How U.S. media lost the trust of the public
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/obama-officia...
Now, extrapolate that to reporting on fields you aren't an expert in and form your thoughts accordingly.
Pick any field where you would be considered by the layperson to be a subject-matter expert. Then, go and consume popular media -- news, movies, fiction -- related to that field. How accurate would you say they are?
Perhaps the downvoters would care to explain?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
The newspaper's editors butchered the news. The facts were not accurate or had been watered down.
E.g. I often read the live tweet coverage of LA City Council meetings and public Q&A.
Yesterday I saw the BBC with the “Brussels Chief” of Politico as the foreign correspondent on some EU issue... we are getting news from the dregs now.
I'm speculating based on experience where I live: When contract negotiations in the public sector comes up, the finance ministry makes a point of having its loyal economic affairs journalists and pundits point out how the top paying position at, say, some port authority is almost as high as the prime minister's. But they neglect to mention that 99.975% of employees make a lot less then that; and it was a one-time situation where the guy worked extra overtime; and that they also counted employer taxes rather than what the employee gets etc. etc.
The British press is a big fan of misrepresentation.
It's not exactly a lucrative line of work as it stands. At the NYT, GlassDoor tells me they get paid $110k. It's a fine salary (although not quite so fine by New York standards), but that's at one of the most profitable papers in the country. The Orlando Sentinel apparently pays only around $50k.
Modern journalism has this breed of reporters outcompeted by a new one that has discovered that that semblance of neutrality was unnecessary.
Judith Miller wasn't a 20 year old when she fabricated tales. I have seen articles in Bloomberg News I know are fabricated (I had access to the raw data misreported) and the reporters aren't children.
Of course the oldies are sad. Their personal breed of lies have now been outcompeted by those of superior liars.
They write articles decrying this particular breed of overfishing the ocean. But they are just obsolete.
Try to find out what's happening with the ship stuck in the Suez Canal. The amount of punditry and opinion far exceeds the actual info.
One of the few useful reports today is from Al-arabiya.[1] They probably have people on site.
[1] https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2021/03/28/Tu...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/28/tugs-dredgers-still...
People can see the attempt at cloaking subjective opinion as objective news and do not like it.
Out in the ad-supported world of supposedly free content, yes, fewer opinions would be a boon.
When writing in a style that I'd closely associate with how I'd like journalism written, I often find myself taking the beginning few sentences/paragraph to explain the facts of the situation as I understand it and the rest on what I think about it or why I think it occurred, etc.
I write this way because I am very open to corrections on the facts and my opinions may change wildly if those facts are corrected or updated so stated the basis for my thoughts up front helps provide context. My opinions and explanations are a lot less malleable if the facts don't change. I'm open to expanding and discussing my opinions but they usually evolve rather than fully change.
It's hard for me to really speculate on the driving force or the motive behind what we see in journalism today (or whether it's new) but it's very clear to me that the intent of the articles written don't seem to be clarity between fact and opinion.
Last seen just these days in US media about guns/gun crime/shootings etc. etc. There are so many statistics which all define mass shootings however they want and its super easy to find the "facts" you need for whatever point you wanna bring across.
Opinion-infested reports where the writer is casting aspersions, making judgements, serving vanguard for some cause or presenting the writer's own opinion as part of the narrative are worthless to me. It's fine to have opinions as long as 1. that is what you are intending to sell and 2. you acknowledge this and are upfront about it.
But claiming some opinions are verboten or others must be accepted as fact rapidly destroys any historical reputation for a media organization.
It’s gotten so bad that a the NYT apologized for letting a sitting US Senator (Tom Cotton)[1] publish an op-ed that diverged with the views of its subscribers.
I might think that Senator Warren is an idiot, but I have no issue with her expressing her stupidity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/business/new-york-times-o...
I think The Times knows that their revenue comes from people "picking a side", not from people looking for unbiased news. That's because it's easier to cultivate a fanbase than it is to hope that there is interesting news. Most days are boring -- you only get a blockbuster exclusive story once a decade.
If we live in a post-truth era, it's not because of the internet or the shitty click-bait 'news' sources that proliferate. It's because these institutions, like the NYT and WaPo, in which we used to be able to expect an objective accounting of the facts, have devolved into the personal Pravdas of a few well-educated idiots who thought that they could steer the country in a better direction, but only managed to drive us into a ditch.
[0](see p. 5/16)https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/maEy58HDFCR7qdtFOb...
I've followed Project Veritas and yes they go undercover for right-wing causes, but I haven't seen evidence of them being deliberately untruthful in their reporting.
The real case here is that imho we should all start to (1) withdraw from outrage, (2) expand our bubble to cover all sides.
I've done the latter, it helped with the former, although I'm not there yet.
I'm guessing you'll claim that Project Veritas was truthfully reporting what Hopkins told them, and it's not their fault that he changed his story once he talked to law enforcement. Even though he also told the investigators that his initial affadavit was written by Project Veritas.
[1]: https://entertainment.time.com/2011/03/13/the-twisty-bent-tr...
My cited source is a legal decision, written by a judge.
edit: replaced "=>" with "becomes"
Feels like major news corporations need to balance between maintaining credibility (at least ones that care about it) and publishing something that might (for lack of better term) trigger reaction like "wtf my favorite Blah-news is becoming more and more leftist-marxist/racist-fascist. Fk them, I switching to unicorn-patriot-news-or-something".
Marked-driven confirmation bias. I wish I had a good idea how to fix it but I don't.
Fox News also did the exact same thing on a similar lawsuit. It was used as a "gotcha" moment, but it still wasn't very meaningful.
> the NYT argued in front of a judge that what is on its front page should be understood to be opinion and not fact, even when it appears in the form of facts
That's a comment about the defamation case. The NYT was arguing the bounds of its 1A rights before the judge. When the person responded talking about the NYT arguing it's 1A rights, that's what they were talking about.
Then you asked what your comment had anything do to with 1A rights, and I pointed out that a comment about the defamation case is inherently about 1A rights.
So...it doesn't really matter that your commend had nothing to do with Project Veritas because the rest of the comment chain in response also has nothing to do with it.
You can say your comment wasn't about that topic if you want, but it's just doesn't seem accurate to me. I'm not "gishgalloping", I'm just explaining to you why people are reacting as if you commented on the defamation case.
Anyway, I think we're way out in the weeds and this discussion probably isn't productive so I'll drop it. I'm sorry if I didn't understand what you were trying to say.
Argument 1) This isn't libel because it's true, and
Argument 2) This isn't libel because we're allowed to lie to our readership.
Argument 1 causes you no reputational harm. Arguement 2 is an announcement to the world that you've abdicated all journalistic integrity.
Do you make argument 2 if you're confident in argument 1?
Regardless, argument 1 must not be bullet proof, because their motion to dismiss was rejected and the suit is moving forward.
If argument 2 works for purposes of a quick motion to dismiss, and argument 1 requires discovery and possibly a trial, you’ll make argument 2 first, and if that fails, mount the much more expensive side defense based on argument 1.
This shows a misunderstanding of what the motion to dismiss adjudicates. Argument 1 cannot win on a motion to dismiss, because it's an argument over the facts.
Argument 1 is absolutely irrelevant in a motion to dismiss. Argument 2 is the only argument you can raise in a motion to dismiss.
At the motion to dismiss stage you are only arguing questions of the law. You assume the facts as alleged by the plaintiff in the complaint, and then state that given those facts there is still no legal issue that can be remedied.
Argument 1) I didn't do what you're accusing me of, or
Argument 2) What you're accusing me of isn't illegal
If you can establish the second one, I don't see why you wouldn't. It seems like it would save you a bunch of effort for this and any future cases.
> The New York Times also attempted a Hail Mary claim that Project Veritas was “libel proof.” We have previously discussed such claims as very hard to establish. The court correctly and quickly dispensed with that claim by the New York Times.
Financial news and if US business news coverage isn't super important to be granular for you, then go for the gold standard which is the Financial Times. The Economist approach doesn't appeal much to me, since most of the time they are like a free-market hammer to which everything looks like a nail. Tech news, Stratechery.
Do you have some examples? I don't remember reading that in the WSJ.
The video in this article, even though I appreciate the criticism of Cuomo.
Also right now, in the front page of WSJ, there is an article criticizing the "woke orthodoxy". I'm no fan of wokeness, but I would have preferred some balanced criticism of the right too from a professional publication. Or just stick to professional reporting like FT.
If you hire a lawyer, the lawyer generally decides what argument to make in court. The things the lawyer says do not necessarily reflect what you believe, or even reality as you see it. The lawyer is expected to say whatever is calculated to make it more likely you will win in court. While there are some rules governing what a lawyer can and cannot say, they are limited to certain egregious behavior.
The client generally only decides whether to plead guilty, not guilty, or whether to settle in a civil case, or whether to fire the lawyer.
