Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism
kottke.org
kottke.org
First I'd like to adress there's very different kinds of journalism, different set of skills associated with it and of course, a company they work for. As a job, working for the New York Times, for a local journal, for a tech magazine or for travel channel is completely different. I don't think people realise how different the job actually is from one media to the other. You can't say 'journalists' the same way you can't say 'engineers' because there's people doing software, people doing tests, people building machines, people advising companies and many other people doing many other things and having no idea how to do some other engineer job because it is... entirely different. We're not interchangeable and we don't all do the same job at all.
All medias are also different. Which implies different owners, rules, and bosses. As a journalist, you're like everyone else : you're an employee. You can have ethics, you can have thoughts or a list of rules. At the end of the day, it's a job and if your boss asks you to do something completly stupid, you can either say no, loose that job and possibly die of hunger. Or you roll with it and hope very very hard it will not stay on the internet. (Spoiler alert : it will and you'll be ashamed of it all your life.) You do have rights in some countries; but first, like many rights, not everyone know them; and second, those rights don't necessarily protect you. Maybe the media can't fire you right away or because you refused working, but a few months later, when they're considering reconducting your contract, you'll just get cut. It's just sad math. Not everyone can afford to be a hero.
All those problems are not easy to solve. They beg many questions : is there just too many people in journalism ? Should companies shrink so they finally get profitable again and the remaining staff can do quality work - at the expense of thousands of people that would get without a job ? Should there only be subscription-based info ? But then does that mean no one without money would get the right to good information ? Should every company sort out a way to be both a newsroom (one that doesn't make much money or even none at all) and develop multiple activities on the side like an ad company, so that they can stay afloat (some have succeeded that way but it's not a valid point for everyone) ? I don't have an answer and mostly every media is trying to figure out their way out of all this. The thing is it's easy to criticize from outside that the managment is shit... but the ships are sinking and when you're sinking, you're not thinking ahead as to which direction you're going to take, or what part of the boat you're going to make better. First you try to figure out how to get all the water out and keep all the people inside alive. It's not an excuse, just the context we have to deal with.
Side note : there's also a problem of journalist schools. That's my own opinion, but I actually think they are very bad for the job - because you won't learn more than in a media, and it makes all the journalists come out very similar. Problem is, if you don't do them, you have no network and, at least in France, you actually can't intern in big medias. Twitter is a similar bubble to the bubbles school create. Twitter makes journalists feel like what they see or talk about has a bigger influence than it really has. But that's not a problem that's only with journalists. It's also with the platforms and it's been argued that it's all over the internet.
In one of the medias I worked for, it does say something that one of the most visited article of the year was about a tenia worm that was in someone's intestine and took literally ten minute to write, edit and publish. None of the very interesting piece of good journalism got as much attention. If you want to do good reporting that will shine, you need good keywords, a video, tons of links... And a long text for good SEO. They can't all have that. And because of the lack of money, all those steps are often asked of the journalists themselves. How can you do a good job if you have to get a good idea while browsing the internet because you don't have time to go out, talk to people and take the risk it will be all for nothing ? Then you have to sell your idea to your boss. Then research. Then interview. Then maybe do a video. Then maybe edit it. Then write the story. Then also doing editing and all the linking. Then publishing. Then promoting it with your own media so you get recognised by your coworkers. Then promoting it online. Then get another idea. All that in one morning of course because where's your worth as a stable employee if you can't publish 5 articles a day ?
I'm not saying journalists are not responsible for what is happening, that all the points you made weren't good points or that I have any answers. I'm just getting tired of always reading hate and simplistic arguments like "Anyway, Buzzfeed is shit" and "Journalists are only caring about twitter". Those are the symptoms, not the cause of the illness. And it would do great to move the debate elsewhere if we want to cure this. It won't be done by journalists alone. A journalist doesn't exist without an audience and this will have to be a common effort or journalism is just going to die and well, it's only my opinion, but I don't think the world will be better for it.
Sorry that rant ended up being a whole book. But if you get there, I would love to hear what you think and we can discuss this outside of hate and "they" and "journalists" and "toxicity".
