We will look back on the ruination of journalism as a profession as one of the most consequential changes of these last two decades.
On one side, the death of traditional journalism really has opened up folks' eyes to bias in reporting. Having one or two main-stream news sources really opens up the possibility for bias becoming truth.
On the other side, now that everyone is a reporter, people roll around inside whichever cocoon of bias makes them feel the best.
It's very frustrating, and overwhelming.
This is not what I see happening. Instead what happens is people see news they disagree with and deem it biased. So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news.
1. Check out a bunch of their articles on various topics, the more controversial the better. That way you can kind of gauge which way they lean.
2. Find some other source, preferably several, check out their biases they same way.
3. Then compare some articles about the same thing, from all these sources.
Look for stuff like references, sources, lack of weasel words or outrage inducing phrasing, aggrandizing vocabulary, etc. The more boring an article sounds, the more likely it is that the reporting is solid.
Yes, it's a lot of work, but you don't have to do it for every article, you do it maybe once every few years, to re-evaluate the options.
For example, last night every major news site had a headline about Biden's electoral college victory, or about Biden's speech, or about the virus. Fox News's huge banner headline was that Joe Biden had "a bit of a cold". This to me indicates an extreme bias.
This is not to say other MSM sources aren't rife with bias--for example, all are staunchly pro-corporate, as they are owned by corporations. But bias does come in degrees; we must continually try to be aware of biases in our media, but we shouldn't treat all MSM as "equally biased and equally bad".
Most of the bias is in deciding what stories to cover and what stories to ignore. They can't simply cover everything that happens. An organization needs to decide what stories are worthy of publishing, and how to frame these stories ("All the news that's fit to print"). And then which politicians do they want to ask questions of, and what types of questions, and that's even before deciding what experts, or "experts" or pundits or downright paid shills to comment on these stories. This is where the bias is.
Have you been not consuming news for the last 5 years?
The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?
To give a much more politically correct example of the very same thing, the media harps enormously on most cases of whites committing violence against black individuals. To do so is generally basically factual but the degree to which it is done without giving context can create an enormous slant to a more contextually nuanced situation.
You evaluate multiple sources to independently verify information, and you hold each source up to consistently good ethical behavior and accurate information.
Basically, treat journalism like science, but a little more fast and loose (literally) because you can't wait for 10 years of research to determine how to act politically or economically.
1) Cross-check. If a news source says something, see what others are saying. Especially others with no vested interest in agreeing with source 1.
2) (This is key, and where I think people tend to fail hardest) Reputation. Real news sources make mistakes. Real news sources print retractions. Real news sources have a reputation to curate. Guy sitting in his van ranting into a camera and posting to YouTube has none of those things and is not a news source. Keep track of who sucks and who doesn't and start down-sampling bad-reputation sources.
3) Separate news from analysis and know which you're looking at. A lot of news out there is doing more interpretation of fact than relaying fact. Be aware of interpretation---you don't have to disregard it, but remember the effect it has on you the listener (setting expectations changes how we interpret input) and the effect it has on the reporter (bias leads people to discard facts that don't fit and over-highlight facts that do). I'm personally always leery of stories that tell you what you should think before telling you what happened.
4) Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down. People in the middle of a riot have no idea what's going on. No matter what they're capturing on cameras at the scene, it's one vantage point of one event. What actually happened takes time to piece together from multiple vantage points. Resist the urge to let the scoop be the story for you and if something is important, do the leg-work to follow up on it and see what people learned in 1 week and 1 month. Medical and science reporting, in particular, often falls down here because they'll report on the first article on a topic and you never hear about follow-up studies, attempts to reproduce, or sometimes retractions from the original researchers.
The other thing that is helpful is your reminder to cross reference sources with no vested interest. The conspiracy-mongering journalist has a vested interest in his/her narrative looking convincing and will have a link to his merch site at the bottom of the article/vodcast/podcast.
There really isn't such a thing. What you report and how you report it is inherently editorial.
For example Fox News simply isn't reporting on the conservative protesters that are rioting in DC right now (stabbings, property destruction, etc), or choosing to report it as specific, isolated incidents stripped away from the larger context ("a man was stabbed today in DC"...). They aren't saying anything that's false, and yet their viewers largely have no idea what is going on in DC right now. And conversely they frame Seattle and Portland as war zones where you can't even drive down the street without getting a bullet, because they are reporting every single incident and every broken window there.
> how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?
