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Comment by seaorg | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now. You have to ask why they chose to report this, why they slant things one way or another with their choice of wording and emphasis. What is the aspect of this story that is too politically incorrect or unfashionable to be included?

I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever. The harsh truth is that generally speaking the news is almost completely useless. You might as well just never watch it.

I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued. The main tool they use to do this is the emotion of fear, and it was for this reason and no other that they created a COVID death counter. And every single one of those points is explicitly, literally and plainly stated on video by a very senior employee of CNN for all to see. so I’m afraid that I can’t be brushed aside as a Russian bot. It’s right there on YouTube.

And what about all the other media companies? This CNN leak, which is maybe the very embodiment of a scoop, was not on the front page of any major newspaper or news website. It was not elaborated on. It was basically not reported.

View on HN

>I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now.

I used to subscribe to The Economist. I then realized, after they kept getting a lot of things wrong over the years, that in my humble opinion, a lot of their headlines should be read prepending the phrase "We would like you to believe that..."

A lot of "movements" these days are completely astroturfed. There's a few foundations that sponsor thousands of institutions all with the same mission statement to make things look like they're a grassroots movement, but nobody really wanted any of it. That's what disconnecting from the media gets you. All that astroturfing flooding in from everywhere stops infecting one's understanding of the world with useless B.S. I've given up almost all mainstream media for podcasts because they can be produced for nothing and spend a long-time looking deeply into issues. They cost nothing to produce and host, so it's really hard to cancel them as well. It's not like video. Hosting audio costs very little.

Listening to random podcasts I find from guest appearances on other people's podcasts and on and on almost feels like eavesdropping on real people talking instead of the same simple message broadcast over and over again via every notable news outlet.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yshJn7lgVsY

As a subscriber to the Economist myself, would you be able to give examples as to what you found wrong and in bad faith? I have found errors in the past, especially in subjects that I am more of an expert on, but none (so far) in bad faith. If you know of some, I’d very much like to know so as to reassess who my trust lies with.

For one, regularly since the early 1990s, they've been predicting a Japan style credit crisis in China. That credit crisis never comes. They have had article after article talking about huge debt levels in the banks, etc. Nothing ever happens.

Good, their economic prediction concerning China was wrong. So far. I don't see any substantial error or bad faith in that.

When you get stuff wrong regularly for 3 decades it's kind of a substantial error in my opinion. They also kept criticizing China's economic policies and banking regulations saying that they needed to change how they did things to avoid doom. Open up their financial system, etc. The Economist representing the perspective of western financial power, it just had the appearance of being self-serving, or at least arrogant. They couldn't get out of their orthodoxy and at least investigate what was going on to correct their analysis.

Not like I am a big fan of the CCP, but give the devil its due from time to time, or at least figure out how the magic tricks work.

I would say that the economist represents what remains of the British imperial perspective, not western financial power if it diverges from that, and that it is pretty clear about that perspective. It wants to imagine that it is advising British industry on how to strike out and dominate.

Why are they printing these articles? I assume to change the future, warning of a financial crisis should lessen the effects as fewer people put money into the broken system. So maybe they averted the future by predicting it

Well, it doesn't end with China. Around ~2010, once you scrub off the weasel word hedging, The Economist was predicting an imminent Eurozone breakup. It didn't predict the entirely predictable austerity recessions of 2012-2015. They were fairly bullish on Abenomics in Japan. They were very bullish on the future of BRICS around ~2008, out of which Brazil, Russia and South Africa are stagnating ever since.

Then, there's a very important tool in forming editorial slant - omitting reporting on inconvenient facts. Italy and Spain, the putatively sluggish laggards strangled by overly strict labor protection laws, have somehow overtaken the allegedly dynamic UK in labor productivity. Ireland, the purported economic wonder, have a household disposable income (a fairly good metric of material standards of living), lower than Italy and much lower than France. We keep hearing about the importance of education, competitiveness, R&D and ease of doing business, yet somehow Finland, which tops the rankings, is in year 14 of it's economic stagnation. Have you heard any of this from The Economist?

Median household disposable income, at PPP, after taxes and transfers is higher in Ireland than France, Italy, UK.

It is behind all those on a per capita basis, but that's the mean, not the median. I infer that this means Ireland has less income inequality.

(Ireland's economic wonder was growth from the 90s through to the early 2000s, largely via foreign direct investment, incentivized by low corporate tax rates. This structurally inflates GDP and makes the country look artificially good on international comparisons, but this is fairly well known, I believe. Irish economic commentary often uses GNI instead, and in fact the Irish central bank replaced GDP with GNI for its own measurements of the economy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_gross_national_income.)

What are the time scales for their predictions? I could easily imagine (say) today's US national debt taking 25-50 years to cause {insert some particular catastrophe here}.

Perhaps they've been wrong on this, and possibly for a while (although of course it may still happen), but where's the bad faith?

I lost any respect I had for them when they were running Chinese propaganda. [0]

https://shootingthemessenger.blog/2020/08/10/the-economist-d...

The author of that blog also got a byline in articles in Buzzfeed News [1] and The Guardian [2] about the same thing happening at the Daily Telegraph.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/coron...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/14/daily-telegrap...

Holy crap

Well if you are asking in good faith, then deep dive and find out if the allegation made here are true or not

The Govt of India has basically stated that Economist peddled baseless allegations and if look deeper you will see it is wrong and in deliberate bad faith.

https://www.opindia.com/2021/06/goi-rebuts-economist-report-...

If you're trying to rebut the Economist with OpIndia you'll have to try harder, likewise with accusing the Economist of "deliberate bad faith" and linking to a page that is not afraid to wear its ideological biases on its sleeve.

if they have reported anything incorrect, point it out.

quit indulging in ad hominem arguments.

There's a lot of indicators of bad faith in the OpIndia article, but I don't see any in the Economist article.

From the OpIndia article:

- "A few weeks back, controversial left-wing US media outlet New York Times had come up with imaginary numbers..." (hyperbole, ad-hominem)

- "The low death rate in the country has become a major concern for the western press, who are trying hard to depict India in a bad light." (Are they? Why? Is the "western press" working in concert on this project?)

- "However, the entire analysis done in the article was based on ‘estimates’ based on randomly selected numbers" (So the allegation is that the researcher and/or the Economist selected numbers randomly to represent the Covid death toll in India?)

- "[...] it seems like the Indian government has finally decided to take on the misinformation warfare being propagated by a certain section of western media" (Does this seem like an unbiased presentation of facts?)

