It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that younger generations have.
No, they grew up in a time when media distortion was less likely to be revealed because the major media was narrower and it's ideological biases more consistent, and voices outside the major media had major barriers to reaching any substantial audience.
People and media will always have a viewpoint that distorts their objectivity. That is just fact of live and not necessarily bad thing as long as it's honest belief. Media used to be more reliable and truthful in the past with the normal distortions that people had. Mainstream media is still like this. Their problem is the lack of money and time that lowers their ability to do original reporting and check facts. They are the victims of dishonest influencing, not the originators. Fox News is the only major mainstream media source that has completely turned news into dishonest influencing operation.
Today the distortions are the same but there is significant increase in intentional influencing with data and arguments that those who propagate them don't believe. Using the same talking point to argue for and against issues is good example of this.
Shady figures like Christopher Blair just sit in their homes and push out (non-mainstream viewpoints) disinformation they know is false.
In addition, a huge difference between traditional media, and modern "fake news" is accountability.
As biased as they can be, traditional articles always come with an author name, and published or run under the responsibility of the media themselves.
They can, and often do, give a specific story a slant which supports their point of view or agenda, but they really cannot outright lie, since they would be called out or even be subject to legal action:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/23/sicilian-journ...
"Fake News" have no traceable source, no attributable author, no accountability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
It's also pretty prevalent on the radio, and has a fair few historical precedents from before journalism saw credibility as an important thing to keep in mind (yellow journalism et all).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...
The Mail's website is also the most visited English language news site in the world.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150418010133/http://www.ft.com...
Depressing? Certainly. Puts a damper on the idea that most people got their news from realiable sources before the internet? Yep.
Seriously? Pretty much all major networks have been caught making stuff up. CNN has been caught giving debate questions ahead of time to their pet candidate.
CNN's statement:
>"On October 14th, CNN accepted Donna Brazile's resignation as a CNN contributor. (Her deal had previously been suspended in July when she became the interim head of the DNC.) CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate. We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."
When mainstream media catches individual journos making stuff up they get fired as it should be. Brazile was not even a journalist or employee. She was running the campaign.
With Brazile, yes, they "accepted her resignation" - not even fired. With other journos, they only fired them after they were caught making stuff up by outsiders. With yet another group, talking heads at CNN make stuff up on a regular basis, but yet they are there because they are "opinion" talking heads. Not just CNN - same with all the other news orgs.
Given Donna Brazile's past and her obvious partisanship, she should have never been allowed to work at CNN to begin with. If they want to be perceived as neutral and fair, that is. That's like hiring Eric Trump to do commentary, while his dad is running for office.
To me, it's ideas like this that perpetuate the problem. It clings to the idea that journalists and journalism - at least that which is sold via mainstream media channels - are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity. They aren't. It is much healthier in my opinion to understand that news is not special within its medium. It's entertainment like everything on every other channel. It's somewhat less fictional obviously, but the entertainment motive is what lies behind it.
I would suggest instead that Fox News was the first major mainstream media source that dropped the pretensions and openly did what "news" has been doing since Walter Kronkite but with an equal and opposite bias. And to that extent, it has had a beneficial effect on society: we now know to watch carefully what a given journalist decides to report on and what they don't and we work harder to extract facts, if there are any, from the pre-determined narratives they are wrapped in. Whether purposely or not, they made news look like a joke. And we are smarter now because of it.
they double down.
> are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity.
My point was that media bias is not same as not being untruthful. Fox News stands alone in the mainstream media in their network level intentionally false reporting.
That's is absolutely untrue. The reason you think that is because your pre-existing bias disagrees with them.
CNN, HuffingtonPost, Washington Post, etc, etc, etc do the exact same thing, from the other side.
Here's a helpful list: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/
Which sites that you read are on there?
I've made a conscious decision to disbelieve any news unless it came from a site on this list: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/
I only news sources not on that list for entertainment.
The distinction was subject of my comment.
Back farther in the past, the many competing newspapers were very partisan. Perhaps we're just back to that situation.
Are you sure? How can you tell?
I guess today's CNN and their much more pronounced left-wing orientation is just a response to the right-leaning stuff from Fox? Or it just seems more left-wing now in comparison.
That, and even if journalists are actively attempting to avoid bias the faster news cycle simply leaves them less time for polish. Thus, more and more stories are the equivalent of first or second drafts.