While a client could try to pressure a lawyer to make certain arguments, the lawyer is not ethically required to listen as long as they think it's better for the client if they don't listen to the client.
If an attorney lies in a court filing, they can be sanctioned, they could be held liable for malpractice / other civil liabilities, be criminally liable, fined, lose their job, or even lose their career.
If a journalist misstates a fact that harms someone else or ruins their reputation, they add a little thingy in italics a few months later saying "oops lol guess we wuz wrong." Occasionally serial fabulists lose their reputations and careers, but generally do not suffer criminal or civil liability for their mistakes. The two professions are not terribly comparable in that respect.
The moral expectations a lawyer is under are also not the same as those of a normal person in the American system. In the American system, even if you are defending a pedophile cannibal, part of your role is to ensure the integrity of the system by providing said reprehensible person the best possible defense without lying about the facts. This ensures the good reputation of the court and, in criminal cases, builds public faith in the integrity of the prosecution. That is the ideal, even if the reality does not always live up to it.
Clients make tons of decisions in either civil or criminal cases while being advised by counsel. A lawyer cannot ethically take an action without the express approval of their client. True, clients are not generally in the driver's seat, but attorneys are limited to advising the client and only acting with the express consent of said client at every step in any kind of process.
Should journalists be held to similarly high ethical standards? That was what the professional journalistic organizations once aspired to, but they have slipped a great deal over the decades.
Was their client caught on camera committing a crime? Just spin some b.s. about that person on screen being someone else.
Did their client rape someone? Just make up some b.s. about the woman being a slut who concented. The attorney wasn't there, you can't prove they are lying when they spin b.s. so they are being "ethical".
The idea that highly paid elite attorneys are doing a public service while going to heroic efforts to try to mislead a judge and jury as to whether their super wealthy clients are guilty is the sort of b.s. these elite attorneys invent that can't be shown to be a lie.
(Of course prosecutors can behave badly as well).
In theory you are correct an attorney can be disciplined, in practice they are not expected to serve the truth.
They can even be disbarred for violating the confidentiality of what the client says to them. That's right, their job in some cases is to literally help insure nobody ever knows the truth of the client's bad deeds.
Beyond that I've read about attorneys being allowed to act against their client's wishes "for their own good", so unless you can show a case of an attorney being disciplined for not letting the client set litigation strategy I have to assume you are confused.
That only works if it could plausibly be someone else. The defence's job is to introduce reasonable doubt, not prove that their client didn't do what they are accused of. It's the court's job to establish whether there is any merit to those claims.
There are many contexts in which you may be obligated to disclose exculpatory evidence in either civil or criminal cases. This really limits how much you can actually lie because of the discipline and transparency that are imposed by the open exchange of evidence.
So, right, you bring up the painting the rape victim as a slut defense. The way that you do that effectively is not by libeling the victim or inventing things out of whole cloth. You do it by creating the possibility for reasonable doubt in the jury by describing objective facts about the behavior of the alleged victim e.g. "On the night of the alleged incident, she posted "I'm gonna get laid tonight, hell yeah!" on Facebook. She texted the defendant "I'm really horny... u down?" not long afterwards.
Do either of those facts mean that the rape did not occur? No, it could have still occurred. The defendant could still be guilty. But your job is to establish reasonable doubt in the jury, and if there are good facts for your side, you go with that. If the prosecution brings up better evidence like security footage, the defense is screwed, but you could still use the 'good facts' on your side to try to bargain down the charges.
So, attorneys misrepresent the truth not by lying but by constructing narratives that favor their side using the best evidence that supports that narrative. Attorneys don't lie if they can avoid it, but they can deceive with the truth!
Confidentiality, yes, that's how the system works.
Here's a compilation of successful disbarments over client abuses compiled by a plaintiff firm that specializes in getting other attorneys disbarred: https://attorneygrievances.com/recent-court-cases/disbarment... Almost all of these issues are related to dishonoring the wishes of clients or just acting irresponsibly.
There are other compilations from any state bar. It's also frequently a topic of news articles in attorney periodicals about attorney sanctions and disbarment, especially because the stories are often funny and colorful such as attorneys being sanctioned for encouraging a witness to be rude or attorneys sanctioned for sassing judges.
Perhaps you simply typed "malpractice cases" in a search , and thought any case would do. If you want to link to an actual case in that site you feel is relevant feel free to do so.
If you are an American attorney, (complaining about attorney would likely invite replies from attorneys) you've almost certainly read cases in law school about attorneys not obeying clients for their own good and being deemed to meet ethical standards.
To be clear, I am referring to the attorney deciding what to write in court documents and what to argue before the judge, not things like failure to appear in court. There's no point in arguing with me if you know I am correct. If you genuinely feel I am wrong I invited you to link to a particular article showing otherwise.
Your other statements are just using fancy prose to call a lie something other than a lie. The attorney isn't slut shaming, they are "creating reasonable doubt". The attorney is not misleading the jury, they are "creating an alternative picture"."
Essentially you have a dictionary of professional euphamisms for propoganda constructed to decieve the jury about what occured during the crime.
I do appreciate the idea that the high powered defense attorney serving the ultra wealthy are not liars or grifter decieving jurys as to the guily of their clients but "creators of reasonable doubt".
That's a very nice play on language and the legal standards developed over the last few hundred years.
The NYT did in fact argue that they have a license to lie, and won: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan
However, the ruling explicitly states that if the publication knew that the information was false or disregarded whether it was true, then a defendant would be liable for damages.
That seems completely reasonable and in no way suggests that anyone has a license to lie.
Sullivan sent such a [retraction] request. The Times did not publish a retraction in response to the demand.
Your post makes it seem like the NYT knowingly published false information about someone and refused to retract it, as if the NYT believed that they had the right to publish lies about someone.
Your source, however, paints a very different and much more nuanced picture. The NYT published an advertisement paid for by an independent organization, the ad contained false information, the NYT did retract the ad, the police commissioner, Sullivan, who is unnamed in the ad but potentially implicated by it sued the NYT for defamation, a court case was fought over whether the ad actually implicated him or not, the Alabama courts decided that the ad did implicate Sullivan and awarded Sullivan damages, the NYT appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court and they overturned the Alabama's Supreme Court decision on the basis that Sullivan being implicated by the ad is not sufficient to award damages for defamation.
At no point did the NYT try to justify lying or claim that they have a license to lie. What the NYT's argued was that Sullivan had no grounds to sue because he was not implicated by the ad.
The NYT is highly disrespected around the world, and considered a mouthpiece for the US government (or key factions within it).
To some extent, this devalues the brand of all news. I'm sure that the Trump supporters who think The New York Times is fake news also don't read The Wall Street Journal. Even though the Journal has pretty conservative slate opinion columnists (and editorial board), people won't even consider it because they think all mainstream media is fake. (It never tells them what they want to hear; the real world without spin is VERY BORING.)
I also read some Singaporean print media. Various ministries in the single party gov't regularly pays local media to write "paid content". Without fail, the notice about paid content is not obvious or hard to find. What a shame.
The reality is they can sale sensationalism at dime store prices. There is no need to be a real news outlet when they can mimic “The Sun.”
There is no cost and all profit to just printing garbage. In the short term.
This is trading your credentials for cash. Eventually, people will wisen and realize this is not journalism. It will cost them dearly then, but that is the future.
Who worries about the future?
The news reports accurately what happens. But we would still hate it.
But tbh I actually prefer reporting the news, not opinion.
If Donald Trump (a former president) causes lives with his lies, we should handle him through a legal mean, not through blackmailing a news channel to ban what he says.
Sometimes 2021 feels like the 1950s...
yeah but they're not making much progress, so what's the point? It's like watching paint dry.
I don't understand why it needs to be a news organization streaming it... Is it how that country works? (IE: Do they block anyone else from publishing data about this event, a bit like what China would do?)
Yes, just like any other Middle Eastern country.
The local townspeople are even afraid to take photos of the ship.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-suezcanal-ship/digg...
Or is it Reuters?
Talking about other people's reporting is cheaper than doing your own reporting. The question is, can American news conglomerates not afford to do proper reporting, or have they just found that it's more profitable to leave that to others?
To put it another way, if we found ways to bring more money back into journalism (e.g. By making companies like Google and facebook to pay for news content), how much of that money is likely to be spent on actual reporting?
I have a sinking feeling that the pundits are here to stay.
A beautiful app / website, that functions perfectly, and is basically a netflix for real journalism... The company itseld would be the one doing the journalism, and providing the app. Similary to how netflix has "netflix originals".
Payed service.
a) I'm describing a video service. Not text. I think that makes a huge difference.
b) How do you explain Apple News? Personally I have no idea if they're profitable but they seem to be betting on news subscriptions being worth while.
