Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power
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It's interesting that they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts.
I'm not sure why I should assume their hearts are so pure. Or if I assume their hearts are pure, why not Elon Musk's (mentioned in the article)?
I do appreciate the role of the news media in creating a multi-polar rather than uni-polar world. But man, they really do think highly of themselves.
I don't know how you could write all this realpolitik stuff, and still think you yourself are immune to it (outside of solipsism).
Lying for ratings, though, is also very bad.
Activists lying for both activist causes and ratings is extremely bad.
I can stomach this and just not read the newsletter when it comes to activist organizations. They’re in the business of leveraging outrage to further good causes. The blurring of lines between activism and journalism, however, is a total disaster. When the media whitewashes issues to further some perceived good cause, all it does is light their credibility on fire.
Virologists are getting sponsored by the pharma industry, climate researchers are green warriors (while at the same time being funded by insurance companies), social scientists going completely off the rails turning universities into ideological war zones. These are interesting times, we have to be careful.
And I wonder how much “good” scientists lend their support to not-so-great scientific claims out of fear that refuting them might damage the public’s trust in “science” as a whole.
https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/climate-chang...
If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything suddenly starts looking like a nail.
If you want to see journalists actually performing the role of being checks on power, go to the third world. Bankrolled journalism isn't true journalism.
Really? Very few, if any. People like Tucker Carlson have wealthy contracts but they don’t even consider themselves journalists, but entertainers (in his case he’s not part of the news division, for example).
The job of modern "journalism" is no longer to inform - it's to influence. The individual players just tow the party line.
Has the purpose of journalism ever been to “inform”? Seems it has always (well, going back for centuries at least) been to argue a point. I say this out of sympathy for journalists, not to condem them.
> The individual players just tow the party line.
Aren’t you contradicting yourself? If your aim is to influence the last thing you’d do is toe the line; rather you’d cross it without a thought.
No, doing hit pieces on anyone is a flagrant exercise of power that deserves no respect and destroys the credibility of the press. Stick to reporting facts and not exercising power and you'll fare much better.
A recent example that was fascinating to me: during an emerging global crisis (covid19) the president of the USA held a press briefing to discuss the situation. A reporter was called on to ask a question by the president himself. That reporter decided to insinuate that the president was racist in addition to asking a question. The president's response included "you're a terrible reporter" in addition to answering the question. I'm sure that guy and his organisation were not welcome back, and rightly so. Keep your editorial shit on the page it belongs, or in another story. There is a place for that, but it's not during a press conference with "the leader of the free world" during a global crisis. And yet the MSM went wild over how bad the president was for calling out a reporter's bullshit.
Stick to the facts and the story or you will be rightly identified as something other than a source of information.
Instance from 2018 (with what you termed “racist” insinuations): https://youtu.be/OXp5GJjuOvQ
Instance from 2020 actually relating to COVID-19: https://youtu.be/N5NQdmHzBTY
I’m going to take this as a reminder that we should all carefully consider sources of information, even when those sources are our own recollections and experiences.
No, this was the "racist" incident when Weijia Jiang asked Trump why he was insisting on bringing up the fact that the U.S. was doing better than (several European countries, including UK, Italy, Spain, and France at the time) other countries.
And he said, "They're losing their lives everywhere in the world. And maybe that's a question you should ask China. Don't ask me, ask China that question, OK?" because at the time, China was claiming they had basically solved Covid-19 with lockdowns and that the virus was no longer spreading in their country. And she said, "Sir, why are you saying that to me specifically?" implying it was due to her race (she being of Chinese heritage). And Trump, in standard form, said "I'm saying it to anybody who would ask a nasty question like that."
Every time Trump would be his ordinary self, you know, he always punches back at underhanded questions. The questions are a set up in the first place, to create a negative connotation. The coronavirus was a situation where nobody won, by the way, but the press certainly was going to do everything to make as much if it be Trump's fault as possible.
Weirdly, some, who feared Trump being a true Hitler-like fascist 2-3 years ago, were upset that Trump wasn't being fascist enough and shutting the whole country down and overruling state governors on local policies.
None of it was productive. None of it was healthy: on either side. None of it enlightened the population. None of it did any favors for democracy. It just inflamed already tense relations between conservatives and liberals. And note, there's no way in hell the media will ever be as hard on a democrat in office. They are 95% democrats themselves, and they have a bias. They soft balled Biden as it is, when he wasn't hiding in his basement.
Did he answer the question? Or did he look at an Asian woman and immediately start attacking China?
And this is just ridiculous:
"Weirdly, some, who feared Trump being a true Hitler-like fascist 2-3 years ago, were upset that Trump wasn't being fascist enough and shutting the whole country down and overruling state governors on local policies."
There's nothing fascist about instituting a national healthcare policy during a national healthcare crisis. That's not what the word means. Fascism is far-right authoritarianism.
Marshalling private militias to attack people is fascism, however, and it's a practice Trump shares with both Hitler and Mussolini.
I don't think that's entirely fair. I suspect his answer would be pretty much the same no matter who asked it. He was pre
>Marshalling private militias to attack people is fascism, however, and it's a practice Trump shares with both Hitler and Mussolini.
"LIBERATE MICHIGAN", anyone?
Though, in fairness, the plot to kidnap Michigan's governor didn't start until two whole two months after he sent that Tweet. The Blackshirts carrying rifles through the capitol building were largely peaceful.