Well, live streams are a way that you can observe an event and the context surrounding it yourself, and observe the larger discussions happening on that in realtime (people talking about the stream on twitter/etc). But of course that's another filter bubble.
Also, virtually all official news media today has pro-corporate bias. Like, even MSNBC is owned and run by GE.
I would say it's more important to understand the biases of a particular source in general, and try to evaluate which is more credible in a particular instance.
But right now you can generally exclude most conservative-run media from any sort of credibility. Fox was outright established to be a voice for the Republican party itself (and there is no equivalent for Democrats), in the wake of the Nixon impeachment, because Murdoch felt that if the Republican party had been able to get its message directly to voters then Nixon would have been able to ride out impeachment (and he was right, this time it worked). From there the conservative media has gone off the deep end (OANN, Washington Times, etc) especially over the last 4 years. Criteria number one for credibility is "not conservative media", they simply have no interest in informing, only in defense and offense.
Looking at The NYT's and the guardian's content on Portland/Seattle riots shows you the exact same phenomenon there.
I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility (CNN, Fox, et al.). Then I see even the closer to center but still unfortunately drifting away (NYT, economist, WSJ) as "take whatever they cover that's even the slightest culture war adjacent with a fistful of salt.
Political alignment is a valid criterion to curate your news feed. However, if you apply that as your only criterion, you end up back at square on: getting a colored sliver of the news.
There are many more criteria you could apply as well. Is it a non-profit or a for profit outlet? Is the outlet based in the U.S. or is it located abroad, say, the E.U. or Asia? Is it a local, regional or national outlet? Is it an outlet I consider as my primary, daily go-to, or is it an outlet I consider as a weekend read? Is it an outlet focussing on a particular demographic? Which one? Am I part of that demographic? Does the outlet only provide short-form news articles, and/or long-reads with background information? Does the outlet report from a single side, or does it pit different perspectives against each other in equal measure?
Asking those questions to yourself adds differentiation in your how you curate your news intake.
The latter doesn't even have to be limited to other news outlets. Reading books is one of the best ways to gain the perspective one needs to digest the daily news.
I follow U.S. news sources but that doesn't mean I'm willing to accept what they publish at face value. Amending the news with many other sources helps me to gain perspective.
The trouble today is how much attention is diverted towards consuming fast digital media and being active in a 24/7 economy. If you don't take the time to stop, slow down and think about what the news is reporting, you're not going to develop the skills and the knowledge to properly digest the news and form nuanced opinions.
NY Times isn’t “my side's media”. It’s just another corporate media outlet.
The actual counterbalance to something like Fox News would be something like Democracy Now. Those outlets don’t really get any air time in popular culture as it exists today. And even then they spend a lot of time on pro-democracy and pro-freedom issues that don’t get airtime in other outlets, it’s not just “all left all the time”. Maybe give it a listen sometime and see what a true counterpart on the other side would sound like - it’s always enlightening to hear what other people hear. And bear in mind - that's what it sounds like for me to listen to Fox, too.
That’s a big part of the problem with the right-wing media bubble at the moment, you think the counterpart to Fox News is NYT but that’s a false equivalency. NYT is ultimately a middle of the road outlet, you’re just so far out of the mainstream that it looks left. I frequently consider NYT articles to be taking too much of a pro-right or pro-corporate stance on an issue (especially Maggie Haberman, she’s just awful).
At the end of the day the US has two right wing parties - one center-right and one far-right, and that's how our news media is structured too. We have two pro-corporate parties, and that's how our news media is structured too. MSNBC is owned by General Electric, with major interests in defense contracting. Washington Post is owned by Bezos. Fox is essentially a media arm of the Republican party. CNN are just sort of chaos monkeys chasing share prices. There is very little "independent media" in the US.
And no, I don’t take Democracy Now too seriously either.
Ok then.
If you don't think the US is a right-wing country, you do need recalibration lol. And that's really both parties for the most part - the voice for, say, medicare for all, or for abolishing penal slavery, are basically nonexistent and non-mainstream.
In international terms, the US effectively has a far-right party and a centrist party, with a handful of leftists lumped into the centrist party where they're effectively sidelined in terms of policy.
The same system that centrally plans and limits care provider production. You don't have market health care or socialised heath care. You have a solution that somehow combines the worst of both.
Then you look at the global dosage of other countries. Its the US socially right of China? Japan? Any part of Asia? If your calibration is literally the left half of the spectrum I guess you'd see the US as the farthest right of the world.