If you're doing it for the love at that point, then it's not about the money and no argument can trump ethics and standards there. I think journalists spend so much time reflecting on others that there is little to no self-reflection. Just because your boss asks you to do something stupid, doesn't make it okay to do it.
If you're a soldier in the military and you carry out an unethical, illegal order, you're not only still going to get tried for it but you have the legal right to deny that order. And that's a job where you're already expected to maybe kill people for your government.
But while I'm glad that the military holds higher standards of ethics than most of the rest of us, the job of a journalist can be one with the potential to lead men to war. Ethics are just as important in your job is just as it is in theirs. Your tools are just as powerful and can equally be used as weapons.
That’s not an argument for abandoning journalistic ethics, but it does illustrate why Lehrer’s rules are not the current equilibrium.
Journalists aren't the root cause of the state of the media, but they aren't unwilling victims either. It's like working for a land mine manufacturer. You're not responsible for the concept of war existing, but you sure are contributing to suffering.
I generally like Thomas Jefferson on the topic:
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy.
It's also not that there's a lot of alternatives. If you don't want lazy, manipulative, clickbait journalism, your best bet is to not read any papers or media websites.
Thing is also that houses that have crumbled have crumbled and there's nothing left. You can't quantify what happened so easily. Articles stay online. Actually that's something that might be good to think about : for a magazine or a journal that decided to make things better and do more responsable journalism, should they delete the content that doesnt fit that bill anymore ? Kind of like the YouTube Kurzgesagt channel when they were confronted with a few of their faults and decided to eradicate the content that was problematic ? It's pretty radical but it sends a message. Not sure how that would be doable economically though.
Would they be willing to pay? That probably depends on the audience. Some certainly would. Others use news as entertainment, they probably won't, because there are better forms of entertainment commercially available.
Regarding corrections: I don't like deleting stuff outright, but afaik you can't change the video on YouTube, so that's a harder problem. For their own site, a company could (and should) still leave them online, but clearly mark them as retracted (and say why they retracted it; and possibly set noindex on them so search engines drop them from the results). This would achieve transparency and keep unknowing readers safe. Doing secret edits that change the meaning of sentences is the worst that can happen.
Someone made a point in another discussion that traditional news outlets are no longer trustworthy and would have to rebuild somewhere else to get a new sort of trust. Maybe that's the way...
Chicken and egg? Virtually nobody has paying customers before they start and create their product. Especially for the large media conglomerates, I don't believe it would be a venture where they'd have to risk their company. For individual journalists or small groups that might be different. I don't know how successful the crowdfunded experiments of the last few years were.
I do believe that it's hard to transition from the current form to an alternative system by making lots of small changes over a long time. On the other hand: there's a chance to build trust with each new generation. It's much easier to start with a clean slate than win back those you've lost, I suppose.
There's been a big the wave of new medias but not many survived more than a few month or a year. Not sure about crowdfunding. I'll look it up actually, that would be interesting to compare.
One question, you touched on this earlier, but do you think there is an oversupply of journalists? There seem to be many blue checkmarks on Twitter who write “analysis” for weird websites I’ve never heard of.
I donate monthly to ProPublica because they put resources into investigative journalism and apparently pay their journalists pretty well. I wonder how many ProPublicas we need for a healthy journalism industry.
The blue ticks are totally over rated. You can have them if you're not a proper journalist and not have it if you are ^^
Yeah Pro Publica does really good stuff. That's the thing actually. A few medias have managed to get a community around them that's willing to pay and then you can do good journalism. That's great.
Problem stands more for old medias that needed to adapt and mostly none took the risk of going for internet subscription. So they still have to pay their hundreds of employees with a news model that won't last.
Management in medias is one of the main problems. Like in many industries, medias had a hard time taking internet seriously, then didn't think their strategy through, then started going on Facebook etc without a sound strategy as well... You see there exactly what happened first in music, then tv, and basically every industry. I dont know if the Spotify / Netflix model would works for medias. Open question there ^^
You can, and should, unionize. And then you can say no and keep your job.
The fact that you see the employment-at-will mentality as legitimate is a failing of professional journalistic ethos IMHO.
Of course, labor law violations theoretically are punished by regulators, but that doesn't happen quickly - if at all - and in the meanwhile you have no job.