The answer to that is government regulation - it must be mandated that terminating a service must be at least as accessible and fast as the most accessible/fast way of signing up.
Not just for newspapers, but also for other services - a particularly common target of complaints are fitness studios.
I felt that it was good value, this particular solo journalist did a ton of investigative research and posted almost every day.
So, I think there's a business model for it if you can get enough subs to sustain yourself.
Obviously there's space for investigative journalism like what, e.g. ProPublica is doing, but if it's just "news", I'd rather get it from an individual backed by a strong reputation than an institution backed by a strong reputation, unless the journalist has a useful on-the-ground insight.
News/Jouralism = Reporting with as little opinion as possible. I.E. what/why/how/where/etc from boots on the ground...
Editorial / Substack = Opinion pieces.
ProPublica is amazing in terms of doing journalism and funding it in a new way.
I agree with your definitions. But if I'm choosing between Editorial "news" from WaPo/NYT vs. someone independently covering the same events on their Substack, I'd be more interested in the individual on Substack if I trust them from previous experience as an intelligent, informed, good-faith writer.
WaPo/NYT I don't know the individual writers very well, and I don't really have much faith in the intentions of the editorial board...
Ya, but you have to remember Substack has no fact checkers, no standards, no peer review... NYT/WAPO are not perfect, but they have those in place. And, such as in the case of the podcast earlier this year they eventually get to the right place and fire the team that blatantly lied.
Reuters is probably a good source if you are looking for pure news, or apnews.
Example: Vogue magazine (US) is incredibly expensive to produce (photograph, report, layout, print, deliver), but the annual subscription price is only 40 USD. How is that possible? (The September issue is legendary each year and weighs just shy of a metric tonne!) Every major fashion brand has huge multiple page inserts in each issue. (I guess half of each issue is just fashion ads -- but artfully done!)
To state the obvious: Good media isn't cheap!
That said, I think there's an enormous demand for straight-forward news reporting with no opinionized, psycho partisan bullshit forced into it. CNN used to represent that in its early days for example, and they've gradually rotted away over decades.
I don't see why somebody doesn't build this, it's right there begging to be done.
Sign a deal with Reuters and a few other straight forward news gathering services, as the originating sources. Set up a Substack and a YouTube channel, and start reporting just the facts, with a couple of people on YouTube reporting the news from behind an anchor desk. Avoid the old media and their networks, publish as direct as possible. And if YouTube gets so bad with their creeping censorship that they start trying to ban reality, shift to self-hosting after you get initial momentum.
Anyone that can do that has my attention. It would be trivial to get started.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2021/02/28/unsurprising...
[1] Around 4:35 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8hnifYOlNs
Perhaps you're also feeling kind of ever-green? :-P
>A new tugboat has joined the ranks of those struggling to free the giant cargo ship blocking the crucial Suez Canal maritime route. Syria, citing the blockage, rations fuel, and Lebanon warns of a similar problem.
What's the problem?
I'm guessing you meant to say the Al Jazeera article? In that Al Arabiya one I see clues they have no direct reporting:
* Only a stock photo of the ship, not anything from the current event
* Quotes and sources only by way of other media organizations ("Egypt’s Extra News", "Egyptian state TV", "Reuters").
* And facts I could get myself via vesselfinder.com or wikipedia ("321 ship stuck", "About 15 percent of world shipping traffic transits the Suez Canal.")
I could have written this article from my home in the US despite having no meaningful knowledge of the Middle East or shipping.
The Al Jazeera one has a photo of the ship actually in the canal and at least one direct quote. (Interestingly, they also have info from Rabie by way of Al Arabiya, which is not in the Al Arabiya article you linked. Looks like the Al Jazeera article was written later though given the count of waiting ships is higher.)
If anyone works in the news making business, can you comment about the cost of opinion vs non-opinion (fact-based) reporting? I assume opinion (pundits) are cheaper than non-opinion reporters. Why? Much less travel & location costs.
Deeper: Can you imagine the cost of placing a highly educated reporter into a developing country with their family and children? I first thought about this after reading that Peter Hessler and and Leslie Chang were moving to Cairo to work for The New Yorker (TNY). Surely, their children will attend private international schools, where tuition would be paid for by TNY. And what about apartment / security / car-and-driver / yada-yada? I am not against any of it, but the total family package cost must be incredible! (Again: If anyone has first hand knowledge of overseas reporter living packages, please comment below!)
The news used to be something that came on at 11 PM and was over by 11:30. Then there was another half-hour of local news. That was it. And of those 30 minutes apiece, at most 12 would actually be news (aside from fluff, commercials, sports [which aren't really news], etc).
Now news is a 24 hour thing, but there isn't 23 more hours of stuff going on. At least, not stuff that people would tune in to hear about. And since it's all the most engaging stuff, you basically get the same 12 minutes of news per day and the rest is yammering.
The thing that annoys me is people who go into careers that are explicitly premised on describing the world only because they think they can use the trust that comes from that to change the world. Those people aren't in media though.
>The thing that annoys me is people who go into careers
because they want to be famous. These people we see on "news" programs don't give a rat's ass about the news, and only want to be the one people are watching.
The reasons you offer may be good arguments against unliked news but do not seem to follow a path to effectively false news.
I would restate the assertion to read: People shouldn't trust any news source implicitly - until trust is carefully nurtured thru the reader's regular and independent vetting of stories.
I think you overestimate the market for truth.
The reasonable complaints about bias - those can be much better addressed by a focus on competency.
Failing to expose malfeasance within a liked administration is primarily an act of ineptitude. Correcting that seems a much surer path to less biased journalism.
Of the people who want to change the world, how many can be convinced of the usefulness of such principled behavior, and actually stick to it? How many organizations? Empirically it doesn't look like very many.
You may want to go into journalism to change the world, but you get hired in journalism for agreeing with the owners of media outlets.
You wont get access to interviews or access to information if you don't agree upfront to support a certain agenda.
A journalist who tries to report against the agenda gets blacklisted immediately.
Mika Brzezinski was threatened by the Hillary campaign who tried to have her fired from MSNBC for making remarks against Hillary on her show Morning Joe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mika_Brzezinski#Democratic_Nat...
(This was content in the embedded video—gestured at in the text.)
What would have protected free speech in the first place? Not allowing the dangerous fantasies supplant fact.
There’s plenty of statements that the mainstream media supported that were either flat out wrong and harmful to the American public. We’re still feeling the repercussions of a government hellbent against saturated fats.
At least allowing people to indulge in “dangerous fantasies” lets some of the people be right some of the time, instead of the entire monoculture being dangerously wrong.
You’d be suppressing that too.
Once upon a time, emancipation of slaves or universal suffrage were dangerous fantasies. In China as of today, democratic ideas are a dangerous fantasy.
It is not as if contemporary West is the only society in history that has everything figured out and can only get worse through entertainment of "dangerous fantasies". To the watchers of status quo, every potential change is at least suspect, if not outright dangerous.
So, do you think those ideas deserve to be held up next things like suffrage or the abolishing of slavery? Please, no.
In many ways it accelerated Limbaugh et al because viewers could see they weren’t getting an accurate conservative viewpoint in the mainstream and thus trusted it less, leading to other outlets.
I'm not saying anything was good vs bad, but it's clear why it was a perceived an issue. One political party was taking advantage to revoke the speech of another. Put simply, I could put two left leaning people on my show, but claim one was "conservative" and that was "fair". Honestly, it's no better than now, but at least we all know the truth.
Most surveys going back decades and decades show that 80 or 90%+ of journalists are registered Democrats. That doesn’t make them bad journalists, but they are a monoculture that doesn’t represent the diversity of political views in America.
It’s notable how it really bothers people that there is one right-leaning news network out of a dozen or so left-leaning networks. Apparently it’s not enough to control 90% of the media narrative - it has to be 100%.
Actually, how crazy the situation is, is shown how "conservatives" abandoned Fox News because they did not reflect their reality distortion and moved to even more extreme outlets (I mean who can call newsmax or OAN even news). If someone moved from Fox News to OAN, they were never interested in news, they were after someone feeding their prejudice no matter how unreal they are.
The UK, France, Russia, Austria, Hungary?
They also all participate in laundering of fake news. One of them throws up a totally false story and all of the others repeat it.
As a recent high-profile example, Washington Post falsely claimed that Trump told a Georgia election official to "find the votes", which a later leaked recording proved to be absolutely fabricated (they retracted it). CNN, MSNBC, BBC and other ethically bankrupt organisations printed the lie verbatim.
"CORRECTION: [...] Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so."
That's a pretty whopping correction that changes the entire story. If he's asking her to investigate the votes to find wrongdoing, then there's absolutely no wrongdoing.
If that doesn’t tell you what the media is about I don’t what is. They literally ran with a story about the president they couldn’t corroborate and it turned out to be lies.