The implication, as far as I can tell, is that "western media" is seeking to embarrass the current leaders of Indian government out of pure spite. However, to my eyes, a more believable story is that the government of India is embarrassed by the high Covid death tolls and would like to adjust the numbers downward.

From a story in NPR:

> FRAYER: There is another reason why India's coronavirus numbers may be skewed - hubris. In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over, but cases were actually creeping up, and some politicians didn't want to ruin the narrative. Dr. A. Velumani runs a nationwide chain of medical labs. He told local media his labs have come under pressure from local politicians to manipulate coronavirus tests and report fewer positive results. [^1]

We saw this very same narrative play out here in the United States under the Trump administration, and just like in the OpIndia story, when confronted with evidence they had mishandled the response to the pandemic, the government responded, "Fake news! They're out to get me!"

The New York Times article mentioned in the OpIndia piece [^2] also seems to be in good faith, explaining how they arrived at their estimates in great detail.

To summarize: when I put on my critical-thinking cap, what I see is the Economist, the New York Times, and NPR presenting good-faith, easy-to-believe arguments that the death toll in India is higher than reported by the Indian government, and OpIndia presenting the difficult-to-believe argument that it isn't, but that western media wants to depict the government of India in a bad light for unknown reasons.

[^1]: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/29/992122467/indias-real-death-t...

[^2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/25/world/asia/in...

> There's a lot of indicators of bad faith in the OpIndia article, but I don't see any in the Economist article.

claim was it is true and nothing fake there, so you did a strawman there. Since that is true, it shows economist as acting in bad faith in best case scenario.

Opindia is reporting on Govt of India rebutting the Economists argument. These are not opindia arguments, they are paraphrasing GoI's. So the below part you quoted is a paraphrase of GoI

> "However, the entire analysis done in the article was based on ‘estimates’ based on randomly selected numbers"

See actual press release here

https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1726521 and the twitter post here https://twitter.com/drharshvardhan/status/140367805453529088...

I am reproducing part that shows Economist acted at the least in bad faith and you have continued on same basis by claiming that you checked out their research and back it over the actual data given out by experts in field of health and agency that collates the actual data

***

The unsound analysis of the said article is based on extrapolation of data without any epidemiological evidence.

Studies which are used by the magazine as an estimate of excess mortality are not validated tools for determining mortality rate of any country or region.

The so called “evidence” cited by the magazine is a study supposedly done by Christopher Laffler of Virginia Commonwealth University. An internet search of research studies in scientific database such Pubmed, Research Gate, etc., did not locate this study and the detailed methodology of this study has not been provided by the magazine.

Another evidence given is the study done in Telengana based on insurance claims. Again, there is no peer reviewed scientific data available on suchstudy.

Two other studies relied upon are those done by Psephology groups namely “Prashnam” and “C-Voter” who are well versed in conducting, predicting and analysing poll results. They were never ever associated with public health research. Even in their own area of work of psephology, their methodologies for predicting poll results have been wide off the mark many times.

By their own submission, the magazine states that ‘such estimates have been extrapolated from patchy and often unreliable local government data, from company records and from analyses of such things as obituaries’.

Union Government has been transparent in its approach to COVID data management. As early as May 2020, to avoid inconsistency in number of deaths being reported, Indian Council of Medical Research has issued ‘Guidance for appropriate recording of COVID-19 related deaths in India’ for correct recording of all deaths as per ICD-10 codes recommended by WHO for mortality coding. States and UTs have been urged through formal communications, multiple video conferences and through deployment of Central teams for correct recording of deaths in accordance with laid down guidelines.

***

> In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over,

NPR has not given any source for this claim and if you look at the Minister's twitter timeline for the period , it shows the opposite.

https://twitter.com/drharshvardhan

Or check out the timeline of the ministry he heads

https://twitter.com/MoHFW_INDIA

All proof there shows that he & ministry was calling for people to be careful, warning about increasing cases, updating on vaccines & health protocols. Not the actions of someone who declared it is over.

So that is a explicit lie/untruth from NPR and your comments also show that you find it easier to believe that India is hiding deaths at unimaginable rates than India has done exceedingly well given its challenges.

Other publications which carried out the same news

https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/extrapo...

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/reports-o...

https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-unsoun...

From the actual press release:

> An internet search of research studies in scientific database such Pubmed, Research Gate, etc., did not locate this study and the detailed methodology of this study has not been provided by the magazine.

It's here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352170008_Prelimina...

>> There's a lot of indicators of bad faith in the OpIndia article, but I don't see any in the Economist article.

> claim was it is true and nothing fake there, so you did a strawman there

...sorry, the claim is that what is true? I'm not following you on that one. For me to have "done a strawman" means I would have asserted you were making an argument that you weren't making. As I understand it, you said the Economist was making claims in "deliberate bad faith", and presented an article to rebut the Economist's claims. It appeared to me that was exactly backward. I don't see how that qualifies as anything close to a strawman.

>> In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over,

> NPR has not given any source for this claim and if you look at the Minister's twitter timeline for the period, it shows the opposite.

I think they're talking about this: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-india-...

...which I admit isn't the same as "declaring it over" but which could arguably be considered wrong. Which is fine; I'm wrong all the time, as is every other human. Acknowledging when you're wrong is one of the requirements of arguing in good faith. Wrongness doesn't imply incompetence, but failure to admit and correct mistakes does.

Anyway, I have zero interest in "making India look bad", and I wish the people of India well, as I'm sure you do. Here is all I am saying:

* I don't see "deliberate bad faith" in the Economist article, and I see an above-and-beyond effort by the New York Times to explain their methodology

* I have seen with my own eyes members of the government of the United States play down the impact of pandemic out of short-sighted self interest, and so it is easy for me to believe another government would do that

* The arguments made in the official press release linked above strike me as overly defensive and don't offer anything more than "no, that's not true" with no additional evidence provided

* And once again, I wish the people of India well, and I hope the government of India acts in the best interest of its citizens with competence, pragmatism, honesty, and efficiency.

In any case, best of luck to you! I hope we can both think critically about the information we consume.

here is another indicator of bad faith from Economist since you are all in on thinking critically. Since it it paywalled , I have outlined it https://outline.com/mumxhq

** True, the official death toll has fallen steadily for the past month, to half its peak of over 4,000 a day in mid-May. But evidence continues to accumulate that the government’s numbers represent a disturbingly small fraction of the real figure. This discrepancy does not just mean that the true level of India’s suffering has been glossed over. It has made the crisis worse, for instance by causing authorities to underestimate demand for oxygen and drugs.