Was his treatment of that reporter in particular bad? No, not really. I don't believe he brought up China because she was Chinese.
But I don't think "he always throws temper tantrums" or "he always finds a scapegoat" or "he's always badmouthing China even when he knows there's been a spike in hate crimes against Chinese people" are terribly good excuses. Premeditation and a pattern of behavior make his actions worse, not better.
> because at the time, China was claiming they had basically solved Covid-19 with lockdowns and that the virus was no longer spreading in their country.
You are putting words in his mouth. We don't know what he meant because he refused to answer the question. Immediately after that exchange, he cut the briefing short and left the room.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...
"It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."
Journalism should not just stick 'to facts'. Journalism's objective is to speak truth to power by whatever means necessary and to bring truth to light. This often requires to get into the dirt. Facts you can find on Wikipedia or in the phone book, that's not what journalism is about. Good journalism is adversarial. The tech sector dislikes this in particular because they rely on the fact that they are not perceived as centres of power.
Nixon connived to have Kent State students attacked and slain by the National Guard.
These are both facts that can easily be reported and are more than damning enough on their own without editorializing.
The editorializing actually makes the case weaker. It does a good job of riling up people who already agree with you, but to everyone else it just looks like you're biased and attacking someone because of a personal grudge.
First - Nixon inherited a war that others started, and put in place a strategy to end it, which he did.
Second - Your statement "killed more people in Laos and Cambodia than the US Army lost in WW2" is technical factual, but also kind of nonsense. It's pointless to compare civilian casualties in one war, with Army casualties in another.
Eisenhower definitely killed more civilians that Nixon - does that make him worse?
See how your selective facts are actually a form of editorializing?
Journalism is actually kind of hard, but yes, there is too much partisan news. Again this is our fault - if we clicked on straight news, and that's where the eyeballs went, that's where the money would go.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility
It's plenty opinionated. But it's interesting because Matt Taibbi is not a Republican, in the same way that Reason (not Democrats) is interesting when it criticizes Republican ideas.
CNN saying anything about Trump or Fox News saying anything about Biden is by comparison of insignificant (if not negative) value, because there is a 97% chance that it's just partisan culture warring.
And so that should be the rule. If you're talking about the other team, be objective. If you're talking about your team, have an opinion. Because an opinion that the other team is bad is not actually useful.
Well, except Reason is a platform with a right-libertarian that is generally supportive of similar things to the Republican Party and favorable to Republicans, whereas Taibbi, however leftist his editorial position might be, is generally not aligned with Democratic policies or politicians and spends disproportionate time targeting them, often presenting the exact same arguments are are being used by the Right on the exact same issues, but with a few negative references to “Corporate America” or some Republican (usually, Donald Trump) to mark it as a Genuine Left-Wing Critique. It's not at all a parallel scenario.
That they agree with Republicans on many things is the point. But then they criticize the Republican position on drug legalization, mass surveillance, foreign wars, various proposals to spend tax money etc., which are correspondingly interesting because they're unlikely to be motivated by partisan animosity.
> whereas Taibbi, however leftist his editorial position might be, is generally not aligned with Democratic policies or politicians and spends disproportionate time targeting them
If he was 100.0% aligned with Democratic policies or politicians then he would be CNN or MSNBC and not be a suitable example.
> often presenting the exact same arguments are are being used by the Right on the exact same issues
Being the same argument isn't a problem, any more than Reason and Democrats using the same arguments against the War in Iraq. The interesting thing, and the thing that makes it a useful filter, is when it comes from someone not uniformly aligned with the opposing party, because it makes partisanship a less likely motive.
Also, are you criticizing the principle or the example? Would you like to provide your own example of some leftist criticism of the left? How about Greenwald or Chomsky?
Didn't Taibbi first break out with his coverage of the Great Financial Crisis, and specifically his vigorous criticism of the big banks' role? IIRC, he even coined the term "vampire squid" to refer to Goldman. His leftism is a lot more than superficial references to corporate America.
This is not Taibbi arguing against own, it is Taibbi arguing against his long term ennemies.
Which is fine; being consistent is not a vice. They're still people in the same major tribe.
Also, people are still arguing against the example rather than the principle.
> Facts you can find on Wikipedia or in the phone book
This is the problem. For the most part, journalists are using the same facts everyone has access to (from wikipedia, google searches, or...twitter). So why do we need journalists? To tell us what to think about the facts?
To the extent that journalists are doing that, we no longer need them. There's a place for journalism, but it involves uncovering new facts, not telling us what to think about publicly available information.
Also, badgers don't actually fight best on their backs.
But there are actually too many facts. People can't read all the facts. We also need "analysis" - putting the facts in perspective, deciding which ones are important, and why. But, and here's where the press has failed spectacularly, we need that analysis to be unbiased, not pushing an agenda, but actually letting the data drive the narrative.
Doing anything results in trade-offs. Some trade-offs are worse than others, and some have horrible consequences, like deaths of many, but writing off the decision as a racist one implies malicious intent, which ignores the potentially real decisions that were being made.
For others reading this thread, parents seems to be referring to the Bengal Famine of 1943. Wiki has a decent summary, but it again demonstrates the circumstances and trade-offs that were made. Was it a good outcome? Famine and death certainly isn't. But was it done maliciously out of "racism"? Some scholars claim so, but often these are the same scholars who see everything through a lens of racism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#1942%E2%...