(And I think you're going to need to cite that "80-90%" number, which seems made up. Nothing is that uniform, even CPAC has a bunch of registered libertarians and independents walking around.)
Both seem to ignore the fact that whatever worked in year X will not work in year X+50, because the society, technology and politics moved on.
One of the defining movements of the last hundred years was the fact that the cost of disseminating opinions and news was slowly becoming affordable for more and more corporations, small teams or even individuals. Thanks to technological progress, the voices out there multiplied, as did their audience. And people unhappy with a certain journalistic narrative found it cheaper and easier to broadcast their competing perspective.
Such a chaotic world cannot be subject to effective content guidelines such as the defunct fairness doctrine, just like the modern world of highly educated professionals cannot be ruled by hereditary nobility.
Instead of censorship, Capital simply hoarded all the bandwidth, starving alternative voices of attention.
How now are us newly ennobled modern highly educated professionals supposed to hear voices which no longer exist?
The hysterical bit is social media swiped the control away from advertisers. We've replaced your dreaded hereditary nobility with the mythical meritocracy.
That aside, it's not because there is a higher diversity of sources at more diverse scales tosay that the answer is not to look at what worked in the past. Or to simply throw one's hands in the air.
It is not because small ISPs, tech companies, etc. exist that the large conglomerates that impact our daily lives should be left untouched and unregulated. Same goes with news, or masquerades of news.
A good start for instance would to untie news media from the profit motive. NPR exists, the French Radio Publique exists, etc. and they output great content, independently more often than not. It shows that public investment into newsmaking is worthwhile and has often a better quality to it. News reporting should be seen as of public interest, and treated as such rather than as a commodity. Breaking news conglomerates should also be explored.
okay, I'll bite. What is the solution then? We got rid of Fairness Doctrine without putting any other check in place and Fox News successfully argued that no-one in their right mind should take Tucker Carlsen seriously, even though he has the biggest talk show on American TV today. I am guessing they are gonna argue the same in their voter machine cases too.
There should be some way to regulate the news media, no?
To what end? The Fairness Doctrine was little more than a method by which powerful people within the government could service their own vendettas against conservative radio hosts, executed through FCC licensure agreements.
Everything is IP-networked now, and there's no FCC licensure for publishing on the internet so a bloody-minded focus on returning to the glory days of the Fairness Doctrine is really just fighting the last war. Oh and it's effectively government-compelled speech, AKA a blatant and egregious violation of the First Amendment without even the paper thin justification of public-owned airwaves.
And that's not about "fighting the last war"; it's about correcting for the network effects of the Internet that create natural monopolies with too much influence on public discussion.
And that is protecting the free speech rights of users, in an age when the public space is controlled by private corporations, so there's a compelling government interest involved.
This sounds like another repetition of the same bad legal take on the "rhetorical hyperbole" standard based, probably, on the McDougal case or one similar [1]. That argument is made with respect to particular statements, not that nobody would ever believe anything they say. But don't take my word for it, read how the court in that very case talks about the standard:
"In particular, accusations of “extortion,” “blackmail,” and related crimes, such as the statements Mr. Carlson made here, are often construed as merely rhetorical hyperbole when they are not accompanied by additional specifics of the actions purportedly constituting the crime."
You will note that it's limited to particular statements in a particular context, not everything the person ever said for any reason, nor to anything ever said on the show. This same standard was used in, e.g. the case vs. Larry Flynt[2]. The media loves to misrepresent this argument as applying very broadly to everything a person says whenever it comes up in contexts with a political opponent, but the claims made are far narrower and rely largely on people not bothering to read legal rulings or knowing what on earth "rhetorical hyperbole" is to begin with. If you take this as some defense of Tucker, it's not, the other side does exactly the same thing whenever rhetorical hyperbole comes up.
So basically every time you see the meme "can you believe that X argued in court that nobody would ever believe them" you can be sure that you are seeing this tired misrepresentation of the rhetorical hyperbole standard.
Which seems apropos in an article about the media losing trust, as I know from actually reading a lot of court rulings just how uniformly terrible legal reporting is to the point where I actively mistrust all headlines by all outlets and refuse to consider anything but actual court papers off of Pacer.
Outlets love to put out headlines with unreasonable billion dollar defamation claims (even if actual awards are a tiny fraction thereof and they have no realistic hope of getting anything but a headline because their prayer for relief doesn't have a prayer), or to headline meaningless procedural motions as somehow dispositive (The Supreme Court denied a hail Mary petition for a writ of certiorari to decide whether suit could even be brought in the first place? Quelle surprise! The case must be almost over!), or to talk about "harsh questions" during oral arguments (the side that gets questioned more wins slightly more often, they may be trying to shore up the arguments for their ruling). There are far, far more tropes than this, but seriously, if you care at all about accuracy, take a course or two on legal procedure so that you understand the different courts and levels of appeal and actually read legal rulings.
Granted, that takes at least some small amount of legal education, but honestly, the public has neglected legal literacy for far too long.
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20519858/3-22-21-...
She argued that her beliefs were based on disclosed facts (sworn depositions by others), which is a credible defense against defamation.
Inasmuch as you're claiming that she doesn't argue truth as a defense, that's appears to be true based on skimming this brief, but it's also quite common simply because that puts the burden of proof on you and it's much, much easier to argue most other defenses.
So even when a person truly believes that they're right, they often won't argue this point in court, especially not on a contentious political topic. So failing to argue that point isn't quite the indicator one might normally assume it should be, even if it does tend to appear in slam dunk cases.
N.B. I don't think her allegations here are actually true.
This is true, which means it's important to look at the context.
The fairness doctrine was from a time when there was limited airtime. Things were broadcast and anything so broadcast filled space that couldn't be used by something else. Filling the airwaves with a singular opinion literally prevented any others from being carried. The fairness doctrine was meant to counteract this.
Today that technical problem does not exist. Everything is on demand. The economic cost in terms of storage and bandwidth is so low that the likes of YouTube and Facebook can carry everything published by everyone. Problem solved, right? Just carry everything; completely fair.
Except that they reintroduced the scarcity artificially through market consolidation. There are effectively three major cable news networks and every one of them is aligned with a political party.
Because that's what happens when there are so few of them. If you have dozens then they each carve out a niche. One caters to socialists, another to libertarians, another to moderates etc. You get a greater diversity of viewpoints and, importantly, less tribal warfare because there is more overlap between any given pair of outlets.
And it thwarts the even more problematic attempts by partisans to capture the incumbents and enforce ideological conformity through them, because it's not as effective if you have a dozen other competitors who aren't just shills for the other team (and therefore have credibility) rightfully pointing out the lies told by competitors they otherwise agree with and keeping each other honest.
What we need is less media consolidation. More competition. Applies to the media as much as the tech companies.
I can setup a website or twitter handle and get my ideas published out there, but they drown in a sea of similar opinions. I can't compete with the kind of ideological carpet bombing than Fox News, CNN or MSNBC can produce. Money and Capital can buy a much larger bullhorn, so that is what people listen to.
That's... literally not a "fact". It's a situational thing. I mean, just to be glib: almost everything that "worked" in the 1980's works now. Most things haven't changed!
As far as media balance: yes, clearly balance is a good thing. I think forcing Fox to hand over an hour of coverage every evening between Hannity and Tucker to someone like Chris Hayes can only be a net benefit. MSNBC can slot Ingraham in after Maddow. Both their audiences will win, because the networks will have to find a way to keep eyeballs without outrage.
Fox only works as "Fox" because of the echo chamber effect. And that can absolutely be regulated.
But no, the fairness doctrine has nothing to do with Fox News, it never applied to cable
I do agree that the FD revocation leads directly to FOX News and AM talk radio, I just don't think CNN or Crossfire are examples of the phenomenon being discussed. I think people mention Crossfire largely in the context of Jon Stewart criticizing the Tucker Carlson era iteration, which fair cop was bad, and also coincided with an era where CNN phased out real news journalists like Aaron Brown in favour of more idiot talking heads. But I'm just not sure you can draw the causal graph from fairness doctrine to those events ~18-ish years later the same way you can to the rise of talk radio a few years after FD was sunset and FOX News 5 or 6 years after that.
Another important issue that you'll figure out in mainstream media is that they're always pushing the idea of us against other countries. They're promoting the underlying notion that we should always be at war (or close to that) with countries that are not aligned with the current interests of the elites. There is always some "enemy" that is a threat to "civilization" and that we desperately need to contain or destroy. Not only this benefits the big interest groups, but this also creates a fictional narrative of reality that keeps viewers interested in learning about the latest developments of this "holy crusade for civilization".
The media business is a business, it has always been about what's profitable. It's not a public service, even hard hitting journalism must sell copies.
The closest thing to news media that serves public interest are worker owned media companies and socialist magazines.