News organisations including The Economist, as well as independent epidemiologists, have speculated that India has suffered perhaps five-to-seven times more “excess deaths” than the official number of covid-19 fatalities, currently just over 355,000. ***

The GoI press release has said that the methodology used by Christopher Leffler is not used anywhere else to estimate deaths.

You disagree and back it. Can you point out where this is accepted practice.

Using occam's razor. If cases & Deaths as 5-7 times, then this would be easily detectable, especially as the second wave dies down as per official figures.

So at peak the cases were 350,000 per day officially, as per economist it is over 2 million. This week the cases are 65k, so then it must be 380k cases as per economist. Same for deaths, officially 500 deaths and should be 3000 deaths as per economist.

Where are all these invisible cases & deaths?

If as per economist there were all these 5-7 times extra cases/deaths, the need for O2 would be far greater. There has been no crisi on that side for weeks now. Only for a 2 week period did capital Delhi have shortage due to the mismanagement of the state govt there that was pulled up by the courts.

So you are willing to consider opinion polling and patchy insurance claims( in a country that has minimal insurance coverage) that compared India with US figures over official figures that are collated by heath authorities.

It is far more believable that US media that has persistently painted India in negative light wants to continue the practice even when there are reasons to state facts as is and risk India being shown in a positive light.

I have already give you one data point where NPR pushed a untruth that you conceded. That was not even bad faith, direct fakery.

Is this how one thinks critically?

I have no problem if you want to believe fake news but lets drop the charade that you have no option other than trusting Economist or that they have a good track record. Information is easy to get in this day and age.

It is your laziness that lets such media spread fake news by appealing to your biases.

I remember when them and other news media pilloried Iceland for not honouring foreign debts taken out by private Icelandic banks during the recession. It was going to be the end of country since no one would loan them money in the future. Iceland was one of the first countries to emerge the recession.

As a former subscriber I can point this out: One gigantic error: they have not seen the 2007/2008 crisis coming. Their policy recommendations are always the same: "cut red tape", privatize, remove tariffs..., and this mirrors their ideological beliefs, not any hard won expertise. They are also in denial about the unfolding ecological crisis. Look also at their job ads to understand with whom they are aligned. In sum, The Economist is a propaganda paper, that is well written, informative even if you can remove their rather obvious slant.

>As a former subscriber I can point this out: One gigantic error: they have not seen the 2007/2008 crisis coming.

Who did see it coming? Are there any media outlets that reliability predicted financial crises?

A ton of websites predicted that the avalanche of mortgage debt that could not be paid was going to destroy the financial system.

Mike Sherlock for one. He’s gotten dumb but he was on point on this.

You're really giving too much credit to podcasts here. If you were to look at your argument from the other side, the fact that it costs next to nothing makes it a really cheap way to spread biased/false information. (See: Alex Jones)

The majority of podcasts I've listened to have an obvious political bias, even the ones I would deem mostly objective clearly show some of the hosts biases. I've actually stopped listening to some because of this. ('Reply All' and 'Rich Dad Radio Show', for example, at opposite ends of the spectrum.)

If you know of a podcast that purely, subjectively presents news, I'd love to hear it!

Alex Jones's biggest sin is he's boring. He repeats himself over and over again. You could listen to him for 30 minutes and then tune in 12 months later and it's the same stuff, whatever you make of it. Art Bell was a conspiracy theory guy back in the day on late night radio, but he was damned interesting and talked to all kinds of random interesting weirdos. Many of them not that credible, but at least interesting. Not to sound old and cranky, but back in my day, when you heard someone interviewed, it was up to the person listening to evaluate their credibility and not to be protected in a little bubble because one was assumed to be too easily influenced to listen to the unvetted.

Podcasts are by no means "The Truth", but at least they are not on the mainstream narrative script and they often don't have a purely political focus. As long as they aren't solely discussing the mainstream news narrative or reacting to it, they can be very interesting. I think Bret Weinstein can be pretty interesting as far as media criticism goes. The Other Life podcast[1] is an example of a podcast that's very disconnected from the mainstream narratives and feels like I'm sitting in a cafe in the 90s drinking coffee with a bunch of intellectual weirdos. Maybe not your cup of tea, or coffee, but it's better than listening to the mainstream news and filling myself with that garbage.

[1]https://otherlife.transistor.fm/episodes

Also podcasts are mostly assumed to be biased by the host, as he directs the conversation. Mainstream news has more indirection from reader to writer so the bias is less tangible.

> Alex Jones's biggest sin is he's boring.

Not the Sandy Hook stuff? Surely that's got to be at least in the running.

Every time I think of this I am enraged. What he did to those parents was a special kind of darkness. So abhorrent.

How could one listen to enough Alex Jones to know this? I like the idea of Alex Jones, paranoid style American politics is a tradition and has its uses, but it’s to me a bit like pro wrestling. It’s not content that’s pitched toward the upper 2/3rds of the bell curve. He is a canary.

With low budget operations there is at least the possibility of objectivity. When there is a bunch of money involved there is not. And that’s not my opinion, it’s the opinion and words of the technical director of CNN.

On the other hand if it's a low budget op it will be bought cheaply like buying troll farms or paying "influencers" to promote all kind of crap. In the end you may get the same crap but in a more distributed manner.

There's almost zero political topics where objectivity is possible. That goal itself is usually already ideology (the goal of unbiasedness often stands in opposition of truth).

Look at global warming: Either it is man-made or not, either it is a problem for our future or not. There's no objective middle ground. Sure, one could simply have news that say "there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.

Or let's use a real historical example: The Soviet Union's invasion into Poland in 1939. Without any context, the SU is clearly the agressor. But with the context of Polands invasion into the SU in 1919 things suddenly look different. And with the additional context of Russia annecting polish territory in the 18th century it looks different again and so on and so on. There clearly is no way to communicate this objectively (i.e. in this case, pro-Russia people could ask why I'd stop here and not with some polish-lithuanian action before the 18th century).

there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.

Why? You can’t explain all the things (even if you’re backed with true data) in one article – that would take a library. A drought by itself doesn’t skew anything, but maybe your intent is more that just that.

The Soviet Union's invasion into Poland in 1939

This is a circular problem. Either do not call it “invasion” or do and so be it. The fact that some monkey punched some other in year 40000 BC has nothing to do with active political contracts. I will not even downvote you on the internet if I find out that our gggps shot at each other in ww1/2, it’s irrelevant now. Most of these people are dead. If you want to remain neutral (nearest to “objective”, which isn’t a thing in case of a physical land), call it a conflict based on historical events and let a reader investigate, discuss and decide who is right and who is wrong, if any, if they ever want that decision. Maybe most people don’t really give a genuine fuck about who is right (if that was a bet, I’d go all in with it).