I can only speak for France but unions have been coming up. But they are reeaally recent. (last year maybe). The unions that were already in place were more adapted to paper journalism and didn't take well into account the online issues. So it's starting but the fact it's arriving so late also explains the current situation that people often feel like they have to do everything to keep their job. Because there's nothing that can protect them.
But of course, it is not at all easy (speaking from the experience both of starting a union and of being fired for speaking up).
There are more fantastic ones than ever before but the number of crappy ones and major players that have entered the market in the past 20 years have overshadowed them by orders of magnitudes.
I think this is pretty much happening everywhere as access to the middle class and knowledge worker/white collar jobs are becoming the norm.
A small cadre of experts still exist but the number of amateurs, scammers and grifters is aggressively growing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism
It's also worth referencing Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent which lays out the playbook for propaganda posing as journalism:
It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.
Highlighting the positive aspects of whatever you're doing, avoiding the negative aspects, discrediting opponents and most insidiously - misrepresenting their arguments is how it's done.
It's about creating the intended narrative around a specific subject.
Take any controversial issue and you'll generally see that the 'sides' are not having a debate in public, they're engaging in framing the issue in a manner. The end up talking past one another entirely.
'Manufacturing Consent' is a funny book, because we read it when we're young and naive and our eyes are opened to the reality of the world and the perennial war of ideas. Because such activities are framed as nefarious and related to questionable acts of intervention (i.e. US intervention in S. America) ... we are 'shocked and outraged'. But I think looking at it from a more mature, contextualized perspective, it doesn't seem 'shocking' it seems really normal.
Ironically the real coup of Chomsky is to misrepresent the nature of 'mass idea marketing' in a fair antagonist way that I don't think is really helpful.
Unfortunately - almost all news is narrative-driven.
Certainly the entirety of cable news.
If you watch the local news, it feels dry and mundane, because it's generally very truthful, and there isn't a lot of 'war of ideas' over the dog that called 911.
But for everything in pop culture and politics, there's a way to frame the subject in an ideological way (or in a manner that represents the interests of some group like advertisers or powerful individuals etc.) which is what happens all day long.
First, you're projecting.
Second, it's not at all surprising that you're young enough to have first read Manufacturing Consent when you were "young".
Third, books like Manufacturing Consent and Discipline and Punishment are primarily sociological. They do have some normative content, of course, but their primary goal is to explain how the world works.
> It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.
This is an over-simplification. Of course that's true. Manufacturing Consent is not merely pointing out the existence of politics or merely making the observation that political operatives attempt to use media to shift opinion. It's a book about ___how___ that process works in the age of mass media and in a democratic capitalist society.
The way in which cable news is used to warp people's perception of reality seems pretty obvious in 2020, with hindsight.
And so Manufacturing Consent might seem trite and obvious today. But the book wasn't written in 2019. Or 2018. Or 2008. Or even 1998. It was published in 1988.
Just to put that in context: it was written prior to 9/11. It was written almost a decade before Fox News was founded. It was written only shortly after cable television was even invented. In 1988, "Cable News" as we know it today didn't exist. CNN barely existed, and looked more like a combination of NBC Nightly News and CSPAN. And most importantly, manufacturing Consent was published at a time when most Americans really did believe that the nightly news was a mostly unbiased source of information.
You might read it today and think "yeah, that's obviously how mass media is used to influence how people think about the world". But that's very much not the reaction most people -- even, perhaps especially, hard-nosed realists -- had when reading it in 1988.
This goes back far beyond the advent of 'cable news'.
For centuries, newspapers have been created, bought and promulgated mostly for the purposes of making money and promoting the narrative of the owners, often in the form of personal attacks.
Yes, I'm 'projecting' a little but this issue usually takes quite some time and exposure to grasp as most people don't have any direct dealings with it. It comes up way too often with young people referring to Manufacturing Consent as some kind of revelation. The fact is it's a revelation to them, but not objectively a revelation.
With social media, Twitter specifically, the journalist becomes the main focal point -- unfortunately the biases comes out as we are all human and you begin to get a closer look at how the sausage is made, how much "access journalism" corrodes coverage, and particularly how non-diverse these institutions are (everyone feels like they went to some Ivy or liberal arts college with somewhat wealthy or well connected in journalism relatives). A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent) from the big institutions but I've totally avoided political and most opinion columns since 2016.