As the OP said, a decade ago you could make that claim. They were much more "news". Now their rating have been in the toilet for years, so they've gone to extremes to gain viewership.
You are right, though -- it took a lot of work to get content to a large audience. That reduced the number of malicious agents who could and the speed with which they could successfully gain broad influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst
While I agree that journalism is in crisis, this isn't the first time. While Hearst was famous for yellow journalism, his papers weren't the only ones, and often the emotional sensationalism was intended to support a particular candidate (or denounce their opponent).
That being said, mainstream media do tend to care about their reputation, same reason the best liars tend to be careful about what/when to lie.
Many of the elderly become more gullible as they reach advanced age, which is the same reason con-men target them with scams.
I grew up with the Internet. I was reading wacky conspiracy theories in my teens. It made me more skeptical of virtually anything I see in print since I learned how easy it is to create a BS narrative and fit details into it. I also learned what propaganda is, how it works, and how prevalent it is.
Older generations grew up with a one-way opaque screen preaching to them. Obviously not everything on that screen was true, but when it was called "news" it was held to some standard and so was probably more likely to be true than not. They also had no way of delving deeper, no way of querying or seeking out an alternative opinion or discussing it with other members of the audience.
That generation grew up trusting things on screens.
Not sure I’ve noticed a pattern, age or otherwise, with such attitudes.
Now, the same points generally hold with radio, as well.
I was just saying that propaganda is not new. Of course, I don't know that this research is claiming these folks are the most misinformed. So, I could be taking it in a pointless direction, as well.
They could and did seek alternative opinions, though often it cost more. Subscribing to newsletters has long been an option. For example, the John Birch Society's TheNewAmerican was created in 1985 as the merger of two older newsletters that date to 1956 and 1965. It's now available at https://www.thenewamerican.com/ but you can still get the print version delivered to your house twice a month.
That some folks from older generations did this, I can accept. But you will need more data than this to counter the facts presented in the article, no?
A better way to interpret those facts: older people lean conservative.
The research showed that political outlook was a far better way to predict sharing these web sites than age or even party affiliation.
They know a domain that's been around vs. one like justice-freedom-eagle.usa that looks like a default wordpress template with stock clip art.
They may get their news from aggregators and live in their respective bubbles, but they're more likely to see through a shady looking site with headlines like "Pope endorses Trump" or "Hillary leads Trump away in handcuffs." As much as the respective sides want to believe those things.
Is that really true though? A lot of the younger folks on my Facebook share stuff from things like "natural-truth-health.net" or "gmo-truth-toxic.tk" or "naturalnews.com".
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/785618/educational-attai...
Without validating that the definition does not preclude the conclusion I don’t see how we can trust it’s conclusikn.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full
>Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics. Here, we mainly use measures constructed by reference to the list by Silverman (7), but in the Supplementary Materials, we show that the main results hold when alternate lists are used, such as that used by peer-reviewed studies (2).
It's domain level, not article. You can follow the links in the paper to see how those groups come up with these lists.
These are the classification sources according to soundwave106:
A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media [1]
B) The study was cross-checked with a list of sites from a peer reviewed paper (H. Allcott, M. Gentzkow, Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31, 211–236 (2017)) and according to the paper was similar to buzzfeed suggesting an ideological tilt.
There is some additional methodology in the study link.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...
There are four questions that need to be answered:
1) are the classifications complete over the data set in the study, not an arbitrary different data set
2) is the populations studied representative of the populuation in general
3) are the classifications unbiased
4) are the classification structure sufficiently granular to represent uncertainty
On #2 the population was chosen by voluntary particiation and I don't see any mention of them doing necessary statistical analysis to make sure it is representative of the general population.
On #3 and #4 buzzfeed said they collected the classifications by searching for fake news of interest to people of their ideological tilt. Some of which is admittedly not fake news, such as hillarys mishandling of government emails:
-- BuzzFeed News used the content analysis tool BuzzSumo, which enables users to search for content by keyword, URL, time range, and social share counts. BuzzFeed News searched in BuzzSumo using keywords such as "Hillary Clinton" and "Donald Trump," as well as combinations such as "Trump and election" or "Clinton and emails" to see the top stories about these topics according to Facebook engagement. We also searched for known viral lies such as "Soros and voting machine."
and
-- Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump's interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American "refugees" fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.
I am sure many other problems could be found if I looked more, but just one of these would put a nail in the coffin of their conclusion and together they just put it on dubious grounds.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...