I would even read political news then. Modern “good boys bad boys” or “oh see you see what you done” stories only make me laugh or facepalm. I’m a reader, not a puppet. No surprise younger people only want tiktok and clothes.

I think we'd first have to find common ground on what the purpose of a free press is. In my opinion the goal is to have informed citizens that can have informed participation in the democratic decision-making process.

For that, we not only have to know the what, but also the why behind a news item. We have to know the relationships between things.

So while we can't indeed can't explain everything completely, that doesn't mean we can't explain anything.

In hindsight the drought/global warming example is bad because there can indeed be another reason for the ocurrence, but even telling multiple possible reasons (e.g. by asking an expert) makes the news item more insightful than any context at all.

> This is a circular problem.

Yes, that was my point! There is no arbitrary threshold where we could stop referring to things happening in the past and get unbiased news.

Or yet another example: The current debate around minimum wage increases. The news could simply state the positions of the two parties, and the current nominal number of $7.25. But that wouldn't make this unbiased, because the $7.25 at inception had a different purchasing power than now. And a different ratio to GPD per capita. Thus omitting this context skews the news item towards the side that is against an increase. But adding the context favors the side that is for the increase.

what the purpose of a free press is

I see it as a source of events that then can be discussed with actual people around you to create a world view. This way an information either misses you completely or you relate to a trusted group that has it. In a world where news are complete, there is nothing to discuss, because authoritative (or not, it’s hard to check) sources already said everything. This swithces discussion from learning all the details to taking the presented details. This is a problem known as “what’s not being said”, and personally I see it everywhere now. I.e. if we disagreed on an interpretation, it was you versus me (both at least knowing each other). With context-ed news it’s your sources versus my sources, which we both are unable to really check adequately, because it’s a recursive problem. That induces beliefs instead of thinking. I believe that context should be left vague at least. If there are questions, press should formulate them, not answer.

I think the primary purpose of the press should be to hold people in position of power accountable for their actions. That's pretty much it. The role of reporting on world events and generating a shared reality can be useful and informative, but is mainly a distraction from the first (and primary) role that media plays in society.

The press is never unbiased - look at newspapers from the 50s or 60s which had strong anti-communist propaganda. Everything has a slant - I don't understand where the obsession with "unbiasedness" came from.

The only question that matters (in a democracy or anywhere with a free press) is - does the media hold people in positions of power (whether political-power, wealth-power or celebrity-power) accountable for their misdeeds or not. Bias is only a problem when it interferes [directly] with this purpose.

> There's almost zero political topics where objectivity is possible. That goal itself is usually already ideology (the goal of unbiasedness often stands in opposition of truth).

> Look at global warming: Either it is man-made or not, either it is a problem for our future or not. There's no objective middle ground. Sure, one could simply have news that say "there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.

There is an objectivity here: scientific consensus, aka naked provable facts. And climate change is proven to be man-made, and it is proven that if humanity does nothing to curb CO2 emissions it will spiral out of control.

Objectivity in news as a result means to not give those who go against scientific consensus any platform.

Well, war is also man-made, and kills humans. Still, those hoping for world peace are still viewed as hopelessly naive. So what?

What do you intend to contribute to the conversation with "so what?"

Apparently something which you are not able to grasp.

News doesn’t need to provide context. It’s possible to remove words like unprovoked from the reporting and just list the facts. We don’t hear that neutral point of view because it makes things boring.

That said, push any ideology far enough and they all start to disagree with objective reality. That doesn’t mean accurate information is somehow slanted or facts are somehow political because objective reality doesn’t care, it just is. If every day you list the ~9,250 Americans that died yesterday you’re going to cover mostly natural causes but also plenty of hot button issues for both sides of the isle.

There is insufficient time to list every fact from every event. The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.

Ideally, the goal would be to minimize bias, however I see the opposite many times, and I see it actually as a result of reduced revenue for people that make news.

We, the public at large, responded to information that evokes emotion (especially outrage). We rewarded it with clicks, translating into money for the people that collect and curate it for us. And that is what we get now. We get information, that has been compressed, and while factual many times, it is without the necessary context to come to an appropriate conclusion.

I think the antidote to this might be consumers rewarding publishers and journalists that wait before publishing. They wait so that there is time for the relevant facts to be gathered, there is time for the editors and journalists to write and edit properly. And, to still keep in mind, that it is still insanely difficult to provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion. As one should know if they have ever read an article about a field they are intimately familiar with and have spent thousands of hours in.

> There is insufficient time to list every fact from every event.

Facts relating to events aren’t news their just facts.

> The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.

You can come up with the threshold for what’s news long before individual stories show up. It’s filtering based on political context that’s the problem not simply filtering. Aka, decide ahead of time that a president being impeached is news that’s fine. However, if your coverage depends on their party affiliation that’s a problem.

> provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion.

I don’t see why people need to be making conclusions from the news. A Twitter account tweeting any earthquake over 7.0 is fine on it’s own.

If the news is that three people died in a shooting, would you not be better informed by knowing the context that they were drug dealers in a conflict over territory?

There is a context vs timeliness tradeoff.

Personally I would prefer reporters to stick with known accurate information rather than what whoever they spoke with believed to be accurate context. Shootouts between drug dealers could be over territory, or just about anything else. Unless they spoke with the people actually involved it’s all supposition.

I don't think that it is difficult to determine the scope of the violence, eg: 'gang on gang' compared to 'an angry mentally ill person shooting random people'... which is typically peoples main concern, and you can explain that in a matter of seconds.

It seems like the lack of context gets used to skew peoples perception of an issue just as often as false information, for example classifying gang violence and robberies as "mass shootings" without giving any other details. This can be applied to just about any topic out there. It's easier to leave out details and use esoteric language, than it is to lie about what happened. People can at-least deduce bias/flaws given enough narrative, and a track record of inaccurate context damages an organization's reputation.

The root issue is I don’t want reporters to guess and report what something probably is. Flight 123 an Airbus XYZ crashed at on takeoff from location Z. Fine that’s all verifiable, what the cause was isn’t known don’t even guess you’re just wasting my time.

Most shootings that look like ‘gang in gang’ are probably ‘gang on gang’ violence. But, that doesn’t mean a specific shooting was actually ‘gang on gang’ violence. Gang members also shoot people for personal reasons unrelated to being a gang member. And they also get shot for reasons unrelated to being a gang member. If the assumption is it’s always ‘gang in gang’ and it’s always reported as such then that’s a lot of biased and often incorrect information being reported as fact.