The East India company came to India 262 years before Churchill was born. But if we want to talk about that, why not also talk about the Mughals, Muslims who invaded India and are the source for many aspects of Indian culture. (I have an Arabic last name because of the Mughals.) Like other Muslim empires, the Mughals were prolific slavers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_India (“Slavery in India escalated during the Muslim domination of northern India after the 11th-century, after Muslim rulers re-introduced slavery to the Indian subcontinent.”).
If we start wiping out parts of our history that are unpleasant we won’t have anything left.
> Anyway Churchill's polices led to famine, which could have been avoided.
No, the famine was caused by environmental disasters. Nobody thinks it “could have been avoided.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53405121 (“‘We can't blame him for creating the famine in any way,’ says Ms. Khan. ‘What we can say is that he didn't alleviate it when he had the ability to do so, and we can blame him for prioritising white lives and European lives over South Asian lives.’”).
Churchill made a decision to prioritize resources for the war effort. By 1943 the UK was devastated. It lost 1% of its population in World War II. Those resources could have saved many lives in Bengal. But how friendly do you think Nazi Germany would have been to Indians had Britain not won the war? You can’t judge Churchill purely by the consequences of his actions without also addressing what could have happened had Churchill acted differently.
> His attitude towards India can be considered as racist.
Churchill once said “Indians are the beastliest people in the world after Germans.” But Ghandi was racist towards Africans (although his views evolved somewhat as he got older): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882. Everyone was racist back then, and in most of the world, people are still very racist. Churchill was no more racist towards India, than Indians in my parents generation are racist towards Africa or China. (And in Bangladesh, toward Jews.) And frankly, outside maybe the educated class in India and Bangladesh, most people are still that racist today.
It doesn’t make any sense to judge people by the standards of society decades later. If we did that we would have nobody left to admire. Churchill isn’t famous for his racism. He is famous for holding off Nazi Germany for years while American sat in the sidelines. He deserves to be held in esteem for that virtue, even if we recognize the faults he shared with other people of his era.
Then why are you trying to defend Churchill. You are trying to paint everyone was racist, Hitler would have come to power, we would have been doomed. Churchill was racist that is that.
> It doesn’t make any sense to judge people by the standards of society decades later. If we did that we would have nobody left to admire.
Depends on who judges whom. As they say terrorist is another martyr. For British people he is great savior for us he was responsible to death of millions. As someone said "If we start wiping out parts of our history that are unpleasant we won’t have anything left"
It might be a good idea for journalism to speak truth to power, but it must then make sure that it is truth, and that it is aiming at the powerful. Too often it has been a very slanted truth and often aligned with the interests of the real powers in the world.
No no no! The facts on Wikipedia are supposed to be dug up by journalists!
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[0] - https://xkcd.com/978/
That's fine, but there is a time and place for it. As someone else said, doing it in that particular situation may have made the reporter a real bro among his own side but he looked like an ass to others. It's not ones own side that needs convincing, so it's ineffective in addition to making one look biased and like a child.
If your paper has power, then in some loose sense it governs, and have you kept the consent of the governed? And if you've lost it, why?
Their importance to the free distribution of accurate information was such that even the government itself in the form of federal courts and law has repeatedly recognized the privilege the press has in things such as keeping sources secret. They recognized the importance of such a space in keeping America's democracy powerful. Now, the media is completely being driven to the sidelines. With the rise of personal branding, content distribution, and disinformation, this once-independent place to examine society is going under.
For all the pomposity in this piece, the question is quite relevant: what will replace the media as an arbiter of independent information and truth? For now, it seems that the news and content space is being swallowed up by the information networks of various individuals and institutions, each with the focus of pushing their own image rather than coming clean to the public. If you can't trust any of them because all their perspectives are manipulated, have we reached an end to free and independent discourse?
A strongman.
An idea that I attribute to Imre Lakatos, is that if you strip people of the ability to debate and discern facts, you create a power vacuum that can only be filled by those who can act in the absence of debate and facts, notably thugs and tyrants.
I believe this is the actual motivation behind the "war on truth" and the flood of misinformation.
This is obviously a worst-case scenario, but I think that to prevent anything similar from happening Americans need to step up and pressure their news outlets to do better, and for social media platforms to be choked with regulation until they start preventing manipulative shit from spreading.
The questions is where to set the limits exactly and misinformation is indeed a grey area. Hence the discussion.
Manipulation is an unsolved human problem as old as humanity.
The core business model of social media is fundamentally based on manipulation.
Asking social media corporations to protect us from manipulation is salmon asking grizzly bears to protect them from getting eaten. It's contrary to their fundamental nature.
Many "smart" activists found that with a little faux rage (and in the end, believing their own BS too), all these pundit, policy advisor, and advocacy jobs are there for the taking...
If you dare to debate and discern the wrong facts, you get a hit piece published on you like Slate Star Codex. Or you get fired like the NY Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr.
It seems some of the media play an enthusiastic part in stripping people of that ability, not in protecting it.
Lament of the Catholic Church during the Reformation: Who will replace the Church as the arbiter of truth.
Maybe it is best that we not have people and institutions that claim to be the “arbiter of truth.”
Anything that gives power to the people is messy. Democracy is messy and the elite wondered how people would be able to rule themselves without an absolute monarch telling them what to do. Now we have the journalistic elite wondering how the people will be able to figure out truth without the journalist high priesthood telling them what truth is.