Journalists will have publishing control, choosing which platforms suit each piece the best. People will have a much harder time discrediting someone with a focused, proven track record vs a business with broad financial and political interests. It's the natural result of a societal emphasis on identity-focused decision-making. We look for other individuals to guide us through things we don't understand. Individuals are relatable. This is why podcasting has swamped radio.
But the phenomenon of reporters being able to personally convey their behind-the-scene thinking and experience? I think that’s been a huge boon of valuable, informative insights we previously could only get in memoirs and 10-year anniversary reflections. What you see published as articles is something that’s been trimmed and edited for largely pragmatic purposes and convention, not through some rigorous standard of epistemology.
The NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi is a great example of someone whose tweets greatly enrich her published work. Here is a thread of insights and reporting that became part of a next-day story on Iran and Sulemani:
https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213421769777909761
One of the best examples of all is David Farhenthoid, who tweeted the progress of what seemed like a very picayune (relatively speaking) factcheck of Trump's charity claims:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/david-fahr...
> I spent a day searching for Trump’s money on Twitter, asking vets’ organizations if they’d gotten any of it. I used Trump’s Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, because I wanted Trump to see me searching.
> Trump saw.
> The next night, he called me to say he had just then given away the $1 million, all in one swoop, to a nonprofit run by a friend. That meant when Lewandowski said Trump’s money was “fully spent,” it was actually still in Trump’s pocket.
Here's a more detailed breakdown of how Farenthold conveyed the progress of his reporting through Twitter, including screenshots of the legal pad he used as a checklist:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/5/13810210/h...
By "picayune", I mean that in late 2016 (e.g. September through November) Trump's charity claims were extremely small-time compared to the actual presidential race. Without a way to publicly convey and accumulate (i.e. snowball) his reporting, Fahrenthold may not have been given enough time (by his editors) to have the critical mass needed for a meaningful story. His work eventually resulted in a Pulitzer-winning investigation, and the impetus for the most damaging ongoing state-level investigations into Trump today:
This is the absolute reverse of true: twitter allows accountability of the journalists at outfits you mentioned.
> With social media, Twitter specifically, the journalist becomes the main focal point
If you put your name on reporting, you're accountable for its quality.
> and particularly how non-diverse these institutions are
Au contraire, the papers seem far more obsessed with idpol than twitter, preferring to focus on cults of personality and what their popularity (or non popularity) means than meat and potato issues.
> A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent)
I disagree, but I'll leave the question of why you consider this flavor of reporting high quality up to you to figure it out.
I subscribe to the new york times, the washington post, and the la times, RT, al jazeera, among many other smaller publications. I don't think I could make any sense of the election year, climate change, or international politics without twitter, full stop—you're only seeing half the conversation, or less. Frankly even hacker news has better "reporting" on climate change than any "journalistic outfit" I've read, mostly because it's a massive topic to cover that changes very rapidly and it doesn't sell attention nearly as well as problems that operate within our understood paradigm of how our world should work.
And, frankly, it's hard to imagine an outfit more driven to polarize and work up its base for no discernible reason than the New York Times Opinion section—I can't articulate it better than this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsWj7Q5iPus.
Finally, this entire dialogue neglects that twitter allows journalists to critique each other in public, a distinctly positive thing for journalism no matter what your opinions are about the unwashed masses.
Can you point to an example of any recent article in any US paper that even tries to be objective? Only the BBC pretends to strive for that nowadays.
This remark is hugely ironic if you followed the recent UK election, but they at least have an outside perspective in the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/health/chicago-coronaviru...
It clearly describes the spread of the disease in the US, including cited quotations from officials at the CDC and other health experts. It provides some useful additional facts about other similar diseases, and projections about how this disease could spread. Seems objective to me.
I think that depends where in the world you live.
In the UK all news broadcasters are required to be neutral and objective by law. They aren't and the relevant regulator is MIA, probably because it's staffed with people who agree with the broadcaster's biases. But it's certainly not the norm there that "people" say media isn't objective. Lots of people still like to claim the BBC at least is objective, despite reams of retired or former journalists going on record to say it isn't.