It’s not uncommon for gang members to just go out and randomly shoot stuff the same way young rednecks shoot at road signs. The difference is gang members in cites are vastly more likely to randomly hit someone due to population density.

For something more recent, the Russian annexation of Crimea. Or rejoining depending on how you interpret history (or get your news) - but western media leaves the important historical bits out because they have a specific political agenda.

Doesn't Joe Rogan typically have a bigger audience than an average so-called-mainstream news program? The economics might play out that it is more expensive to get him to endorse something than get it run on a major network.

There aren't many (any, really) quality guarantees on non-podcast media anyway. It isn't like they get any negative feedback when they lie or make mistakes. Viewers can't even withdraw support for specific known liars on a channel. It is unclear why a podcast would be at a structural disadvantage to any other media source, and probably higher reputational stakes.

I forgot he existed since moving to Spotify’s walled garden.

Maybe you did, but I don't think that's true of the general population. He seems to have increased in popularity since.

I don’t think anyone knows for sure? I miss not listening to them when used to see them appear in Overcast :-)

same here. spotify does not seem to get the user experience right unfortunately, particularly around offline/low data use. or may be it’s just me not liking “one stop shops” when it comes to podcasts and music.

i started tuning in less, but i still do.

It might be controversial but I feel Spotify have never done good ui.

Reply All is (or was, before it imploded) an interesting one as a stand in for how this has played out on the left. They got more and more blatant about their views over the years, and even though I generally ascribe to the same views, I would rather not have them put forth so blatantly, especially in a program that purports to be investigative.

My assumption is that with the increasing polarization, many shows followed their audiences to the poles. It feels rare these days for someone to not stake out a stance on some culture war battle, whether subtly or not.

It's honestly weird that Joe Rogan feel like one of the least biased popular programs to listen to out there, or the least biased in a consistent direction at least. You also get a lot of off the wall crazy shit on there, but honestly someone willing to have enough of an open mind to have people on like that not just to make fun of is a nice change of pace, even if the things are ridiculous, given how entrenched everyone else is in their positions.

>It's honestly weird that Joe Rogan feel like one of the least biased popular programs to listen to out there,

There are plenty of other hosts that do a much better job than Rogan (David French & Yascha Mounk). Rogan does indeed have a slant, it just doesn't fit into the most stereotypical red v blue one.

Eh, it is pretty tough to stay purely objective about political reporting these days. "Both sides" play political messaging games, but the Republican party led by Mitch McConnell is a pack of barbarians at the gates of our political system. They'll destroy all Americans' faith in democracy and each other, if it means the GOP can suppress minorities and keep their own pockets lined.

So while "Pod Save America" for example is biased, I still believe their takes on what is happening at the federal level are informative and thought-provoking.

Take a look at this opinion from a distance and see if you think it accurately reflects the views of half of the American population or if you might have internalized some biases

It is a fact that there was an insurrectionist attack on congress on Jan 6, that there were obvious lies about false election fraud pushed by the president and eventually by the majority of the Republican party. What are you getting at by saying whether it reflects the views of half of America? Those views are objectively incorrect, not based on reality. Reality here is not based on someone's opinion, no matter how widespread the belief in it is.

Note that I said the Republican party. I know there are many decent humans in this country who have small-c conservative beliefs, and I can have reasonable discussion with some of them.

And I pity those who don't take the time to create their own philosophical defense of their beliefs, and only parrot what Fox News tells them to think.

When I start getting into a heated discussion, I like to turn away from arguing about specific people (too much) and say "What do you want this country to be? What matters to you?" and the discussion becomes a lot more enlightening.

So yeah, if someone really believes that the poor deserve to die because said person, making $60k a year, thinks that taxing the ultra-wealthy is unethical, I'm gonna have some problems with your character.

> So yeah, if someone really believes that the poor deserve to die because said person, making $60k a year, thinks that taxing the ultra-wealthy is unethical, I'm gonna have some problems with your character.

For someone who extols “philosophical defenses of beliefs”, you certainly make use of shitty straw men to do so. I suppose you didn’t say anything about the quality of the philosophy.

It's what they are telling pollsters:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/04/05/more-th...

And the politicians in red states are conspicuously making efforts to restrict voters, in ways that they know are more likely to apply to voters who oppose them, going well beyond just voter ID:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...

So no, it's not just the OP's internalized bias. It's a simple, objective fact that they are attempting to make it harder for their opponents to win elections, based on an objectively false narrative.

I will bend over backwards to try to reach a common point from which to move forward and share a country together. I want to be aware of my own biases and the places where I disagree with the people who share some of my views. But that simply cannot happen in an environment like this, and nothing I do can change that.

It's what they are saying, in public. The large number of them saying so doesn't make it less true, only much scarier. It would seem impossible that so much of the country should be so objectively deluded, but it's literally their own words.

With the amount of people in the country that are not legally allowed to vote it is not crazy or restrictive to require some proof that you are a citizen to vote in a national election.

Where in the US do you think you can vote without providing any proof that you're a citizen? Tell me, and I'll tell you what proof was actually required.

California is the big one. Many states only require proof of residency to vote. Any state that allows something like a utility bill as ID is allowing all residents regardless of citizenship to vote. Not being a citizen isn't an issue for state level elections if that is what the state chooses to allow. But, national election voting rights are only extended to citizens.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state

Thank you for being specific. You're ignoring the fact that for the requirements listed here [1] to be valid, you need to have already registered to vote. To register, you need to (among other things) sign an affidavit affirming that you are a US citizen. It sounds like your real complaint is about CA not following through on punishment for those who lie on this form.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_ID_in_California

For a non-citizen to vote in CA, they either need to lie about their identity or lie about their citizenship. They are not "allowed to vote".

If all it takes is a simple lie, you’re not really doing any meaningful verification. If that level of trust was good enough, why not just drop all checks entirely at voting booths and just have a brief questionnaire that asks “are you allowed to vote?”

They didn't say there was, but there are efforts to reduce ID requirements.

Here's the crux: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/873878423/voting-and-election...

Higher ID requirements increase security, but also improve republican result b/c democratic voters are less likely to have certain IDs (I think). As a result this can be spun either way as Republicans restricting voters, or Democrats opposing countermeasures to fraud.

Personally I don't know, I think I'd focus on Democrat behaviour; Given they just got off the back of Russia-gate, and accusing a foreign superpower of interfering in the election, they should also theoretically have a stake in voter fraud. I'd expect them to be focusing more on driving their demographics to acquire ID, rather than loosening requirements. Mail-in voting is a hard one though.