"... baseless claims" "... without evidence" "... debunked conspiracy theory"
These may be factual in some (or all) cases, but it is manipulative language. It prejudices the reader without giving the reader a chance to even consider the claims or theory. There's much to be discussed about dis- and misinformation, but overall the truth emerges only in sunlight.
Also watch those adjectives. They love their superfluous adjectives.
I'll throw in a few other ideas:
1. 'Opinion' panels should come from both sides of the political isle. Thoughtful panelists should be able to get to the bottom of ideas (instead of getting caught up in partisan minutiae). If they can't have a good discussion they shouldn't be on the panel.
2. Recommendation algorithms _must_ attempt to diversify a user's taste rather than silo them. This is an ethical issue and may hurt the bottom line.
3. Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions. It is patronizing to have it any other way.
4. Context is key - sound bytes and cheap twitter drama are destroying journalistic integrity. Journalism is archaeology of the now. It should be treated with the rigor of a science. Have some respect for yourselves and we will do the same!
I don't even mind someone spelling out the conclusion for me, as long as the article contains links to original sources so that I can verify it. But even that is rare. Most links in an article point to other articles written by the same newspaper.
As an example, suppose a newspaper writes an article about something related to Wikipedia. I would expect to see the word "Wikipedia" hyperlinked in the article many times, but none of those links would actually lead to Wikipedia; they would lead to random other articles of the same newspaper that happen to mention Wikipedia. It would be probably impossible to get to Wikipedia from the news article by merely following hyperlinks.
Anyone making a claim of fact needs to be prepared to back it up. Far too many people game the media by making absurd claims knowing their claims will simply be reported verbatim. Accurately reporting a claim is presented without evidence or is repeating a previously debunked statement is a necessary counter against people making absurd factual claims.
There's a clear dividing line between making statement claiming fact and a statement of opinion. If I tell you I think the sky is made of honey I may be factually incorrect but I'm not claiming to be making a factual statement.
Claims of fact deserve much more scrutiny than opinions. You're entitled to any opinion you want but you are not entitled to your own facts. When your claims of facts pose a material danger to persons or simply the rule of law, especially when they come from people with a wide audience or power, they deserve even more scrutiny than some Joe Shmoe.
As for evidence of an event occurring, you'll also notice journalists go out of their way to second source statements of facts. They want first-hand accounts from named sources in order to put an identity and reputation up for scrutiny. Ideally they also want a second named source but failing that they will often accept unnamed sources (to whom the journalist knows the identity but does not publicly reveal it). This is a common practice specifically because journalists are rarely in the room when and where events occur.
Also, just an FYI, your comment didn't feel like it was written in good faith when I first read it. I had to actively suppress my bad faith detector to write my reply. Just feedback for future comments.
This is actually exactly what I’m talking about, these news agencies are reporting accurately the events. And you don’t like it.
What calling these manipulative and refusing these as statements does is that it biases writing towards claims without evidence and towards conspiracy theories. Because you dont allow writer to call them what they are.
> It prejudices the reader without giving the reader a chance to even consider the claims or theory.
Note that many without evidence behind them and conspiracy theories have claims that in isolation sounds ok. It is only when you check evidence and find that there is none you know to reject that.
I see it as a proxy for actual cross checking every time, but more and more, cross-checking is needed anyway. Some sources could be permanently rejected, but ‘trustworthy’ sources consistently miss important information that only come in corrections with a significant delay. If we’re not taking the info at face value, the “trust” part is not there anyway.
And if we’re talking about well thought and researched pieces, I’d argue we should also take the time to think about them and do our own sanity checks.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-World-Add-Up/dp/1408712245
Video link and summary of some of the books points can be found at:
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/keep-...
Watching the phrase "fake news" become coopted to mean "news unfavorable about Trump" instead of literally "false information" was one of the more depressing aspects of the 2016 election.
Absolutely, traditional journalism had some problems with bias, and they were tough to improve.
I can't think of a single thing in journalism (NB, journalism, not information access) that hasn't become notably worse due to the collapse.
This is really just the prolonged conclusion of 24 hour news cycles that have been with us since cable television.
What's the quote about newspapers bringing all of the horrors of the world to your doorstep? Television brought them into your living room. Now with online media you carry them around with you.
(Low quality comment, I know. I'll see myself out.)
It's all intensely personal and polarizing.