Are those topics news worthy? Who knows, but the fact the media decided that was for them to decide alone is somewhat worrisome.
So I don't think there really is a right answer here. "Not this" may be a start, but it's hardly a solution.
BTW, I regularly read both the WSJ and the NYT. Reading both gives one a good idea about how agenda driven the media is.
- "These are the facts"
- "This is what you need to know"
- "This is what it means"
- "Explainer: ..."
- Everything you never wanted to know about British Royal Family - Women in bikinis - Men engaged in violent sports
I agree. I remember when news organizations had correspondents who travelled around the world to report on stories. People like Marie Colvin, who would risk their lives to get a story. Now it's all talking heads sitting around a table, telling you what to think. The stories aren't even real in many cases now, but made up hysteria like the nascar noose.
>BTW, I regularly read both the WSJ and the NYT. Reading both gives one a good idea about how agenda driven the media is.
May I suggest reading RT and the SCMP while you are at it. Maybe round it out with with some Al Jazeera.
I find it deeply ironic that Russia can run a news network that acts as a propaganda weapon by just talking about all the scandalous topic that American media wont touch (US war in Yemen, CIA black sites, Hunter Biden emails, Saudi government involvement in 9/11, CIA dumping billions of $ of weapons into the hands of ISIS, etc).
This is technically true but also misses the point by a mile. The dry work of journalists hasn’t at all changed. News is just as boring and impartial as it always has been but nobody consumes it. It’s been there the whole time and hasn’t gone away. But television radically disrupted what we call news and proved that what people wanted wasn’t actually news but storytellers who consume the news and present it as a cohesive narrative that has the benefit of context (historical, cultural, political). This is totally rational. It’s why reading news reports and case files about criminals is niche but true crime podcasts are hugely popular.
These aren’t and can’t be apolitical in nature but that isn’t the same thing as “injecting opinion into fact” which is something that doesn’t really happen all that often. It’s very rare that you know a journalist’s opinion on a topic (outside of their personal Twitter) but how they assemble a narrative is ultimately informed by their views as an individual.
Indeed, the CBC isn't an actual elite that could be defined by achievement, performance, accountability, history, or other merit, but they do groom the lower slopes of it. It's possible they have become more balanced as I tuned them out almost 10 years ago, and perhaps in the mean time they've investigated public service corruption, major party financing and election integrity, foreign influence operations, value for money in spending, threats to Canada's sovereignty and place in the world, challenged dominant narratives, and provided valuable and neutral insight into the culture conflicts of the day, but I'm willing to bet I haven't missed that much.
If you are in the U.S., CBC news is like if a Portland NPR affiliate had the budget of CNBC. Lots of very concerned and appropriately unattractive white people with cameras, descending from billion dollar office towers to hover around mystified minorities (who, quite reasonably, just shrug and go with it) demanding to know how they've been victimized by the Four Bads. (climate change, homophobia, racism, and sexism.) The CBC became the prosecutors in litigating for social justice, which I think many of them would be sincerely flattered to read, but to many Canadians, they are just activists posing as reporters.
This is in addition to that they are the state broadcaster whose mandate was to popularize Canada's increasingly homogenized federalism and (now post-) national identity. Their mandate isn't even reporting, it's narrative, and from a federalist perspective.
That view represents the consensus of a few neighbourhoods and schools, basically Queen's, McGill, and to a lesser extent, Carlton, and the international NGOs they all did their gap years at. It is widely regarded as an arm of the LPC. Their content is a formula of patronizing concern about what should be done about people who don't work for the government, or aren't paid in public money, and it manufactures sentimental conflict over different minority interest groups toward that end. While most media panders to outrage, the CBC's editorial tone exalts victimhood as a kind of new state religion.
I could just dismiss them as just another group of radicals with government jobs, but it's more complex than that in Canada. The CBC is something much weirder altogether.
That said, I agree with parts of what you said. CBC's opinions are not at all related to the normal experiences that Canadians have.
The news podcast is fine, and is better than the quality of most Canadian news (a low bar). I appreciate that they will steadily question the government in interviews; however, but for topics around science and technology, they simply don't have the background to really ferret out BS in the same way.
For instance, they will readily tell you "all of the vaccines are equally good at keeping you out of the hospital" - which is true - but they will not ask the more challenging follow-ups. For example, "if all vaccines prevent death, why is it so important for certain vaccines to be allocated exclusively to the elderly?". The answer to the later question is actually far more interesting, since it unveils bioethics questions that a listener may not agree with; but the CBC is invested in protecting the aura of the experts it agrees with.
The Japanese NHK is, without a question, far better than the CBC, despite its politicization and its recent change to be seen as "agreeing with the government". Other than the Ideas podcast and the News show, there is very little value that the CBC provides me (despite being a linguistic, racial and religious minority in a mixed-race marriage with another linguistic, racial and religious minority.)
I might vote for a political party that had a clearly defined plan to end CBC's divorce from the concerns of the average Canadian.
At least in the US you have a few different news sources all with their own bias. But the CBC is looked up somewhat as an institution and god damn Peter Mansbridge is a handsome man.
I’ve seen stories covered in the US media and on CBC and it’s apparent the CBC provides an even narrower viewpoint.
And don’t get me started on how most coverage of the US tends to have the conclusion “aren’t you glad we aren’t as bad as the US? may be you should stop complaining about our governments little missteps?”
We use technology to rate how informative an article likely is: links & quotes analysis, lack of opinion in writing tone, author's topical expertise based on historical writing and site historical reputation. The result is you can find good articles in hundreds of sources without having to brand an entire source (Fox, NYT, CNN etc) as good or bad. And by curating a few highly rated stories across the political spectrum on each topic you see different framings of a story quickly so you get closer to the unbiased story.
More here if you're curious: https://thefactual.com/how-it-works
It would be nice to have a spectrum that could be set based on your country.
I've been surfing around on your site. The article selection is very good. I'm unlikely to use it because I refuse to sign up for almost anything these days, and it's a requirement on the site, but it looks well done.
In as much as news orgs fail to challenge those in power, they are abdicating their primary responsibilities - they are earning a loss of trust. Publishing press releases by Gov/LEO/Biz verbatim, without vetting the info or adding historical context, is a polar opposite of what 1A protections imply.
As far as informing the public: One news org publishing 7 headlines is informing us. Dozens of others who publish those same stories, w/o meaningfully different content, is not. Bounded, local markets have been gone for a generation. It seems delusional to disseminate news as if it were still 30-300 years ago.
This would in effect have that Gov overseeing itself. I would offer that the powerful are exactly who should not oversee news orgs.
Gov is not the Media or is it. So Government overseeing Media is not the same thing as Government overseeing itself.
I think it should in fact work quite well. Government should oversee Media and Media should oversee the Government.
In other words, in a world where the Internet exists, it was inevitable that established media powers would eventually erode away and lose their position as sole arbiters of information.
Personally I think the lawsuit against Fox about mis-information they spread about voting machine manufacturers is a great remedy and will help restore public's faith in the system. It is not that all media are equally bad in spreading mis-information. Some are clearly worse than others. How do we know that? Lawsuit(s) will prove that, beyond reasonable doubt.
The outcomes of lawsuits are not really relevant to the average person.
Such news would be highly relevant to the average Fox News customer because it would tell them that Fox has done something quite bad, caused damages worth billion(s) by spreading misinformation.
It is relevant to the "average person" because it clearly tells them something about the trustworthiness of the news they get from Fox every day. But whether that news will reach them is a different question. Therefore I think part of the remedy should be to order Fox News to tell their viewers about the outcome of the lawsuit more than once to make sure it reaches all their customers.
The Internet is Pandora's box. It's been wide open for 20+ years, and we just don't know what do about it, or even if anything should be done about it. Infinite information is something humans have never had before, and its greatest strengths are its greatest weaknesses.
This thread craps all over media (and with good reason), but the same force that makes that media available is the one that gives us hyper-local, unmediated information in near-realtime through Twitter, Facebook, et. al. You can't have the one without the other.
1940's His Girl Friday is a great madcap comedy about the journalism business. Though I can't find the timestamp, there's a great scene in the first act where the reporters are sitting around their phones playing cards. Our heroine, Hildy (played excellently by Rosalind Russell), comes in and rouses the group with a hot story. The reporters then relay the story back to the newsrooms in increasingly dubious and truth-stretching headlines, all for the evening editions.
It's a bit over the top, but the headlines they spout out sound just like Twitter posts and FB memes to my ears.
Yellow Journalism has been around in the US for about a century now, so it's not 'news'. To see the path out of where we are now requires that we look back and see how it was done before
https://archive.org/details/HisGirlFriday1940_201505 Free Here
Why does watching a news channel necessarily mean that you think that the news channel understands you? Maybe they're watching it and from that deciding it doesn't understand them. In fact... if they didn't watch it they wouldn't know that it doesn't understand them so they must be watching it...