As an aside - I'm unconvinced by reports that voter fraud are low. No evidence of fraud isn't evidence of no fraud, and too many news articles or "explainers" seem to focus on lack of evidence versus a secure and airtight verification process.

consider https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/nonc... :

  election officials .. referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting.. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.

  Forty of the jurisdictions .. reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting..

  In the ten counties with the largest populations of noncitizens in 2016, only one reported any instances of noncitizen voting..

  In .. the states where Trump claimed the problem of noncitizen voting was especially acute — no official we spoke with identified an incident of noncitizen voting in 2016

The headline claims "no noncitizen voting" but the actual process implies "no noncitizen voting, that officials know about, (or are willing to say)". What it doesn't account for is incompetence, poor vetting/fraud detection and complicity among officials. For the strong claims coming from self-proclaimed voting experts, I'd expect some kind of random sampling of votes, not "we asked the people who counted the votes" - well, they're not likely to condemn their own reports, are they? The fact that a lot of hot air and political context is upfront, and self-critical analysis of their own process is not is what makes me doubtful of these kind of text, despite the credentials/qualifications of the authors.

You're asking people to spend a lot of time, money, and political capital, on an issue that you admit there is little to no evidence is actually a problem. I'm sorry, but that is not reasonable or realistic. I understand the whole issue of "no evidence of fraud doesn't mean no fraud" but if we treated every problem like this we would never run out of problems. When you combine all of what I just said with the fact that we know certain groups are disproportionately effected by these rules...it just comes across as you saying "yes I know there's no evidence that this is a serious problem but I care more about the process being abstractly and theoretically perfect than the people these rule changes would actually effect."

> on an issue that you admit there is little to no evidence is actually a problem

Because "no evidence" isn't relevant. If it was, no one would care about Trumps taxes; and the IRS would happily decrease reporting requirements, and work on an honour system.

The mechanism by which the ruling powers of the nation are decided is pretty important, so the requirement on "time, money, and political capital" is not at un unreasonable - it isn't important if "we treated every problem like this.." because every problem is not equally as important.

The fact is there are huge incentives to cheat, and undeveloped nations across the world are characterised by unfair elections, it's not unreasonable, then, to place importance on the veracity of the election process, more than just a glib "there's no evidence that this is a serious problem".

> I care more about the process being abstractly and theoretically perfect than the people these rule changes would actually effect

fairness is dictated by the rules you dismiss as "abstract and theoretical". You talks about "facts" and what "we know", but that is the very issue - what we don't know. It's convenient to discount the value of what we don't know when the current worldview favours your opinion. I don't know anything about undetected fraud, and neither do you; neither of us know how much a problem this is, or who/how it affects people. The only solution is an airtight process, and you seem to dismiss that, worse still, attempting to characterise me as unsympathetic for placing value on such a thing.

The US is the richest country in the world, and it's government richer than most nations of the world. Why should it lack the resources to secure the most significant process in the nation, while poorer corporations (mastercard, veritas etc), and even the military can secure their own, lesser processes much better.

My local concert venue could sign their tickets with 4096-bit RSA, and make us take our shoes off and go through an x-ray before we come in like at an airport. They could have an airtight process; it would stop almost nothing, while making the process far more difficult for patrons.

Yes, I dismiss your desire for an airtight process, because I think it's security theater, whose actual outcomes would be massive and largely detrimental relative to the actual desired outcomes.

Not sure why you're talking about concert venues, What's that got to do with voting? What purpose would an X-ray serve?

Signing ballots with 4096-bit RSA? If you think that wouldn't prevent fraud, I disagree - dismiss without basis iyw.

I am talking about the usefulness of security theater on the margins. At a concert venue, and at a polling place, we can do things that, in the abstract, increase security, but provide little to no actual benefit and actually serve to make the process more difficult and unpleasant on the whole.

(Ignoring RSA tangent, making all concert-goers go through an X-Ray to screen for weapons and drugs would catch more weapons and drugs than the current pat down/bag check process does. It would undeniably increase the security of the venue, while slowing down entry, exposing concertgoers to X-Rays, and IMO providing more annoyance than actual extra security)

It seems that you think, for voting, that's a fine trade-off. I do not.

edit: not disagreeing that signed tickets would prevent fraud. Disagreeing that it would be worth, say, an additional $5 fee on the tickets, plus slower more expensive readers to verify that they're signed correctly, plus plus plus etc etc. My entire argument here is based on the net utility of additional security measures, not whether or not those measures provide additional security.

Security theatre often refers to security from physical threat. I'm not talking about undetected fraud in a sense where that makes sense, but rather a verifiable, auditable process.

The only thing you referred to that was process related (versus physical security) was use of encryption keys. Why not talk about the pros/cons of that?

> It seems that you think, for voting, that's a fine trade-off

With respect to x-ray screens? Not at all, nor did I say such a thing. Nor do I think all things that could be described as "security" are exactly equivalent to each other, such that you can mention x-ray scans, and the argument automatically extends to RSA keys.

...I'm putting myself in the shoes of a person who is in the united states without authorization...and with that in mind, why in the world would I risk exposing myself and my illegal status by participating in something as pointless as voting in US elections...

I just don't see how an average person concerned with being deported is willing to risk exposing themselves by registering with the state government, especially in the last 8 years of ICE really pushing the limits on what they can do.

You can be a legal resident of the country and not a citizen. But, your point still stands.

You conflate election fraud (hacking machines), voter fraud (individuals illicitly casting ballots), and state-sponsored misinformation campaigns. Those are three distinct problems with very different challenges.

You say "no evidence of $x != evidence of (not x)" which is true in theory, but let's step into reality: "No evidence, despite systems built to detect evidence".

You act as if people aren't already on the lookout for fraud, or that systems are not already resistant to them.

Where do I mention anything about hacking, or misinformation? If you got that from "russia-gate" you are creating the conflation.

I was talking about vote fraud, but that's not necessarily an individual act.

> despite systems built to detect evidence

Which systems? Where are they described?

As I said, the laws in question have nothing to do with the basically-nonexistent "voter fraud". Nothing about voting on Sunday could possibly have anything to do with voter fraud, but that's one of the things they're trying to ban. They're limiting voting hour and removing polling stations, and then making it illegal to give people water while they stand in line.

Even if voter fraud were a problem (it isn't), they're not even pretending that these measures have anything to do with it. And that makes it incredibly clear that they don't believe that voter fraud is the reason for any of it.

