoting, read at least this:
http://nypost.com/2016/10/12/how-the-washington-post-killed-...
For those downvoting, read at least this:
http://nypost.com/2016/10/12/how-the-washington-post-killed-...
The only thing I'll turn to these corrupt giants now is weather events. Can't slant those in any way. We need to break up the 6 corporations that control our media, ASAP.
Sadly, it's even worse than it sounds, because now even the alt-right websites can't tell the truth. For an interesting short piece about this, see the final section of "Donald Trump broke the conservative media" (1). Quote:
One of the chief problems, Sykes (2) said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers."
"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"
"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true."
(1) http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...
Edit/insert:
(2) "Charlie Sykes, a popular conservative talk show host in Wisconsin"
Yeah, no. I see the dung heap in front of me, I don't need conservative click bait news outlets to help me.
What is the baseline?
Also, these were clearly-identified opinion pieces. Fake news doesn't identify itself as such.
Nonsensical beliefs and faulty reasoning are deprecated (and ideally not represented at all) in any well informed clear thinking venue. Here that manifests, quite sensibly, by the downvote.
And any meritocracy would eventually eliminate nonsensical views entirely.
So the problem comes when a political movement harnesses nonsense while clear thinking people have systematical eliminated it entirely from their discourse. And after that movement's unexpected triumph, the clear thinkers try to understand what happened.
A hard problem I would say.
In other words, serious reporting (as opposed to opinion pieces) treated lies as though they were truths. This could only be considered harmful.
There has been quite a lot of discussion around this. See, for example:
The Death of 'He Said, She Said' Journalism http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/the-deat...
Big lie, little lie, and the media’s role in telling the difference http://www.cjr.org/criticism/trump_birtherism_lie_media.php
It’s Not Too Late for the Media to Fix Its Election Coverage: A final plea for sanity in how we report on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. https://newrepublic.com/article/136848/its-not-late-media-fi...
There's also the issue of false balance (Edit: which is the point of your links, actually, so I'm just stating explicitly). I think the media, in an attempt to appear more unbiased, has been more giving air to statements which are misleading or arguably not true. Politicians have noticed this and taken advantage of it. (This is independent of actual bias in the media.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/our-first-ame...
[1]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/79783222980005068...
Yup. A lot of media organizations endorsed Clinton over Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
I've been (admittedly amateurishly) looking for research on media bias. Research is limited by its methods, and researchers hold opinions, results can be subject to confirmation bias, so this whole area is difficult for the every day person to sift through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...
I find it hard to believe that no bias exists, and I think a lot of journalists try to be objective, with varying success. The question to me is how much bias there is, how we can keep that in mind, and how we can agree on some shared understanding of facts.
It's also in the interest of these organizations to support the First Amendment. Hard to ask them to be against — or even neutral — the First Amendment, just as we'd expect for any business to support aspects of the Constitution or law that are in their own self interest (regardless of whether we agree with it).
It's also in the interest of Americans in general for strong First Amendment rights. It has broad support across parties. This kind of nuance doesn't fit easily in 140 characters or support the easy "us vs them" characterization.
Pretty hard to endorse Trump, given that he's a crooked racist and narcissist, a sexual predator, a pathological liar, and wholly unqualified for any public office. Given what he said in his speeches, not many companies would even hire him.
As a result, even Republican newspapers broke with tradition and endorsed HRC, except for one Las Vegas paper owned by one of Trump's backers.
> I find it hard to believe that no bias exists, and I think a lot of journalists try to be objective, with varying success.
There's a strong bias towards getting the truth reported, which is why the leading newspapers have trained journalists, fact checkers, subeditors etc, plus ombudsmen to handle complaints.
If you have the facts then you can argue about causes and solutions, and you might have (say) a more Democratic or a more Republican approach to those. Those opinions may involve denying at least some of the facts, but people generally choose the outlets that suit their own opinions.
The problems start when news outlets no longer care about facts, like Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge etc. Fox actually argued in court that it wasn't obliged to tell the truth because it was an entertainment channel.