So yes, I watch it, and yes, I don't think it's good or understands me, but there's no other choice; the alternative is to be awash in one ideology's propaganda 24/7, to only ever receive information from sources that are horribly biased one way.
Primarily, it's OAN, Newsmax, and radio. Fox has some people who are watched (Tucker Carlson, Hannity).
The argument is that if someone (government) doesn't fund and help maintain the old model of establishment media (with some left/right division) then the new economic forces will lead to its collapse. The framing being advanced here is that the collapse results in further left/right polarization as we move from objective news reporting towards self-rationalizing and subjective news analysis because that's what drives attention and clicks. This is a false framing in my opinion and only serves as a justification to protect establishment narratives using government money.
Instead I would suggest that: is that the collapse of current media leaves us with a polarization between establishment/non-establishment media narratives also. It's also possible to argue (but that's not my goal here) that non/establishment polarization is greater or more threatening (to who) then the left/right polarization.
The manifestation of this change is much more holistically represented in US politics by putting the typical voting blocs on a political compass map and plotting the line separating Rep/Dem for 2014 vs November 2020. Note that the shift is axial. I think this a more useful (productive) example than the proposed capitol riots (Jan6th) example or Antifa suggested by others. The axial shift is correlated with a different dimension of disagreement in the common zeitgeist.
So some questions worth asking are: - Is this ok? The days of yellow journalism DID have some of the highest literacy rates in the USA. - Are you ok with a system where the government gives out financing at will to journalists/media and you may have to take them to court to get a press pass? ...like Canada? - Were we ever really objective? Should we still strive to distinguish the objective from the subjective? - Not everyone learns these words in school. Some learn (incorrectly, in my opinion) that there's a moral connotation to it. How can we do better at this? - Is it worse to lose "objectivity" in reporting or to purport to to be when we really aren't?
Americans are looking for a savior. The politicians and the mainstream media are pandering to this groundswell of voter anger.
For years now, the only remaining public institution that Americans "trust" is the military. If a junta of generals promise jobs and stability, I do not doubt that many Americans will acquiesce.
For those who like to draw parallels with the Romans, this is how Rome became a monarchy. The average Roman was being exploited or enslaved by the wealthy optimates led by Pompey and they looked for salvation in Caesar and his nephew Augustus.
https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_19-03-21_scienceconfidence_am...
"The savage beasts," said he, "in Italy, have their particular dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light and, having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to wander from place to place with their wives and children." [1]
Accordingly Marius sent to Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, requesting assistance. The king replied that the majority of the Bithynians had been seized by tax farmers and were now in slavery in the Roman provinces. The senate then issued a decree that no citizen of an allied state should be held in slavery in a Roman province, and that the praetors should provide for their liberation. [2]
Livy and Polybius also tell of farms suffering physical destruction at the hands of rampaging armies, both Roman and foreign, especially during the Hannibalic War. Scores of veterans returned home only to behold the burnt remnants of their once-productive farms and were forced to sell or abandon their plots when they could afford neither the resources nor the time to restore them.[3]
It was also editorially consistent with the NYT's positions before and after the fact.
Painting Judith Miller and her coworkers as a hapless accident is defaulting to excusing an outlet you identify with. The NYT was not doing good, badly. The NYT was doing bad, knowingly.
This is ineptitude.
> excluding and attacking critical voices as borderline seditious
This is also ineptitude.
The most likely reasons for news orgs refuse to publish damning evidence about US Gov malfeasance are collusion and/or ineptitude. I feel that showing unearned deference to US NatSec state implies the latter.
Because US media is legally allowed to lie on air.
Make lying, or knowingly propagating information you know to be wrong illegal - as it is in civilized countries - and the problem goes away. But you'd rather have guns and lies.
I don't see this as a particularly problematic idea. Assuming a high burden of proof, why shouldn't a deliberate hoax from a news organization be treated as a kind of fraud or "malpractice"?
An alternate implementation would be for the FCC to regulate this and unilaterally issue fines for broadcasting fake news, but that seems ripe for abuse and more against the spirit of 1A.
Instead, I like the idea that anyone (either the state or a private citizen) could sue any news outlet for publication of a hoax; not necessarily claiming any direct or personal harm caused, but just to defend the principle of truth. The process would be as fair as possible — requiring evidence of willful intent to the standards of a court of law, allowing appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, etc. — but in return the consequences would actually have teeth. Offhand, I'd say fines roughly comparable to securities fraud and a journalistic equivalent of disbarment for individuals responsible.
If a jury of peers is determining that someone lied, that seems pretty reasonable to me. It can be illegal to lie on purpose without the government determining the truth or enforcing "the truth". The court system would almost certainly require that not only did an entity deliberately lie, but direct harm was caused that exceeds the harm done to freedom of speech.
The US free speech system already divides speech into high value and low value speech. Political opinions in America are considered high value and are probably the most protected speech in the world. Do you think direct lies or manipulations should be considered high value speech? If you have a scale for "value of speech" that starts with illicit pornography on one end and political speech on the other, where would you put: "fire!" in a crowded theater, advertisements/commercial speech, opinions, direct lies, direct manipulation, medical lies (this sugar pill cures cancer), etc. What about labels on food. Should a company be able to list 0 calories on their ice cream? How much should this idea of "speech" be unbend-able, how narrowly or broadly should the word "speech" or "press" be defined?
If we have a class like "food" that requires true nutrition labels to protect the integrity of food, and we have have scheduled medicines that require "active ingredients," to protect the integrity of medicine, why is the idea of news regulation to protect the integrity of news so provoking?
There is no black and white when it comes to this issue. America's free speech almost lost us our democracy to an authoritarian who would have assuredly decreased our human rights and ended the idea of free speech. In philosophical terms, our free speech as it exists right now is very likely a "contradiction". If free speech exits to prevent authoritarian destruction of human rights, but it also allows for an authoritarian to seize power, is the basis of free speech in tact? How do you protect the integrity of the system?
Zero trust systems for reality discovery is essentially what the scientific revolution is based on.
We know how to do it
It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to consent of the governed. . . .
Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age government, political parties, the media.
The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22451908-the-revolt-of-t...
I'm mystified to not see any mention of it in TFA. Nay, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!
People in the US have not been exposed to much propaganda from the media before, so tended to trust the news. That's why fake news and biased reporting had such an adverse effect.
Now this is changing, as more people realize that New York Times or Fox News are not much different from Pravda, and that it's not a good idea to blindly trust talking heads on TV.
The issue is that if media outlets provide only news their viewership wants to hear then it can go very wrong. But there is a difference. Some people want to hear accurate information while other prefer information that only supports their worldview.
This is different from the issue of trust. If you trust a media outlet because it always gives you news you want to hear then the problem is with you not with media that provides accurate information.
Note also that it is in the interests of those who want to spread misinformation that the public indeed loses its trust in the media. When that happens then anybody's opinion is as good as anybody else's.
Do you really need examples of NYT's bias?
We interpret world events entirely through the lens of massive, politically-embedded corporations. To avoid that lens, we'd have to visit those places ourselves and investigate, which, to say the absolute least, is not scalable.
The oddest aspect of modern media is that when it comes to foreign coverage, the smaller the outlet, the more likely that they are actually on the ground where they are reporting from. Representatives of large outlets clump together in hotels attending press conferences from government representatives and interviewing designated sources whose names were passed to the journalists by intelligence services. Journalists with no money just travel to countries and go to where the action is happening.
The most important thing is the habit of not trusting any sources, official or not, and ability to recognize propaganda.
But what no one is talking about on this thread is how this headline is the message. The message that trust is gone. How can we get it back? You can't... or so they want you to believe. In reality there are many forces trying hard to keep you confused because your attention is the commodity that they trade in.
The truth is out there, and it isn't hard to find. People who had RSS readers through the 2000s already went through a kind of grieving process for the flow of information and learned how to cultivate their network. They made a lot of mistakes too, and found themselves in conspiratorial suspicion networks that spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and that's where the majority of people engaging with the news currently are, and the former majority, from the 2000s have moved on from this game.
The eternal September will continue, and all of the current people bewildered by crank memes and "I'm just saying" types will be the ones in the future trying to talk about how all of this has been going on forever when in 5 years the amount of news consumers online makes another broad leap in size and complexity.
We need a resurgence in the study of how we all come to know things, and we need to invest in why we decide to trust sources. This needs to be a public conversation and not just yet another kind of behavior where people can just argue and be like "well, if you believe the Associated Press" seriously screw that kind of thinking. Tell me why you don't believe that specific source and give me something more than just cynicism and doubt, show me something that has the same rigor from whatever you're trying to justify.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
"Tell me why you don't believe that specific source"
I don't believe Dan Rather's claims or excuses afterward for "unsubstantiated critical allegations about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973." In the resulting controversy "[a] former vice president of CBS News, Jonathan Klein, dismissed the allegations of bloggers, suggesting that the 'checks and balances' of a professional news organization were superior to those of individuals sitting at their home computers 'in their pajamas'."