That issue is a perfect microcosm to explain both the problem with polarization and information silos, and why progress on an issue like this is so hard, and why no progress is made forming consensus because neither side wants there to be.

The left presents the issue as:

- People already verify themselves

- Voter fraud doesn't happen

- This is used to disenfranchise voters by making it harder because poor people are less likely to have a valid ID.

The right presents this as:

- No proof is required in many jurisdictions

- There are instances of voter fraud, and while few, there may be a lot we don't see

- Voting is important, so we should take it seriously and require people prove their identity to vote

The problem is that both of these sides are entirely true. Namely, verify != proof, and people talk past each other on this, and selective omission of the other side's valid points lets people believe the other side is irrational or wants it in bad faith (Republican operatives may want to make it harder for certain groups of people to vote, but from what I've seen Republican citizens do not).

The respective parties have no interest in bringing people to consensus on this issue because right now it's one that activates the bases of the respective parties. It's a way to take moderates that might be tempted to vote against the party line or for the other side for select positions and people that they respect and radicalize them by papering over the real positions of those people with the twisted narrative put forth by the media that caters to that side.

People are for the most part rational and compassionate and don't want to hurt each other. But people are also easily misled into believing things because of curated information presented when they don't have counterexamples that they trust or first hand experience to the contrary, and those beliefs cause what is considered rational and compassionate to differ from person to person. We shouldn't hate or dislike the people on the other side, they are just like us. We should engage them usefully, and the first step of engaging usefully is accepting that we're like them also in that we're presented with curated facts, so we should be open to their points when we engage and accept them in good faith.

I haven't seen the left claim that fraud doesn't happen, that is demonstrably false. There are a few convicted vote fraud cases annually. The claim is that it is insignificant.

> I haven't seen the left claim that fraud doesn't happen

Some will claim it, or say it's a myth, and if anyone points out those few cases, they'll say it's statistically insignificant to the point of not being something we should worry about.

It is strictly incorrect, but colloquially accepted as okay to say, which is yet another thing argued about from each side.

I suspect that you thinking you haven't seen it is likely because you're interpreting their intent and not reading the words strictly, or they followed up to clarify and that's the part you remember, because it's common to see. The problem is that the other side remembers the first claim or the strict interpretation of the statement, so both come away thinking they were correct, one in that the statement was "true", the other that the person was not being "truthful".

>pack of barbarians at the gates of our political system

It's quotes like this that make it hard for non-Americans like myself to take American political discourse seriously. To me, takes like this are at a similar effort level to the "Obama is a socialist!" cries heard in the 2008 election. Yawn.

Oh look, a false equivalence between the standard GOP scare tactics playbook, and Republicans breaking all norms of governance.

You tipped your hand here by repeating a line used over and over again on Twitter (“breaking all norms of governance”)

https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=breaking%20all%20norms%2...

So, are you a bot? Or are you just not thinking independently? I strongly suggest spending less time on social media. You’ll find that both sides of the political spectrum are just people, like you and me. Not “monsters” as the news would like you to believe.

You insult my intelligence. You're being rude.

I think plenty on my own. Like many humans, I occasionally use terms in vogue to get the point across. You must not work in technology or communications. (see how asinine that sounds?)

I'll forgive you for not seeing my other comment in the thread, but to be clear, my beef is with the political establishment on the right. My feelings toward "normal human beings" who are conservative are much more varied.

The Republican party as an organization at the federal level is indisputably a less patriotic, more malicious organization than the Democratic party, which has its own problems of infighting, horse-trading, and "everyday" corruption.

But instead of posting the latest trove of articles describing McConnell threatening SCOTUS appointments again, or Trump trying to use the Justice Department to investigate debunked claims of voter fraud for his own benefit, or the million other datapoints about how awful the GOP leadership is - please, continue calling me a bot.

I didn't mean to insult your intelligence. I see plenty of intelligent people acting irrationally these days.

I suggest checking out right-wing Twitter/corporate news to see how they're using the same words ("unpatriotic", "malicious") in the exact same way to describe the democrats. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. It's not black and white, evil vs. good. At least not in the real world.

Ah, but the difference is that the twitter right wing is wrong.

Just because they say it too doesn't make the correct side less correct.

You're ready for On The Media - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm

Thanks, I looked it up, but it seems very left-oriented. So it really kinda confirms my point. Unless I'm missing something, since I only briefly looked into it.

It's the old-school cynical left tho, not the modern knee-jerk woke left. To each their own!

Sometimes I think it would be comforting to write off the opinions of my fellow citizens as (influenced by) paid shills. But I’m pretty sure it would be a rationalization to avoid the unpleasant reality of genuine conflicts and differences.

I also see a lot of genuine local grassroots stuff that makes my blood boil (NIMBYism), so I don’t really attach a moral credit to those qualities.

The _Economist_ was founded to provide a particular point of view. You should always consider the speaker's biases. It doesn't mean they're wrong.

The Economist definitely have a specific world-view and to be fair they would probably be the first to tell you that. I now read their articles with a certain amount of scepticism, particularly if it's topical but not necessarily current affairs.

There is still value to be gotten out of the magazine but if you're looking for accuracy or truth that can be relied on then I think that ship sailed a long time ago. "Thankfully" the internet has allowed everybody to finally realise that.

No such thing as subjectivity. What's important is that people are looking for the truth and reporting accurately as possible. I'm more interested in penetrating analysis than "subjectivity". I read the news with a skeptics eye, knowing that they always have an agenda.

Without having watched all of the CNN "leak" linked below, I'd like to point out two things that will color my viewing of it:

1 - Project Veritas has a history of misleading / baiting subjects into saying things that sound bad, and of taking pieces of conversation out of context.

2 - A "technical director" in television isn't an editorial role, nor is it very high ranking. The job of a technical director is to physically operate things like the video switcher to choose which camera is on screen or to put up a lower third; their job typically would not be to decide who to interview, what to ask in an interview, direct the on screen talent, etc.

I am sure CNN, like most workplaces, has employees with varied opinions and political views. Seeing any one of those employees statements as evidence of the overall views of the company is kind of ridiculous.

And therefore, is it true that what he says is not true?

Project Veritas is great at getting low-level scoops and inflating their importance for views. Almost like the mainstream news sources they transparently claim to be "above."

During the 2016 presidential race they promised to drop a big discovery about the Hillary campaign's corruption, and it literally turned out that it was something to do with canvassers dressed as ducks who got into some kind of minor altercation. It was the cringiest non-story of all time.

