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Comment by maeln | Hacker News Reader

Saying this is as stupid as trusting any articles.

Yes, a lot of journalist do a very good job at providing crucial information that is vital to a democracy.

Journalism is an important counter-power. Without journalism you wouldn't be aware of corruption, abuse of power and many other things.

Yes there is tabloïd, yes there is bad reporting, bad journalism and yes, in the age of internet, even reputable journals spread unverified news. But dismissing an entire profession is amongst the most dangerous thing you can do.

If you have an issue with some journalist, you can go and pay for journals that do a good job at verifying sources and do real investigation jobs. They are here, they exist.

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@cronz. Not all jurnalists are created equal

[meta] While the comment is very poor, lacks a deep consideration and can be considered stupid without a need for a deep analysis, WyTF is it dead? How not leaving it up to be downvoted into oblivion is a bad idea?

> Yes, a lot of journalist do a very good job at providing crucial information that is vital to a democracy.

Journalism isn't vital to democracy. It didn't exist in the democracies of ancient world ( greece or roman empire ). It didn't exist during the founding of the US.

> Journalism is an important counter-power.

It can be a counter to power or it can be a servant to power.

> Without journalism you wouldn't be aware of corruption, abuse of power and many other things.

Of course we would. Do you really think people weren't aware of corruption before journalism?

Journalism, like all institutions, can be used for good and evil. And they can be corruptible. It can be used to shed light to corruption or it can be used to hide corruption. It can be used to hold the powerful accountable or it be used to spread propaganda for the powerful. In the US, journalism has primarily been for the latter. Feel free to read up the history of newspapers and who created them. It was wealthy( bankers or tycoons ) and politicians who created our prominent newspapers.

> They are here, they exist.

If they do exist, they must exist as independent journalists.

The problem with modern society is that journalists have duped everyone into thinking they are essential and they are objective/good/fair/etc. I don't think anyone paying attention believes this any more. The problem with journalism is that there are no checks and balances. Nobody holding journalists/journalism to account. A lot of it has to do with the fewer and fewer corporations owning so many media outlets and of course the ideological conformity enforced in almost all of the media.

> Journalism isn't vital to democracy. It didn't exist in the democracies of ancient world ( greece or roman empire ).

The Roman empire was (according to my limited research) a republic, not a democracy as you might imagine one today:

> Once free, the Romans established a republic, a government in which citizens elected representatives to rule on their behalf. A republic is quite different from a democracy, in which every citizen is expected to play an active role in governing the state. - http://www.ushistory.org/civ/6a.asp

Greek demporacy seems to have at some point come to an end,

> Around 460 B.C., under the rule of the general Pericles (generals were among the only public officials who were elected, not appointed) Athenian democracy began to evolve into something that we would call an aristocracy - https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/ancient-greece...

> It didn't exist during the founding of the US.

I'm pretty sure it did:

> The History of American journalism began in 1690, when Benjamin Harris published the first edition of "Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic" in Boston. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_American_journalism...

Even so, journalism certainly developed over the years after that because we can see it happening now.

> It can be a counter to power or it can be a servant to power.

That much can be seen. There are egregious displays of bias on both sides of the political spectrum, and it is important (IMO) to hold journalists to account using critical thought and facts.

> Of course we would.

If it's so obvious, how do /you/ think people became aware of corruption?

> Do you really think people weren't aware of corruption before journalism?

Yes and no. I would guess that lots of news was spread via word of mouth which would have been unreliable and risky (dissent within earshot of someone with the wrong loyalty could get you punished).

> The problem with modern society is that journalists have duped everyone into thinking they are essential and they are objective/good/fair/etc.

The problem, that's a pretty big statement, please give some examples.

I would agree that A problem with modern society is the manipulation of the population by (some of) the press, but it's not the /only/, or necessarily biggest, problem.

> I don't think anyone paying attention believes this any more.

I don't think that it's really changed that much. People haven't (as far as I can tell) got more manipulative or biased, it's just that the tools have changed.

> The problem with journalism is that there are no checks and balances.

Something that's hard to do if you have a "free" press I suspect.

> Nobody holding journalists/journalism to account.

Other than perhaps the readers themselves.

> A lot of it has to do with the fewer and fewer corporations owning so many media outlets and of course the ideological conformity enforced in almost all of the media.

I think we can assume that "ideological conformity" is a synonym for "bias", as we're talking about two different ideologies, liberal and conservative and the media being biased towards one of the other. I was curious so I looked up some research:

- systematic research has found no consistent partisan or ideological favoritism in news content despite fre- quent complaints of biases. - http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid... (The Liberal Media Myth Revisited: An Examination of Factors Influencing Perceptions of Media Bias)

- "We did indeed find remarkable balance in candidate valence coverage" - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238429795_Elite_Cue... (Elite Cues and Media Bias in Presidential Campaigns)

I'm paraphrasing this one because it's a PDF in image format and I can't copy/paste, but you can go and read it yourself:

- "People [conservatives, democrats not s much apparently] have been taking cues from political elites related to media bias and have started to believe media bias exists where none does" https://dshah.journalism.wisc.edu/files/2017/01/JOC1999.pdf

There's almost certainly more reseach on this issue, I encourage you to go and look some up https://scholar.google.com/

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