I think it is a good example of how people hyper-focus on one thing to discredit someone or some thing and throw out the underlying truth because of it.
Edit: what I specifically posted was that you just can't say I don't believe that source... but that's a great example of how "I don't believe that source" usurped the original point for sure.
> The document itself that they used was probably at best a re-creation
> the content of the document was not invalid and verified
> several [verified] that such a document did exist at least at one point and time and said exactly what it said
How did you come to believe these assertions to be true? I'd be inclined to believe them at the level that favoritism is often shown for the offspring of wealthy and politically connected folks. My assumption is that a claim of special privilege is likely true. I don't see any justification for any truth to the document. You claim that "several" verified such a document existed. Who are those people?
When I was very young, Dan Rather took over for Walter Cronkite. Their evening TV program I would watch under strict orders of silence in respect for the seriousness my grandfather gave it. Their credibility came from the prestige of an organization with wondrous information processing and distribution capabilities with a multi-generational reputation for seriousness and veracity.
Dan Rather and the CBS institutional response to the blatant and pointless forgery recklessly published before an election was an "emperor has no clothes" moment. In any possible interpretation their response to the revelation of the forgery destroyed their prestige derived authority. Were they incompetent, partisan, indifferent to facts? Whichever direction they demonstrated deep contempt for their audience and are at least part of the reason some are not likely to trust media organizations by default.
[Edit]
You have made three claims. Are you denying them now?
> The document itself that they used was probably at best a re-creation
> the content of the document was not invalid and verified
> several [verified] that such a document did exist at least at one point and time and said exactly what it said
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/15/us/the-2004-campaign-nati...
HOUSTON, Sept. 14 - The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed that they are fakes.
[...]
Mrs. Knox, who was the secretary for the squadron at Ellington Air Force Base from 1957 to 1979, said she recalled Mr. Bush's case and the criticism of him because his record was so unusual. Mr. Killian had her type memorandums recording the problems, she said, and he kept them in a private file under lock and key. She said she had never voted for Mr. Bush, because she disliked his record in office.
It is pretty easy to maintain trust in media if “fake but [maybe] accurate” is A-ok. Maybe it isn't even "fake but accurate" but "fake but fitting with my preconceptions and interest in self-delusion."
This is completely upside down. Necessary skepticism (not cynicism) should always be your default mindset, not blind trust. If a specific source makes a claim then the burden of proof is on that source to provide evidence for their assertion. It is in many ways analogous to science or mathematics. You should never simply believe an assertion that comes without the underlying data or proof that supports that assertion.
Unfortunately legacy media (most newspapers, all corporate owned networks) have devolved into a toxic soup made up of opinions and evidence-free assertions from unnamed sources (assertions which often turn out later to be false). Well-sourced, well-written, fact-based journalism is practically non-existent. The critical role of the 4th estate is to be a watchdog over the government and other loci of power. Instead the 4th estate has been subsumed by the powerful, and effectively acts as another propaganda arm of the political parties and various powerful corporate interests.
[0] Or seems to at least.
Strategic plans involve some rigidity, so they're not without drawbacks.
Does it, though? It sure seems to me as if our solutions tend to introduce ever more drastic problems which dwarf the original problem.
Though I think we should have some red lines, some big picture initiatives that do need to be planned at a higher level. The US dropped the ball on this for a while, for example.
The consensus reality agreed to between major media outlets may well be an epiphenomenon.
It was just easier for them to get away with lies before mass adoption of the Internet allowed anyone to point out their lies.
The freedom of the press is sanctified to ensure functioning democracy but there needs to exist reasonably accessible tools to exercise that freedom otherwise it's just flowery language.
It's not meant to cover all the costs but exist as an incentive so that the service is provided.
When 4/5 of the major networks use identical wording when reporting on any politically polarizing subject, one cannot help but think they are told what to say.
To have been so thoroughly wrong would make anyone with any shred of remaining self respect give up writing.
Most people at the time thought that voting to authorize W to invade Iraq was what cost Hillary the nomination, because Barrack voted against.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
This only has to happen once for you to stop trusting "the media".
So says the journalist. Let me clear this up: You hate us, and you have no ethical boundaries. There’s a good reason not to trust you.
We just need a good filter to keep the good. Like Curated Social Media, like a newspaper/TV should be.
1. News media viewership and trust in the content are two very distinct things.
2. Referring to news as a "consumption" good already kind of answers the question of why it is not to be trusted.
> But as people consumed more news, they also began to trust the media less
No. Their low trust decreased even more. It was low before the 2020 elections as well.
> A Pew survey suggests 95 per cent of MSNBC's audience are now Democrats while 93 per cent of the Fox News audience are Republicans.
Well, those two sources are highly partisan: MSNBC is known as "MS-DNC" (for the Democratic National Committee) and Fox was created by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, with GOP man Roger Ailes at the helm from early on, to serve the Republican Party and a right-wing/"conservative" agenda from the get-go.
These are not trustworthy bodies _structurally_, even before you examine their specific contents.
What could be said to distinguish the recent few years - other than Covid-19 - is the fact that the established Republican and Democratic party have a sort of a modus operandi with the various large corporate news outlets, so that neither side points out inconsistencies and misconduct of the other beyond a certain point. Trump and many of his followers, however, were not in on this cultural norm, and lashed out against news media (mostly the Democratic-party-supporting outlets). Some of the complaints were justified, many/most weren't, but the point is that people were now hearing a prominent voice suggesting that they question mainstream news.
This may not be the only factor - the prevalence of online news sources in recent years may have also had an effect, and probably some other factors - but this struck me as quite influential.
Articles could be signed by the journalist and you could check the probity of the journalist in the same way you can check the safety record of a Pilot with the FAA. Complaints could be tried by a tribunal panel with findings of poor professional conduct published like they are for Doctors and Architects the ultimate sanction being struck off from the profession.
Suddenly these people care about misinformation? Really? I mean, to an outside observer Fox News and CNN are propaganda machines from two different sides of the spectrum. And they push these politicians political agenda.
But now we have social media where America’s elite can’t just kill a news story, and suddenly that’s so wrong?
I think back to 2003. I was in Asia and flipping between CNN and Fox News as Saddams statue was being toppled in Iraq. These media organizations peddled lies and were an important cog in the machine to reshape the Middle East, which only led to hundreds of thousands of deaths or people becoming refugees.
Social media has its own problems, but it’s quite insane that the same people who peddle lies each and every day have the audacity to act like they’re on some moral pedestal questioning tech CEOs. In fact they’re just mad they can’t control them. I saw this last week and couldn’t help but wonder that America can’t afford healthcare and had homelessness in most metropolitan cities... yet your leaders put on theater.
An interesting tool they built is their “Blindspotter”, which lets you see the bias of who a particular Twitter account follows (their news diet). Interestingly a lot of the left leaning popular media accounts like Trevor Noah’s operate in a complete echo chamber whereas many popular right leaning accounts like Megyn Kelly are actually very balanced. And as you might expect, extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are very biased in their news diet: https://ground.news/blindspotter
Yeah, sure.
Anyone who spends any time investigating any story will quickly find the truth.
Take the Capital's mostly peaceful protest on January 6 (sarcasm), where the 7 people who died. Did you know the only two who died violently that day were protestors and many news agencies retracted the death of the police officer "hit with a fire extinguisher"?
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/02/23/nolte-politif...
Two people died from "medial emergencies" and don't appear to have done anything besides attend trumps rally:
https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/who-are-the-four-who-died-in-t...
Officer Brian Sicknick died the following day and there have been arrests, supposedly he died of a stroke, but to-date no medical report has been released:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/15/politics/brian-sicknick-capit...
Estimates vary, but based on reporting on the ground, it appears there were at least 500,000 people there, so it's not super surprising that there would be quite a few natural deaths.
Further, it has to be the only armed insurrection in history where the insurrectionists primarily left their weapons at home.
Not saying what was done was moral, correct, etc (it wasn't), but after watching my own city burn in the BLM "mostly peaceful protests" I can't help but recognize the unadulterated falsehoods being propagated.
https://twitter.com/JoeConchaTV/status/1298863702272344064?s...
Both are bad, both were riots, and all you have to do is look to see how bad it is. We don't need to make the death count worse or ignore other riots / crimes.
The general point, if the media would focus on reporting as opposed to pandering it would have trust. As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership. However, as soon as people realize they're being sold something, they forever lose that viewer.