Do we really need to know what is going on on the other side of the planet right now? Isn't it better to have correct information rather than fast information?
As I've gotten older, and become more educated on these specific topics, I've had the exact opposite reaction. Reporting on International politics in particular seems to have deteriorated to the point of being propaganda at best or outright garbage at worst. This is just recognizing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect at scale, I suppose, but to your point what Twitter has done is expose how little these people actually know about the subjects they write about. That seems like a net-good thing to me, since I'd rather we know that the people who pretend to know about the subjects they write about actually don't have at least a baseline understanding of what they're talking about. "Explainers" are probably the worst development here, since this is just advocacy journalism pretending to be "just the facts, ma'am". These "data journalists" have an explicit twitter personae that advocates a specific narrative, and then we all pretend that, for some reason, this doesn't leak into the reporting from the institution they work for.
There's probably no going back from this state, and I doubt that there will be any major changes in hiring practices at e.g. the NYT since this kind of journalism drives a lot of traffic. Cat is out of the bag, so to speak.
Alas, they are completely moot in today's ad-supported automated outrage machines. And I'm fresh out of goodwill.
Until we decide that discourse is more important than profits, forge a new consensus, we have to treat reporting like the replication crisis in science.
Just two rules apply:
Sign your work.
Share your data.
The corollaries are just as simple:
Unsigned, unsourced statements are gossip.
Unsupported data is propaganda.
The sad part is that concocting sensationalism is extremely profitable, especially politics. And when you can create the controversy and then charge outrageous amounts of money to the very people to whom you poke, you control the discourse and you make a lot of money, which in America is power.
Modern, mainstream "news" is just like fast food. If you care about your body and your health, you will not eat the stuff. But most people dont care, dont mind and dont even think about it. Its cheap, tasty and convenient.
The worst problem with journalism today, encapsulated in a single sentence.
> Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
A journalist should check whether there is another side that they missed. However, there sometimes isn't. Sometimes the other side is simply flat-out wrong. More often, the "other side" is maliciously wrong.
This journalistic assumption that there are always multiple sides that are on equal footing needs to DIE.
I don't think anyone on the right or left would say that the present problem with Journalists is that they present both sides too well.
That's not to say that there's never a correct position. Assuming there is another version is different from assuming all versions are on multiple footing.
There are NOT two equal sides. There is a correct side and an outright fraudulent side and bunch of easily swayed morons.
Journalists tend to cover this with "balance" instead of calling one side flat-out wrong. "Fair" means occasionally calling out liars and pissing people off.
For instance, they keep reporting the results of dodgy scientific studies as if it's the unquestionable truth. Their evaluation of "is it true" is nothing fancier than "does the person telling me this have a PhD from a university I've heard of". Then more studies that come out and contradict the first set, and they get reported in the same way. Pretty soon people figure out that these stories can't all be right.
If journalists insist on interpreting the news to try and give context, which they don't have to do, then they should be far more skeptical than they really are, and give far more time to people who disagree with any given idea of view. That would pretty quickly put a stop to things like this:
http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/
NB: this site tries to make the Daily Mail look stupid because some objects are classified as both cures and causes cancer. But if you check the stories, they're all reporting on actual scientific results. The problem is the underlying medical science isn't reliable enough to determine truth.
Not lying is not at all the same as telling the truth.
Modern journalism, at best (very rarely seen), tells you something that is, narrowly taken, true. Even this version of journalism does not attempt to tell you what the actual truth of the matter is.
Narrowly true statement: "Republican Senator Blarg said today on the floor of the Senate "these charges are nonsense, fake news, totally made up"."
That's a true statement! It was said! But it's also misleading about the whole matter to convey it to your readers.
Telling your viewers the real truth of the situation: "The charges levied in the Senate are obviously accurate and serious, but Republican Senators are lying about them in an attempt to obfuscate and downplay the situation."
They act out this status-dance of pretending to loathe every second of life in the toxic digital hellscape that, in the talk tracks and visibility it gives them is actually very beneficial for their careers.