'The Press' is already a structure of independence and decentralization.
Without integrity in those systems, someone will come along and dictate the Truth.
15% QAnon, 35% Trump (those willing to go along even if they don't fully agree), and then the rest are compelled when the President orders the press to communicate his words, verbatim, without criticism etc..
Twitter does not actually give power to the people, or the Truth - it concentrates power in the hands of those who have the most popular Truth.
But yes, the press needs to be less biased, but that's also partly our fault.
We don't read the less biased news, unfortunately, we like tabloids and click bait.
this is not a debate of press vs no press, but one of good press vs bad press
If "journalism" is entertainment, but nobody wants to pay for it, then it has no use and we should let it die.
If it's an important resource required by our society, (so that we are not ignorant of whats going on in our neighborhood and world), then it's not entertainment, it's an essential service, and it should be publicly funded like our other essential services.
As we transition to publicly funded "news" (things that happened) we can examine the various formats, and design them to to be easy to query and verify.
This is especially the case when a proto-strongman is attempting to consolidate power.
Publicly funded journalism cannot be the only way it works.
(I say this as a left-learning person generally supportive of public funding).
(Also, "entertainment" vs "an essential service" is a false dichotomy)
What you want is control over what other people think.
corporate funded news can investigate the government, and government funded news can investigate corporations.
Those aren't "services", so there's that.
In many countries, however, power companies, the water company, central banks, rails, the hospital system, universities, etc, are, or were before the neoliberal attack, public.
I have no idea why people think the answer to fixing a shitty government is handing more money over to them and hoping they'll do the appropriate thing with it when they prove the opposite time and time again.
The decentralized model. Aka everybody has to think for themselves, like responsible grown ups are supposed to do.
The fact that some people think a central authority of truth is necessary is terribly sad.
"decentralized" doesn't seem so different to what we have now through that lens.
The “problem” we have today is that too many different commentators, and the people who consume their commentary, are free to make their own decisions about credibility, motive, interpretations of events... Which of course leads to people disagreeing about those things.
Some people would say this is a fundamental feature of a liberal democracy. Others will look at those they disagree with, and say they are spreading misinformation, that every avenue they have for expression must be restricted, and controlled by a central authority responsible for determining what is true and what is not true.
I would say that having a free democracy, and having an arbiter of truth are mutually exclusive states. The people who see the need for a truth arbiter, and try to implement solutions for the problem of lacking one, can only ever do so at the expense of democratic freedoms.
No, the problem is the so-called "democratisation" of journalism and the corresponding cross-fade between "shill", "pundit" and "journalist". It's not the diversity in voices, but rather the lowering of the bar. Any random YouTube hack can proclaim themselves a "journalist" or "commentator", regardless of their credentials or affiliation.
Meanwhile, traditionally trustworthy media channels are trying to be "fair and balanced" by including both sides in a debate, regardless of whether both sides are sane. Think anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers or flat earthers versus their rational counterparts. Then there are more complex issues like "stolen" elections and Brexit.
This "both sides", "marketplace of ideas" approach also stimulates polarisation, making everything a partisan issue, especially in politically bipolar countries like the US or the UK. Suddenly, even well-accepted facts are "controversial", generating clicks because all that matters is engagement.
> Others will look at those they disagree with, and say they are spreading misinformation
That's a very modern (as in, post-modern) take. There is no denying there is a lot of actual misinformation on "both sides". It's not so much who you disagree with, but journalistic integrity, of which I frankly don't see a lot, regardless of whether we're talking about the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, the Independent, Fox News, Newsmax or OAN. They're all mainly pushing an agenda, during which they at least lie by omission. What's more, they no longer distinguish between OpEds and news reporting.
> free democracy, and having an arbiter of truth are mutually exclusive states
That's a false dichotomy. There doesn't need to be a single arbiter ("Ministry", if you will) of Truth. The purported added benefit of the fourth estate is its many voices would each do their part in verifying the veracity of claims and elucidating the context of events.
It's required for a functional liberal democracy because powerful voices can otherwise dominate the narrative and peddle messages like "regulation is at odds with a functional economy" or "fact checking our statements implies bias". With the number of journalists decreasing by 75% in the US since the advent of the Internet, the fourth estate has obviously become increasingly dysfunctional and shallow.
a society built on several isolated nucleuses can vary wildly, a society where we expect people a thousands kilometers away to campaign in social media for local elections needs to be more uniform not to split
I don't think further decentralizing so each individual has to carry out original research with primary sources to obtain any sort of picture of what happened in the world yesterday would represent a feasible improvement, and I suspect the conclusions people would draw instead of doing that research would be [even] worse.
Media isn’t alone here, though they are the cannery in the coal mine. In the legal field, there has been growing pressure to harass and blacklist attorneys who represented Trump and his associates (beyond the ordinary universally applicable ethical rules for making misrepresentations in court or filing frivolous suits). Now the legal profession has a long-standing set of ethical codes, in which helping a murderer get off in a technicality is deemed virtuous. There is pressure to draw a line and say “well but Trump is different.” I’ve been watching these efforts with horror because, while attorneys don’t exactly have tons of trust and credibility, there isn’t a widespread belief that the profession is using its institutional power as a fulcrum to advance the political viewpoints of its members. The way to shred whatever credibility attorneys have is to “draw a line” and put the former President of the United States, who secured the second highest vote total in American history, on the “untouchable” side, while putting Exxon, Philip Morris, etc. on the “will happily represent so long as they pay their bills” side.