I tend to trust journalists a bit more, such as Glenn Greenwald:
https://twitter.com/GGreenwald
They appear to be truly investigating.
The "7 people died in an armed insurrection" is a lie.
The most accurate statement is:
"one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot",
"one officer died from suspected injuries sustained",
"two people died in march to capital after trump's speech",
"two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital"
"one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters"
^ These are all more accurate, but probably reduces viewership. The statement was "how did the US news media lose their viewers trust". I simply summarized one event which highlights it.
> "one officer died from suspected injuries sustained", i.e. one officer died in the riot.
>"two people died in march to capital after trump's speech" i.e. two people died in the riot
>"two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital" i.e. two officers died in connection with the riot
> "one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" i.e. one rioter died in the riot
>"one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" i.e. one rioter died in the riot
I'm very confused as to where the media claimed that "7 people died" as the result of being gunned down in the street. Obviously if 7 people died by being gunned down in the street, the media headline would be "7 PEOPLE GUNNED DOWN BY INSURRECTIONISTS", not "7 PEOPLE DIED IN THE INSURRECTION".
> There are supposedly seven people who "died in the Jan 6 riot"
And then proceeds to dispute this, by showing that... each of those 7 people died as a result of injuries in the riot, with the sole exception of the suicides.
The question is what standard of "dying in the riots" would satisfy OP, if the literal interpretation (died from injuries sustained in the riot) does not satisfy him. Presumably if they were gunned down in the streets?
Do you dispute the above?
If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence?
1. Pressure Congress to delay counting the elector's votes and perform a proper investigation (which they felt hadn't happened)
2. Pressure Congress to count the votes of the "alternate" electors sent by some of the disputed states by the losing party (who instead supported Trump). I'll stress that this was predicated on the idea that, since the election was "stolen", these were the "rightful" electors.
3. Some Q-Anon bullshit I don't care to remember too deeply, just that it was something to do with Trump doing some kind of secret investigation behind the scenes or something
All of the above (including a few I didn't list since I forget the details), were precipitated on the the idea that /someone else/ was going to be fixing this. Many left-wing people don't seem to understand this, but most modern conservatives are not activists at heart, they just roll over and let things happen. To be clear this isn't really a "right-wing" thing but a "conservative" one, they generally don't, at scale, rock the boat.
The truth is the even if there was 100% undeniable evidence that the election was blatantly stolen, conservatives would do absolutely nothing (unless you include complaining), and frankly that's kinda what happened. Looking at it another way: to many conservatives, the election really was stolen from them, and they aren't doing anything about it. A small subset of them loitering around in the capitol was the best they had.
> If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence?
You said it best yourself, why wouldn't you resort to violence? The answers is less exciting: because they are afraid and unmotivated.
No, it was explicitly to change the outcome of the election, by changing the way the election was certified. This is why Trump was demanding that Pence attempt to change the election outcome as he was presiding over the certification process. This is why the crowd was chanting "hang Mike pence" when he refused to do so.
This is why Trump told his supporters that they had to be strong, to give the Republicans the "courage" to do "what they had to do".
See, you bought the lie, so to you, stealing the election on the basis of a lie seems legitimate. Stopping counting mail in ballots on election night, once Trump had a lead in tallied ballots based on the on-person voting (a lead he had orchestrated by telling his supporters to vote in person), also probably seems reasonable to you.
The problem with "alternative facts" (such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump) is that when you believe them, all sorts of horrible behavior seems justified, and in fact you believe that your side "isn't going far enough!"
Exactly what part of my comment refutes this? Ultimately the end result of all outcomes I listed (from the perspective of someone who believes the election was stolen, aka not me), would lead to a change in the outcome of the election.
> See, you bought the lie, so to you, stealing the election on the basis of a lie seems legitimate.
I'm uncertain if you are attacking a hypothetical here or me personally, but I feel it's the latter. Are you implying I "bought into" the lie of Trump's supporters or from Trump himself?
> The problem with "alternative facts" (such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump) is that when you believe them, all sorts of horrible behavior seems justified, and in fact you believe that your side "isn't going far enough!"
You say that but is that necessarily true? What exactly has the party that always claims to be armed and ready to overthrow the government done when faced with a scenario where they believe there was a stolen election? We can agree to disagree on this but I still have trouble wrapping my head around why people are so hysterical about random unarmed people loitering around the capitol building.
It's certainly a far cry from actual insurrections:
* Like when Puerto Rican nationalists broke in and shot at members of the house of representatives (and were later pardoned): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_sho...
* Or when the capitol building was bombed by Weather Underground (also pardoned): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Weatherman_actions#197...
To make my position on this more clear, my concern here is not the election itself, its this growing anti free speech movement spurred by fear of these "Alternative Facts". I'll remind that this is in-fact a discussion on the public's trust in the media and I believe apologists such as yourself are "buying into" their lie that this was a bigger deal than it really was. In order to retain their position as guardians of the "truth", they spread fear to achieve their goals like they always do.
The web provides us direct access to the discussions of people from all kinds of backgrounds and political ideology. One can easily get a feel for the "other sides" perspective on nearly any issue. I'm not talking about the issues themselves but the people who believe in them and why. Yet far, far too often, people rely on talking heads with an agenda, to TELL them what and why people believe something, often exaggerating or misrepresenting their intentions to make them out to be some kind of ultimate evil.
I'm not saying the election was stolen and I'm not saying they were right. I'm saying you don't have as complete a picture of this as you are suggesting because you didn't get your "Facts" from a primary source.
Exhibit A:
> such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump
The impetus of all this, for many conservatives in the online discussions I was following (but not participating). Was explicitly that Republican poll watchers were complaining about their level of access to the ballot counters. Their access was restricted due to Covid, and they were disputing this restriction directly on social media.
This detail is far easier to overlook when you are fed all of your positions by journalists spinning a narrative that makes this out to be far less complicated than the reality of the circumstances. Personally I consider "spin" to be functionally the same as lying.
I'm not an American, so I can say this without repercussion. But I think its time for a regime change in America. Perhaps its better off being smaller countries.
https://theconversation.com/it-is-difficult-if-not-impossibl...
https://youtu.be/mE-XvGMiyRQ?t=1488
"For sure hundreds of thousands"
Those who went to the Capital are probably less, I'm not sure anyone has estimated that. I'm sure many people left after Trump's speech.
Edit: registered White House press core
Edit: they had their cameras, that’s most of what you see on CNN if you saw police scenes of fighting
>Edit: registered White House press core
Isn't this just appeal to authority? It's not even a good authority. If he was a crowd counting expert, and was doing a count from a helicopter, I'd be more inclined to believe him. As it stands it's still some guy making a casual estimate from his very limited viewpoint.
Here's a photo of Trump's Jan. 6 2021 crowd: https://nxsttv.com/nmw/wp-content/uploads/sites/107/2021/01/...
Here's 100000 people at a college football game: https://blog.lime.link/content/images/2018/12/100000.jpg
https://elmoudjaweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Trump-add...
All the hotels were booked for 45 min around and in DC. That is literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Source? Specifically, what's the hotel capacity "45 min around and in DC", and what's the the normal occupancy rate (ie. last year, or in the weeks leading up to the protest)?
This is a red herring - the amount of revenue/profit produced by news media outlets is trivial. Not just nominally as compared to any other industry, but also as compared to the other sources of income that the owners of these outlets have.
The primary reason for the editorial lines that large news outlets take is to push ideas through the electorate, and to generate references that politicians and businesspeople can use to justify their support of certain issues/legislation that the owners of those outlets also support.
They're public thinktanks, not carnival barkers.
The choice of language is also important. Lots of people are using terms like “coup” or “insurrection” causally. The experts meanwhile note why this is not appropriate, with careful comparisons to historical incidents: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/why-this-wasnt-a-coup-c...
Does this matter to anyone? No. After constant amplification of a hyperbolic take on the Capitol riot, the truth seemingly doesn’t matter anymore and instead its derivative stories are the new battleground (for example “should social media increase censorship of moderates and conservatives”). In short, the damage has already been done, seemingly permanently.
We saw bias in the other direction last year, with underreporting of criminal political activity. Like you, my city has experienced a constant stream of riots from BLM activists. In 2020 we literally had daily blockades of highways, autonomous zones resulting in deaths (CHAZ), widespread destruction of businesses, and more. Seemingly all of news media, social media, and even academic research studying BLM-associated rioting inaccurately portrays what actually happened.
It’s scary to see how widespread and unchallenged those prevailing narratives are. I think a lot of people forget that “propaganda” doesn’t have to come just from scary foreign state actors - in practice it is much more likely to come from domestic sources, such as masses of activists blindly repeating falsehoods in unison. The journalism industry is supposed to protect against that but it’s actually part of the same machine. The only way to counter the effect is to read and listen to many different sources with different biases.