They couldn’t actually admit it’s been good for them though, as that would mean admitting profiting from the algorithmic, privacy problem-invested landscape that they barely understand but have made their careers criticizing.
But of course, everyone’s at it! So the only way to get ahead is more paranoia, more angst, more toxicity. Once you’re bought in, you can’t go back to tacking to the middle. So we get an arms race of performative angst and hyperbolic statements.
Before you know it, you’re claiming that Slack notifications give you PTSD symptoms: https://twitter.com/pfpicardi/status/1220738739514814467?s=2...
The problem is that that is antithetical to the real work of journalism - which should be about seeking truth without fear or favour.
Maybe one day actual journalists will come to the conclusion that tweeting is antithetical to journalism and may only use it as a tool of discovery rather than engagement.
The upside though is that it's easier to tell they're activists / non-objective on Twitter - compared to supposedly 'serious' outlets pushing all kinds of agendas as "objective" journalism.
They've always been activists. Twitter just makes it visible to the public while in the past, their biases were shielded behind the fake PR-driven reputation of an institution.
The first newspapers in america were created to lie and spread political ideology. And that has been the case ever since.
"As for what is not true you will always find abundance in the newspapers." – Thomas Jefferson
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle." – Thomas Jefferson
I wish everyone was taught about the history of the news industry. Also, I wish every media company was forced to notify/warn their audience on who founded the company and why. Like how cigarette and tobacco companies have to put warning labels to notify their customers of the dangers of the product they are selling.
It's like they've said: Alright, truth is impossible to reach, so let's throw everything out window.
You literally paraphrased it as "Before you know it, you’re claiming that Slack notifications give you PTSD symptoms". If you don't agree with that analysis (which is ridiculous: the author is making a joke about being afraid of slack notifications) then why did you give it to us just to deny it later?
But that is the point, the poor interpretation of the single tweet does not particularly bolster the argument analyzing the general behavior of journalists on twitter.
If what a journalist really wants to do is tell their own "truth". Then yeah, facts and hard evidence aren't really necessary and putting out their "truth" becomes entirely possible.
Some truths do.
A lot of truths don't depend on point of view.
Whether something is right or wrong, benefit or detriment etc does depend on point of view. But lots of truths just depend on what's reported matching what is the case.
E.g. "whether X did Y (e.g. whether John punched Jack)" is not based on opinion. There's a universal truth there, either John did or he didn't. Speculation about what happened (when the journalist speaks without evidence) and whether "it's good that X did Y", sure, are based on opinion.
Media, all too often, fails to report correctly on things that fall on universal truths (in a famous case, saying someone had WMDs when they didn't). It fails to look for evidence, and it even often blatantly lies or distorts the universal facts.
I'm pretty sure you just conflated "truth" with fact. John punching Jack. Or John not punching Jack. Is one of the facts of the situation. At least, police and criminal courts would call it one of the facts. They certainly wouldn't call it one of the "truths".
That doesn't make fact equivalent to truth, any more than it makes belief equivalent to truth. (Or, indeed, anymore than it makes belief equivalent to fact.)
Juries often issue “a speaking of the truth” inconsistent with fact. (Even inconsistent with facts as presented.) That's what the Innocence Project is all about, they exist precisely because of the difference between these adjudicated "truths" and real world facts.
That's because they're doing speculation on facts - and can get them wrong.
That they call it "a speaking of the truth" doesn't means it's epistemologically true or that they think it is true and only true with no element of error (any judge will admit to that).
It just conveys their wish and effort for it to be true. Calling a verdict merely: "What we think is true" doesn't have the same ring to it, nor would be as respected by the public as the word of the law. So there's that.
But a verdict, at least the part that is based on a statement of facts (X killed Y), is absolutely either true or false (regardless of whatever we know it or not to be such -- only one set of events transpired in the real world, either X killed Y or he didn't).
Whether e.g. some moral judgement is neither true nor false - it depends on a system of beliefs and viewpoints, regardless of what somebody did in the world.
E.g. "you are a sinner because you wear a mini-skirt". Well, for those who don't believe in such a moral, no, you're not.
An opinion in the sense of a value judgement (moral statements, political statements, etc) can't be true or false. One can agree with it or not. At worst it can be inconsistent with its premises (wrongly arrived).
https://twitter.com/imani_barbarin/status/122088704700891545...