Doctors and public health professionals similarly shredded their credibility in the past year by taking nakedly political stances on protests in the middle of a pandemic.
There are professions which form the “social and political infrastructure” of our country. The political debates of the day are often played out through them—factions sue each other in court, bring to bear medical knowledge and science to support their positions, and leverage the media to cover it all. But there has to be a modicum of trust amongst the political factions that this infrastructure itself isn’t trying to stack the deck in favor of one side or the other. And I think historically there has at least been this baseline level of trust that this was true.
In reality, of course, even Walter Cronkite had his biases. And lawyers and doctors have used their professions to advance their political interests in various ways. But there was at least the pretense of objectivity, and for most people it was a sincerely held end-goal even if it was imperfectly achieved in practice. These old belief systems are being abandoned today. The media is at the forefront, but it’s happening throughout the educated professions. And I fear that we’re going down a dangerous road. If people begin to perceive the system and our institutions as being overtly tilted against them, they’ll simply lose trust. And society simply can’t work if the various political factions don’t have institutions that they all trust.
It's their right to do that I guess, but I personally believe strongly in the Constitutional rights we have even if it is unpopular or kitschy to say that. I thought lawyers were people who believed strongly in fighting for their clients' civil rights even if they despise their clients because they think the rights matter. Without them we aren't a democracy.
Dershowitz defending the rights of Nazis to have free speech is a great example of that but I guess that kind of thinking is obsolete now. At least lawyers should stop saying they care about civil rights or democracy in that case.
Afaik, this particular thing does not require you to not have political opinions. And in particular if some party or politician seem to trample all over civil rights or legal defenses, you might argue against him or align yourself with his opponents.
Also, if your motivation if pure civil rights, you wont attempt to trample civil rights of opponents of your client in the process. As in, you will defend your client as vigorously as possible, while keeping defense squicky clean. And you wont try to smear their victims etc. And you will defend all kinds of clients, not just nazi, but also their victims once in a while.
My point: If a person helping with a defense is not a lawyer, then the legal profession can't disbar them.
That's over 100 years ago. We can stop pretending that the media has ever been some selfless arbiter of truth and protector of the downtrodden. There is nothing to replace it in that role because it was never in that role. It has always been a tool for one group of powerful people to spar with other groups of powerful people and the truth rarely enters into it.
Maybe in another 100 years historians will figure out what the truth was, but for us today, the truth is whatever gets the most clicks. 20 years ago it was whatever got the most people at home to tune in. 50 years ago it was whatever sold the most newspapers.
The saving grace is that for the vast majority of people it just doesn't matter. Whoever the President is, you'll still have to go to work, pay the bills, buy groceries etc. Not much about your day to day life will change.
Your last paragraph seems to imply a kind of quietism, as if it just isn't important whether a country's rulers face constraints and challenges. That isn't true: eventually, bad politics screws the economy, which is why Russia is a poor country.
The fact that the average person has been led to believe the opposite, shows how much power the media really has. If you asked most average people the importance of the office of the President and who holds it, I think it would be ranked pretty damn high. Not that I disagree with you. I think a lot of problems in society could be fixed with an honest retooling of society (but that finding people to do that impartially is as much of a challenge, if not moreso, than actually retooling society).
There is currently very well written and researched fact-based reporting. What we lack is consensus. So, the truth is out there currently. But many people don't believe, or haven't heard it. (and, not relevant to the point you're making, but I believe that many people cannot understand the truth in the first place, unless the truth happens to be a simple moral narrative. ie, "one person was bad, and another person was good.")
> That's over 100 years ago. We can stop pretending that the media has ever been some selfless arbiter of truth and protector of the downtrodden. There is nothing to replace it in that role because it was never in that role. It has always been a tool for one group of powerful people to spar with other groups of powerful people and the truth rarely enters into it.
Oh come on. That's like condemning democracy on account of all those people guillotined during the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, or the whole field of software engineering on account of the Therac-25. Maybe a few changes have happened in the intervening generations?
The idea that "the media has ever been some selfless arbiter of truth and protector of the downtrodden" is an ideal to be strived for, but like any ideal, there will always people examples of people who fail to achieve it.
Also, there's another ideal that the media there cast a skeptical eye on things, to peel back the paint and expose what's really there underneath it, which is probably more pertinent here. That kind of journalism usually pisses of the fans of whatever the journalist is examining. Fans usually want fluffy puff pieces.
The sentiment among an ever growing body of people is that "independant" his has never been less true.
Big media has probably always been heavily biased but had some modicum of professionalism that helped maintain a perception of objectivity. In recent years it feels like they have crossed that line and lost the trust of the people.
An interesting question to ask is WHY has big media been more and more willing to cross that line? I think it comes down to money. Big media's bottom line has been pulled away from them over the last 10 years and so they're getting desperate; More willing than ever before to lean into click bait partisan stories that rile people up.
Shame on them.
There has been a well-organized and well funded campaign to get people to not trust. It started with the cigarette lobby realizing that they couldn't argue the science, but that science was hard to understand. So they spread doubt and confusion.
that strategy is now well known and practiced globally.
Fox News didn't just happen.
I know a few journalists, and many of them do take their professional ethics very seriously.
And yes, many of them are struggling. And watching others in their field able to make a living selling clickbait.
