Political Bias Is Destroying Peoples Faith in Journalism
nypost.com
nypost.com
https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-s...
ABC faking a crime scene.
https://i.imgur.com/QDU9OGE.jpg
Anderson Cooper faking a scene.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/...
Which is it Washington Post? One of these articles is FALSE.
We are losing faith in journalism because the journalists are WRONG.
He also did an on-air segment with the full footage: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/1....
Not to say that CNN is not often wrong, but this is a meme that isn't true.
It doesn't matter which hurricane it is; it's whether or not it's bullshit for him to be doing that. That's it. The picture isn't fake, it's true that he FAKED that news. It's fake news. The hurricane's name doesnt matter.
The massive corporate centralization of all media channels is the primary source of distrust in journalism now. It seeks profit by whatever controversy, fake news, or distraction that will sell ads, regardless of traditional value.
Being a staunch environmentalist I obviously loathe most Republicans and hate centrist-dominated Democrats almost as much.
But it is clear to me that the partisanship of the country is due to a flood of media desperate for clicks, overwhelming people who have not or cannot adapt to the propaganda firehose.
Here's a fun little experiment: where can you tune in on TV for balanced opinions on issues that will actually account for more that a single viewpoints, coming out of the same mouth? You know, things like "caveats" or saying "granted" about some aspect of the opposing side?
Moderation doesn't fuel emotions, and emotions and radicalization are what gets you constant viewership.
Like all other industries in America, the conglomerates need to be split up.
Most people know good and well whats happening, its more the intellectuals who are making out well in this current environment who are doing (in good faith) the mental gymnastics to put the fault of the american media's decline on some abstract idea as if tree's didn't bear fruit.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
What are your thoughts on the requirement that environmental policies are tied very closely to left economic policies? I'd like the option to vote for string environmental policies but they seem coupled with economic policies that I don't want to vote for.
It also seems like it might be hard to write about certain political stories without being accused of bias. Is it possible to write anything about the shutdown and border wall fiasco that doesn't paint he President and GOP in a bad light? Wont many people incorrectly perceive that as biased reporting?
I don't mean to imply that there isn't actual bias but it just seems like a strange thing to bring up at a time when certain political figures are acting in such extreme ways. Simply reporting on those actions and their consequences if often going to be very negative.
And of course all the botched bombshell scoops that are retracted 24 hrs later.
> It is not hard to find examples of how far we have strayed from reporting standards in the Trump era. A simple example is Time Magazine falsely reporting on President Donald J. Trump’s first day in office, stating that he’d removed a statue of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office. The news went viral. But the writer did not follow the most basic rule of journalism — pick up the phone and ask the White House if it was really gone, and why? The writer late wrote a correction on his Twitter account, stating “The MLK bust is still in the Oval Office. It was obscured by an agent and door.”
There are numerous examples. Most recently the entire media running with a Buzzfeed story to the tune of "Trump is finished" that Mueller himself disputed, or the stuff about the MAGA hat kids that allegedly surrounded and mocked a Native American peace activist (turns out he had muscled his way into their gathering and was physically intimidating them, but the press ran with a selectively edited video and didn't bother corroborating it). This is stuff that gets widespread coverage before any journalist bothers with due diligence.
I think it's a shame because a free press is one of the only ways to keep the government in check but they are shredding their own credibility, apparently because of personal biases (but who really knows), and the result of that is a government that can rightfully dismiss a lot of what gets reported. How do you recover after "crying wolf" too many times?
There is also a tendril that reaches into Academia. Free speech on most campuses is dead. The left has seen to that. Kids are being militantly trained to shut down speakers with whom they disagree, simply because they disagree. This empowers the rest of politics because these kids will never let fairness and unbiased reporting happen and the more prestigious the school this happens at, the more likely these students will affect the media in their lifetimes.
MSNBC’s programming in the US evenings is largely opinion/political talk, and isn’t presented as news but as editorial. One can object to opinions, but it is unfair to criticize journalists for op/ed content—just like with newspapers. Very often the journalists personally disagree with opinion/editorial page content, but everyone understands that content isn’t bound by journalism’s standards.
You're not wrong, but I see that as self-correcting. If the media continues to undermine their credibility, then independent journalism will continue to rise. We're already seeing YouTube creators with bigger followings than any of the traditional media channels. This is a double-edged sword because a lot of these channels don't have the same level of journalistic training that traditional media champions, but training is also a moot point when the traditional actors have abandoned their best practices to chase sensational headlines.