What of public relations, think tanks, and campaigns? Those legions of people paid to push a point of view?
It's amusing (tragicomically) that your sole criticism is for the people with least power in a corrupt media ecosystem.
The article is about a journalist so we're thinking about how other journalists compare.
I originally read this as "orange tsunami". Which changes the point slightly.
How do we fix this?
That's an open question. But I think we need to change the game and the incentives. We probably need a new business model and/or for this kind of news to become widely understood as the junk food entertainment it is. Maybe put a nutrition label or cancer-like warning on them, heh...
Most of what they post is utter clickbait and not really informative. They also do amazing pieces of investigation because this model brought them money and they wanted to use it to do better work.
See this article from 2018 that was nominated for a Pullitzer Prize. https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...
Does that mean you rate Buzzfeed as cancer - including the great reporting they sometimes do ? Or each article independently ? But then who does it ?
Open questions here as well ^^
The same goes for Buzzfeed in my opinion. Yes, there may be something of value every other year, but generally it's shit. You don't want to regularly ingest shit on the off chance that there's some delicious candy in there somewhere.
Who cares about paying for a staff of $60-80k/year well-seasoned investigative reporters that take weeks-months to produce vivid, informative pieces only for them to be forgotten about for another thing in the 24hr news cycle? Why not just pay a bunch of young people $18/hr to "rehash" 8 articles/day with a bunch of fluff and opinion to pump out more stuff to get more dollars? Why even bother going out into the world to gather information when I could just copy-paste the first story to come out, add a few pictures and edits, then release it to catch the demand-wave for content monetization while it's riding high, and call it a day?
The proliferation of 'fake news' is basically just "full-throttle" digital journalism that said, "Fuck it, why even wait around for real-life happenings to report on when I could just create my own and make money?"
Journalism is not anymore some "sacred art" or "esteemed profession", like a doctor or lawyer or scientist, it's just another avenue to make dollars from society through supply-demand.
This is just one recent example that comes to mind. See why Harvard Professor is suing the NYT [1] for completely twisting his post about MIT and Jeffrey Epstein [0]
I found this so outrageous how NYT would completely twist words and not make the appropriate corrections when given the evidence.
If you see the egregious defamation there, then you're a more nuanced reader than I am.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/13/21063873/jeffrey-epstein-...
You can 'yea but' anything. For example, for rule #2: "Do not distort, lie, slant, or hype." ... yeah, but what if the subject is evil.
(Also, I have yet to see one mainstream news report on Flat Earth, much less a favourable one ... is that actually a problem you're worried about?)
Due to social media, we know more of the unfiltered thoughts of Trump and his supporters that any other president and political movement ever.
My opinion of both has been formed by direct exposure to their utterances.
1. do not care about creating panics or damaging society
2. are incentivized to provide click-baity to-the-minute reporting.
How to fix this?
Maybe regulation, even though dangerous in this freedom of speech territory.
One thing I was thinking (inspired by one of Andrew Yang's point) is to have a press tax to fund a delayed international news outlet.
It changes the incentives: the media has no funding issue and is not incentivized to attract more readers; and it changes the impact: delaying each piece of news to wait until more information is available is good.
Perhaps the public broadcasting service could have a nightly program that dedicates an entire hour of primetime to this type of reporting. And we could even name it in Lehrer's name! Of course in that case we should also give MacNeil credit as well. So perhaps the show could be called something like the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour"!
;-)
What you are asking for already exists [1]. In fact, the article we're commenting on is about the guy who co-hosted it [2]. Up until a few years ago, the program was even called the "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" [3].
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Lehrer
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS_NewsHour#The_MacNeil/Lehre...
Stop clicking.
What you want to know is the facts that go against the narrative that aren't mentioned.
Then take a holistic view.
Something that gathers all of the known facts in one place for review. That used to be what journalists did, not so much any longer.
Political coverage is a nightmare though. Just yesterday George Stephanopoulos was caught on camera acting in an extremely partisan manner [1]. This happens on both sides of the isle regularly at this point (the White House itself is hardly faultless). It's only ratcheted up since 2016 where it seems the press took it up themselves to "save" us, where the definition of save seems to be: push their own political opinions.