Who does the shame go to? The people who are tired of starving for upholding standards, or the people who starve them for upholding those standards?
They're really not though, that's part of their marketing. It seems like there is a long history of news media being used to push agendas, being arrogant, and running politically motivated smear campaigns.
They might occasionally tell the news without opinion but that seems like an added benefit, not their main goal.
What we have now is competition. The replacement for the mainstream media will just be more media and like always, people will have to determine for themselves if something is accurate. It's weird to think you believe our government, our lives, are so fragile that without mainstream media we degenerate into fools led by a strongman.
Why wouldn’t they tell the truth? Why do we need someone else to be arbiter of truth?
Take feminism. Why do we still hear this deceit statistic that women earn .73 cents on the dollar, without any list of the assumptions built into those very gross average? Barring that, why do journalists never put it into perspective? Barring that, why do journalists never interview counterpoints on this topic, when they would always have a feminist on panel if a man gets interviewed? Hence, what does anyone mean with “arbiter of truth”? They are not seeking truth in appearance, let alone in depth.
I understand that this is about power, but, when even a layman can study the underlying science and prove the journalists are blatantly “forgetting to say the big hypothesis that makes the statement a blatant lie”, then your question becomes:
“What can replace media as an arbiter of lies? Who would be capable of misleading more than they do?”
(For the record, media is now trusted even less than congresspeople, with less than 21% Americans trusting them)
That's like asking what you replace your cancer with once you are cured.
Nothing. You're cured.
We're over-informed nowadays and spend too much time on news without even distinguishing properly betweens news, editorials, and infotainment.
> Now, the media is completely being driven to the sidelines.
I still see zero evidence for that. As far as I can see, there is a bunch of political zealots who for various political and personal reasons state something like the following (roughly and deliberately polemically paraphrased): "The 'mainstream' media are crooked and wrong. Everybody is mislead by them and a victim, except for me, I am a victim but also know everything better than hordes of journalists. I am reluctant to back up any of my claims, though, because my sources are mostly opinion websites and blog posts, but if I must and you pressure me, I am willing dig through the Internet to selectively chose a few random articles to back up any claim I made, no matter how unfounded it might be. I do not really know any 'non-mainstream' media that would hold up to superficial scrutiny but I'm hell-bent on insisting these exist. The reasons why I do this are psychological and irrational, I feel uneasy in a complex world and spend too much time online."
Actually, in the absence of the professional journalism, they'll be "held in check" by things like QAnon and "Stop the Steal," fueled by things like partisan talk radio.
The media isn't a "centralized MiniTrue" (I mean that's obvious), it's just industry where people with the profession of gathering and disseminating information work. It's taken time to develop professional standards, and if it's destroyed, the main thing that would be destroyed are those standards.
The world is a messy place and it is only hubris that makes us think we can organize it neatly.
The only fix I see right now is to get information from as many sources as you can and stop listening to media outlets when you catch them lying about things. For me CNN/MSNBC are completely off the table because they're just propaganda machines.
The headline occurs mid article and it's a good choice. When writing is about power, its job becomes to deliver narrative in that power struggle, and that means it's no longer good. Who wants to read that? Maybe these institutions are losing their influence because they suck at the one thing they were supposed to do well, which was produce compelling, brave, and thoughtful writing that people wanted to read so much they would tolerate advertisers. Maybe if they were more interesting, more people would read them?
This is what caused the existing problem.
We had a media where people mostly believed them because they mostly cared about telling the truth, issued corrections when they were wrong, were critical of both political parties etc.
That media discovered that if they published outrage bait they got more clicks, because if something is outrageous and true then people are very interested. But things that are outrageous and true aren't all that common, so to keep the mill running they started publishing things that were outrageous and false.
That works until people figure out that they are no longer the media they were thought to be. Because things that are outrageous and false are boring. Anybody can write outrageous fiction. That's how we got into this. But the more readers who figure that out, the less credibility they have, and the less anybody wants to read their made up accounts.
Their existing solution seems to be to turn the dial up to eleven. So then everything is an existential threat and a hot war and literally Hitler. That whips up the frenzy for the people who still think what they're hearing bears some resemblance to the truth, but increases the number of people who realize it doesn't.
Eventually you get a critical mass of people no longer interested in hearing fantastical conspiracies about everything and somebody realizes there is a market for objective journalism and makes a name for themselves. Then, with any luck, the others follow. One can hope.
People are starved for information but have little interest in mainstream's news preference for packaging it up and waxing philosophic in order to provide their 'objective view' of events.
A social media platform that amplifies people's ability to vet information and that is also resistant to dishonest campaigning would provide an advantage to its participants.
quote from opening:
> we should also recognize this for what it is: one more glaring data point showing that powerful people no longer think they need the mainstream press, especially critical and ethical outlets like the Washington Post.
quote from closing:
> All I know is that there is only one way the press maintains its power in society: by metaphorically putting the heads of powerful people on pikes. If the Post and all the other respectable media outlets lose their ability to do that, powerful people will, by extension, stop caring what the well-informed segment of the public thinks.
--------
Listen, we are used that we are IMPORTANT, that we must be listened to.
Given that the media in US is as divided as the politics, I'm happy that press loses their ability to control the narrative. As of today we clearly see (just look at recent frontpage discussions about Slate Star Codex, Jetbrains or a bit older Supermicro) that for rare gems there's too much activism, propaganda and hit pieces.