We are rapidly approaching a place where people can choose whatever facts they want to believe because everything is questionable. That is more dangerous to democracy than the so-called fascist president the media is railing against.
Looks like you're running with what their PR firm says[1].
[1] https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2019/01/21/...
What if the PR firm is saying the truth?
If you can't imagine such a story would possibly portray the current administration in a positive light, then you are not visualizing the story from the other point of view. Imagine allowing the White House to write the story, for instance. Or Fox News. Or the RNC. etc. I'm not saying this is the way the story should be written-- only that it is certainly possible to spin the story either way.
It's the journalist's job to present just the facts, without spin. It's not an easy task, but that's the way it should be.
I agree with #1 to some extent, but they came up with the dumbest possible example in pointing out that the lawsuit was funded by Peter Thiel. I'm pretty sure there's a concept on the "left" that says it's not your right to "out" a person's sexuality. Gawker violated that. Not that I (or even the law) care one way or another, and not that this was the focus of the trial (it wasn't), but I get why Thiel was livid with them. Thiel (secretly) funded a lawsuit against Gawker for posting a sex tape of Hulk Hogan. I'm not even sure what mental backflips you have to do to presume that this was newsworthy or okay. They tried to explain it to us, and the best they got was the meta-point that Thiel funded the lawsuit. Nothing worthy of note about why they had a right (via Freedom of the Press) to make a sex tape public against the wishes of one of the participants. Maybe if it was a sex tape surrounding the impeachment of a current president, I'd understand.
And somehow, I'm supposed to believe that this means there's a slippery slope now, where journalists can no longer freely state the news, for fear of being sued. As if this case weren't limited to the example of, maybe don't post a sex tape of some D-list celebrity as news.
All that said, and per the article here, I am unhappy with "journalists" as a group, specifically with their sanctimonious claims that they're protecting democracy. And the conclusion of this idea, when you take it to the end, is that people simply need to believe them on moral principle, non-believers are against democracy.
They're the victims here, the perpetrators are all the people who don't believe their stories any more--as if there was nothing they did to put themselves in this place.
But when ~6 companies own 90% of US media, that doesn't count as influence.
The best part is, they don't even have to lie. They can shape public opinion just by selecting which stories get covered, or get more prominence, without giving you a smoking gun false-story you can point at to prove their bias.
One of most hilarious things happening, as others point out is the “fact checks” which should be called “gotcha on technicalities”. No, it wasn’t 200,000 gallons, it was 189,480 gallons, liar! No, unemployment isn’t down to 4.2%, it’s actually expected to be down to 3.9%, you are so wrong!
It's a shame, really. But I'm very glad Lara Logan is speaking out. It will cost her, but by raising awareness of the issue maybe things can start to improve.
Reuters, for example, still does a great job at focusing only on the facts, without attempting to interpret or inject personal opinions. They hold their journalists to a very high degree of journalistic integrity, and it really shows.
Political Bias is in my mind largely a side effect: politically charged stories get lots of eyes and getting to them late means missing out on the inevitable flutter of angry and indignant retweets about the story. So loads of political stories get rushed, which means we see a lot of slanted ones (because more are written), and because they were rushed they are missing facts or have incorrect facts.
So yeah, bias. I'm not at all convinced this is a "both sides" issue. You can find errors in coverage and examples of bias, but the scale of the Murdoch/Mercer news empires really has no match from the center. The actual left wing is pretty well unrepresented.
The big problem I have is their obsession with ridiculous fact checking now. Not checking how many bodies are actually in the morgue, or whether or not a statue was removed. I mean the bullshit pedantry. Donald Trump says in the state of the union that the US has been at war in the middle east for almost 19 years. The NYT "fact checks" that as "actually it's only been almost 18 years". What does that accomplish? Is anyone more informed? Is there any story there? Is there any commentary on the state of the union, or just a summary? Does it matter at all? Is their fact check even accurate?
My problem with it is that this has replaced any sort of quality journalism with just a mass of worthless fact checks and the important stuff gets buried.
There are very few moderate left or moderate right news outlets, perhaps because moderate news isn't as prone to the virality of the far left/far right viewpoints.
"Fact checking" largely seems to be an attempt at appeasement to the error-rate of instant news.