1. https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1220758756071497728
To be fair, Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative for years before transitioning to media. Why would you expect him to not be partisan?
I'm amazed that we've reached a point in the USA where we can't agree on some simple truths anymore.
I'm curious. Can you give one or two examples of the 'simple truths' that we can't agree on anymore?
>What one side considers the truth might not be the same for the other, look no further than the impeachment proceedings.
The impeachment proceedings are interesting examples because I truly believe that objectively, even if the facts are as stated by the Democrats, it would be a gross abuse to remove Trump from office for that. It's bonkers. Trump's conduct, at best, warrants a Congressional censure. But I take your point one two sides looking at the same event but interpreting it vastly differently. The Kavanaugh nomination was the same way, as well as coverage around Covington kids (could not believe as it was happening that news reports would profile children in the way they did).
"Should Trump be impeached for leveraging military aid to require an investigation into local companies in a nation that was ostensibly interfering in American politics, when the target of said investigation is a political opponent, thereby creating an obvious conflict of interest"
"Should Hillary Clinton be charged for communicating sensitive information using persona devices, or deleting information requested by the FBI during the subsequent investigation"
These are really hard issues actually.
If you stand outside your hatred or love for these people, and stand outside of your own political preferences, they become considerably more nuanced and difficult than we'd care to admit.
They are not black and white enough to have easy answers, and so, we get narratives, misinformation, and polarisation.
I don't think this is a new problem in politics at all. In my earliest memories of observing politics I remember being outraged at the convenient redefinition of words. Politicians are basically advocates for an agenda (most of them are even trained attorneys). And most everything they do and say is designed to further that agenda. Character is secondary and will not be what gets them elected/re-elected.
I'm sorry, but even as political talking points go this makes no sense. He made a "cut" gesture during a live feed, but live news broadcasts cut from one feed to another dozens of times per hour, and the feed he was motioning to cut wasn't of any particular importance to either party (it was a Trump lawyer listening to someone off-camera asking a question). That's hardly "extremely partisan".
Stephanopoulos was giving directing clues for his own talk program. There is positively nothing "partisan" about that, however partisan he may be. The White House, on the other hand...well let's not even go there.
This is the entire internet.
It kind of explains why we live in the fact light environment of quotes and spin. Presumably, if a hard fact proves unpopular with a large enough group, then those facts, even when backed by hard evidence, can likely land you in a lot of trouble.
A bit understandable I suppose? I mean, if talking bad about Trump or Obama increases the number of shooters in your Walmarts and churches, then yeah, probably should be careful about doing that. At the same time, if you have to walk on egg shells around people so emotionally invested in a person, or place, or subject that they're going to shoot up anyone who disagrees with them, then your journalism on that issue is not likely to be very "good" in any case.
Facts are not enough because in order for 'facts' to be useful they have to be embedded in a larger structure - like a theory, or ideology, or narrative, or whatever.
Here's a fact: "Sun rises in the East, and sets in the West". This fact is compatible with heliocentric and geocentric models. The fact on its own doesn't tell you which is which. It doesn't tell you the context, nor the other facts that may have been omitted or superfluously included when reported, and proponents of both theories can use it to justify their position. This is why there can never be such a thing as "journalism that just reports the facts".
But the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun does tell you which "model" is actually a fact. That's the point.
You're making an argument about which facts should be reported? The sun rising in the east? Or the phases of Venus? Or both? Or both and more?
But stating that you need an ideology or narrative to support your facts is a bit nonsensical in my own opinion. There really is only one conclusion that can be drawn from the totality of the facts. To state only a single fact, and then say, "here is an ideology or narrative so you can understand the fact I just gave you." Really is just stating an ideology or narrative.
Think of it this way, if you still need a narrative, then you didn't give anyone all the facts.
Nobody has time to report all the facts.
Nobody knows ALL the facts.
There are infinitely many facts. They don't select themselves. Humans do that, for reasons of their own, and sometimes their reasons don't match the intended use of this website, which is curious conversation. So while facts are a nice-to-have, they're not sufficient to make for a good HN post. Other things are needed also.