What this neglects is that journalism is many times in bed literally and figuratively with the rich and powerful. Anderson Cooper of CNN is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt one of the oldest monied families in America. While Andrew Cuomo the New York governor, was doing policies that resulted in high number of elderly nursing home deaths, CNN was showing segments with him chumming with his brother CNN anchor Chris Cuomo telling each other how they loved their brother. Andrea Mitchel of NBC is married to Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve.
Many of the high level journalists are family members of the "rich and powerful". Many of them went to the same Ivy League schools. Many times, they live in the same neighborhoods and send their kids to the same private schools.
If you expect the mainstream media or journalism to hold the rich and powerful in check, you will be just like a medieval peasant, expecting the bishops and cardinals of the Church, to hold the nobles and kings(who were often the older brothers, fathers, or uncles of these same bishops and cardinals) in check.
This is an absurd characterization of the WaPo. Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about power. It's about trading editorial positions and floating bullshit stories citing anonymous sources in exchange for insider access to (and financial partnerships with) powerful people and organizations, and advance leaks of their decisions.
Musk has decided that he's deriving no benefit from this traditional relationship. He already has the contacts in government because he is both a contractor and otherwise works in heavily subsidized industries, and also employs a lot of scientists who are employed as often by government as by industry. He doesn't need reporters to influence politicians or the public. His stock price is more likely to move (medium-term) based on tweets and press releases than any WaPo article, whose effects won't last out the week and are an opportunity to buy. These outlets have no authority, or leverage.
Musk realizes that he should be treated with kid gloves like any other major government contractor, ignored when not being defended or hailed. He's the girl. If an outlet chooses to start kissing his ass, that outlet will get all the inside scoops they can handle. Just pretend he's Raytheon.
edit: the press maintains its power by putting powerful people on pedestals, not on pikes. The way you get power is through powerful sponsors. Alienating the powerful gets you censored out of existence.
The author advocates for the people's "right to know", but complains that social media has made it possible for people to reach a mass audience without relying on the press' megaphone. Surely social media increases people's right (or at least opportunity) to know, unless you consider that only what the press publishes is worth knowing.
It goes on to complain about the influence that social media has given powerful people yet acknowledges that the press itself is owned by the same powerful people.
And then we have the complaints about "tabloids" against respectable journalism at a time when the New York Post was the only paper with the guts to publish an election scandal while the Times is peddling public shaming campaigns that do little but lower the level of public debate.
The title, at least, sounds right and if journalism want to have any power, they'll need to find wat to be indepedent. the recent case of Glenn Greenwald has shown that this seems to be the only road left.
It’s a good thing this is not the case anymore. Big media is essential for democracy, but controlling distribution is not democratic.
Big media has two options now. Either:
1. They can learn to use social media better, so their accounts reach as many people as @realdonaldtrump.
2. They can ask social media companies to artificially boost distribution for Big News.
The other option that the article seems to imply — going back to a world where Big media is the arbiter of distribution — isn’t going to happen. Social media (and the internet) are here to stay.
Also, and hopefully you already know this and didn't intend to imply otherwise, but social media is just one way of using the internet.
Which means that there's a third option: learning to use the internet better, in a less harmful and destructive way. And "Big Media" are obviously not the only group of people with access to that third option.
edit: also, "so their accounts reach as many people as @realdonaldtrump" is a very very low bar. that account now reaches zero people.
People have accepted the like/click/upvote reward/amplification systems that surround us as if they are some well thought out foundation on top of which everything else has to be built.
Once some country decides to ban algo amplification of all content, all the castles in the sky being built and debated will break. Who thinks that wont happen?
If you only vote on local issues, you don’t need media to inform you since you can see it first hand. But as soon as the average citizen is expected to keep up with state, national, intl politics you need a media capable of informing them.
Not in any form we'd recognize as modern democracy.
- Use social media personalities to present and spread news
- Informecials as a medium
- Run adwords
this is what just happened with Scott Alexander. they tried to put his head on a pike, because he's a high value node in the tech community that's eroding the power of the legacy press.
Put his head on a pike? They? Come on now.
It will be interesting to see what will happens with this. Ever since the Scott Alexander NYT story, there's been a parade of old media criticism articles getting dredged up and making it to the front page, as well as a lot of broad-brush "I'm done with journalism, those fuckers" sentiment. It frankly sounds a lot like conservatives who are mad that the media wrote so many negative stories about Trump, and think it should have focused instead on positively covering stuff like the Trump administration's self-authored list of great accomplishments. Some people don't want journalism, they just want myside PR.
I mean, the media's not perfect; but it's pretty unreasonable to get mad when your favorite band new album gets a bad review or a newspaper writes articles that fail to abide by the commenting norms of your favorite online message board.
Is there any accusation -- outside of actual crimes -- more likely to cause a person to lose opportunities, social connections, or standing in their community?
I can't speak to this reporter's motivations, but if a reporter wanted to metaphorically put someone's head on a pike, I can't think of any more effective way to do it than to insinuate that they are a racist, and somehow get it to stick.
The actual article did not in fact label him as racist, and I don't think you could read it that way without being sloppy.
You could call this sloppy reading, but I think the truth is that a writer can clearly communicate their intended conclusion without stating it directly. Which is just what Metz did.
And the first article about him also did not done anything that would be objectionable.
And frankly, I have seen way more aggressive writing from journalists who are praised here as truth tellers.
Although of course Wikipedia is also not a perfect source when things are policitally controversial.
"When the full flowering of the social media age turns even the most prestigious paper into just another midsize Facebook page struggling to catch up to the reach of Dan Bongino?"
Good. That's a source of our strength. And It's not going to stop.
Any media company is just another corporation with self-interest that doesn't align with the public good.
They are right that "raw power" is being wrestled from them by social media.
I am glad to see it, after seeing one-too-many hitjobs and too much activism all emanating from a singular and rapidly narrowing worldview.
In another article he wrote about how a lot of news people are just desperate to be considered buddies by the people in power, so they can join the "elite"...
Nixon wasn't crucified for the genocide in Cambodia (I don't have another word for a bombing campaign that was projected to kill 20% of the countries population by the CIA) he was crucified for having fucked with the other powerful people in the US. Watergate wasn't even a blip compared to what Hoover did to the anti-war left, organized labor and organized anti-racism [0]. What was so bad about it is that it targeted people with power who could fight back.
Journalists are being told that there is a new set of powerful people they need to be careful around and they haven't gotten the message yet. The current generation without the instinct to walk softly around big tech will be run out of journalism the same way that those who didn't understand they needed to walk softly around robber barons and not just land owners in the gilded age were.
Trump, like Nixon, seems like an aberration to these people because he, again like Nixon, did not treat their sacred cows with the respect they expect. He treated them like he treated everyone. Interestingly enough Trump was a lot more successful at it, which means that they have lost a lot of power since Nixon was in power.
[0] https://twitter.com/propagandopolis/status/11816410786524487... that this is now thought of as racist in progressive America should tell you all you need to know about how successful cointelpro was.
I don't want the same arrogant, self-unaware journalist that pushes pernicious narratives to the public and doxxes people for blogging to come and tell me how rich people are evil and their newspaper is a defender of the public good.
Just look in the mirror for a moment and realize that you are the problem.
The author really should have left this perspective out of the essay; it's vain and distracts from the valid larger point.
If powerful people can "no comment" the Washington Post and other significant outlets because the media can no longer extract a penalty for doing so, then they only really have to worry about crossing each other. The public interest is likely to suffer as this trend continues.
(edited for clarity)
I would love to see real truth to power journalism again but these folks need to look in the mirror.
Narratives can be dangerous, pernicious or not. For example, on every article about a big tech company, regardless of the facts at play, people will happily comment why they think it contributes to their narrative of that big company trying to grab power. I’m frustrated more when journalists do it, though, because they have more reach.
For example: the WhatsApp privacy policy change that happened recently was grossly misreported. The actual change to share data between the companies happened years ago.
People found out what they were doing and got angry. As if the time line excuses the behaviour. At best, it wasn't properly communicated through the right channels with the proper context so that everyone who used it understood the ramifications when it first happened and that just makes it worse.
The NYT piece on SSC felt like a religious crusade to reveal a blasphemer, taking quotations out of context and making weird, tenuous connections to other known blasphemers.
"Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed" --Friedrich Nietzsche (b. 1844)
4 years of non-stop "The world is ending" crises one right after another, with barely any time to realize that one amounted to nothing before the next one started has left people disillusioned. Add in the fact that when actual problems like Covid did occur, the press was slow to pick up on them. They wasted months mocking VC firms for not allowing handshakes instead of digging deeper into what they were talking about.
People will go listen to Elon Musk et al directly because they've learned that when they compare his actual words to journalists' interpretation of those words, they are completely different. If they stop lying people might start listening to them again.
There's your first problem. MSM got into bed with the people they are supposed to report on. In the recent case of the GME stocks story, the MSM literally reported fake news about WallStreetBets (WSB) pushing silver. This story didn't come from Reddit, it can only have come from sources close to the hedge funds, and then it was uncritically pushed out across the board.
The MSM often work closely with political parties, specifically the Democrat party. The recent Time article on the so called 'shadow campaign' was written by the author (Molly Ball) of Pelosi's 2020 biography. That job was not just given to anybody, she was heavily vetted. These people all run in the same circles. How on earth could you ever trust Molly to report unbiased on Trump or the Republican party? How could ever trust her to report critically on Nancy Pelosi or the Democrat party? She's not going to bite the hand that feeds her.
> When Elon Musk can say whatever he wants to forty million Twitter followers at any time with no filter, it is little surprise that he does not feel compelled to listen to unpleasant questions from some reporter who wants to know why he busts unions and wildly accuses people of pedophilia.
They do realize that journalism still happened before Twitter? It just actually required hard work, instead of spending time on Twitter all day watching hash tags. It was called 'investigative journalism'. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing this again.
I also suggest that every other company shutdown their social media accounts immediately. You cannot make a political statement without alienating some of your customers, no matter what the subject. Most high-profile interactions will likely be very negative. Few people logging into Twitter to say "thank you, it worked exactly as it should, for the n'th time in a row". There was a time when customer service was dealt with privately, rather than having all of your mistakes aired publicly. Currently, the only way possible to get issues resolved regarding Youtube for example is to publicly shame them on Twitter - _this_ is the system they have actively encouraged.
> Donald Trump, unfortunately, looms large in this. His imperviousness to the usual blows from the press was evident five years ago.
The damage to your publications were done long ago, you just only realized it then. You can't convince Republicans that Trump is bad, if no Republicans consume your media. They have switched to alternatives and you need to figure out why.