It's not bias that bothers me. Attempts at neutrality can create their own bias-ish issues. Variety and independence is the best help here, IMO. Independence of outlets from one another. Independence of journalistic voices within outlets, etc.

What does bother me is quality, effort even. The majority of high visibility reporting is mostly commentary. Factual accuracy isn't even applicable.

They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc. A good example is the latest G7 meet. Every summary of the underlying tax problems I read was substandard. The speculation about what G7 decisions would mean was substandard.

No one actually understood what they were writing about. They dig just far enough to strike emotional or partisan content: "Apple paid just %X tax, because tax havens, cheating & stuff." Tax is all about details. You have t

The average engaged reader who has read dozens of articles on the topic has not learned anything, besides good guys, bad guys and moral outrages. I don't think the journalists do either. If you want to actually know something about the topic, you need to go to wikipedia or hunt down a good blog article.

> They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc.

Indeed. Many times when I look at the original sources for news articles, the sources either include major pieces of information omitted from the article, or even information that contradicts the article. There's talk about how people on Hacker News/Reddit/Twitter/etc. comment without reading an article, but it looks like most reporting is the same - writing an article without looking at the source.

When you see that neither the reporters nor the consumers of the news seem to care about this, it's clear that the purpose is to entertain and not inform.

I don't even blame them, really.

Depth isn't all that compelling. A well researched article doesn't get more views. The incentives to do a quick write up are strong. Spend 100 hrs researching a topic, for no gain... or spend 1hr writing an article with just enough content to draw agreement or disagreement.

Counterpoint (as someone married to a journalist): most news outlets do not have the time, resources and intent to further any special interest agenda except for their front page and op-eds. To achieve Murdoch-level disinformation is hard work. It requires so much work, that most news outlets cannot compete. There just isn't enough time and money in the news business. Remember this isn't science where there is time for research. Many news outlets have individual journalists contribute 3 to 5 articles per day. Do you think this allows for a lot of spinning an agenda?

No, the reality is different. Lots of news is just repeating what others report (news agencies to online news to news papers) because there aren't that many original sources anyway.

I believe what you think is (malicious?) agenda, is really just news outlets trying to survive. Murdoch/Springer/FoxNews to the contrary, but these are easy to avoid.

I think the argument here is more about what journalists know that they can cover, what goes onto the front page and in headings, rather than journalists themselves writing with a hidden agenda. Also who is promoted, Greenwald wrote about a particularly bad example: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/cnns-new-reporter-natasha-b...

In addition, no news outlet seemed to be in enough of a survival mode to report on the Hunter Biden story for example.

> Remember this isn't science where there is time for research. Many news outlets have individual journalists contribute 3 to 5 articles per day. Do you think this allows for a lot of spinning an agenda?

I always thought of this as exact the problem. There isn’t time for a journalist to do their research (and the bar is low enough), so instead of reporting the truth, you get what they already thought and already wanted to say, sprinkled with a tiny bit of new info.

Maybe agenda is the wrong word, but it’s close.

This sounds like a pretty childish take to be honest.

Of course there is no such thing as objective news, but that's because reality isn't that simple either. CNN and most mainstream news are indeed trash (more like entertainment), but there is very good news out there. You have to find the right news source for the right topic.

For American foreign policy, read The Intercept; for American domestic issues - Propublica, for middle eastern news - Al Jazeera English, and so on and so forth.

News is never "objective facts" and neither should it be. Good journalists put news in the context of reality.

I was surprised when I found that Al Jazeera was the most neutral source of news (on non-middle eastern topics) I have seen in a while

I’d be skeptical of Al Jazeera’s Middle East coverage. They are pretty much a Qatari state outlet and Qatar isn’t friendly with a lot of countries in the region.

It certainly was an issue in the past https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cabl...

I (and a lot many other residents and citizens of ME countries) find Al Jazeera English to be pretty okay. They give very neutral reporting, and when they do shit on someone, it's usually against someone with a vested interest against Muslims (such as Netanyahu or Narendra Modi), which is to be expected from a Mideast media outlet.

Now Al Jazeera Arabic though, that is one steaming hot pile of bullshit, that is still so popular in the Arab World that they call it the "people's news". Saudis and Emiratis alike used to watch it, likely because of their strongly biased reporting against their respective governments, as well as their pro-Muslim position on all matters. And interestingly, they were mostly allowed to broadcast in those countries up until recently.

I mean, if i was looking for objective coverage of the middle east, your comment sounds more like a criticism of Al Jazeera English than a support of it. Like, if i'm looking for neutral coverage of a region known for its religious conflicts, i wouldn't look for the news source that is pro a specific religion.

I don't think you'll find objective coverage of about anywhere - objectivity itself is an impossible goal and the more you look into you consider objective the less likely you are to find it. Even the driest readout of action/reaction has to decide what the scope of the reporting is. Any mention of blame, motivation, etc is inherently subjective. My rule to cut through this is try to watch reporting foreign to the place its produced, and then apply it through a lens of my personal values.

AJE does a lot of reporting on the daily lives of people in the middle east, and for that its a very welcome source for me. Also if you know Qatar's particular political stance you can sort of de-slant a lot of reporting. Criticism of the west, especially of western militaries are something you literally cannot hear within US news.

"region known for its religious conflicts" - I would sort of state that you're not being very objective there yourself. Islam is a religion but its also a really ingrained part of the culture in ways that christianity is not. It just means they're reflective of the culture thats produced it.

> "region known for its religious conflicts" - I would sort of state that you're not being very objective there yourself. Islam is a religion but its also a really ingrained part of the culture in ways that christianity is not. It just means they're reflective of the culture thats produced it.

Would it be better if i said ethno-religious conflicts? Regardless, one of the biggest conflicts in the middle east is probably Israel-Palestine, and its been that way for a long time. I'm not sure i would look to AJE for neutral coverage of that (I definitely wouldn't look towards western media either though)

One thing that AJE will show is the conflict from the Palestinian side, which is not something western media shows. They will show actual towns and cities in the west bank and Gaza, the israeli settlements which are what are actually causing the flareups in violence. There may not be a neutral source available - reuters and the AP have a pretty consistent bias of rarely mentioning settlements or evictions.

At the very least its nice to put human faces and see real communities in what is often a more rhetorical exercise.

> Would it be better if i said ethno-religious conflicts

Perhaps, I would just say a reading of the situation shows its less a religious conflict and more a political apartheid state. The borders and political rights are the true conflict here, with the religious element sometimes there to inflame and balkanize the factions. Having been raised in the US to think that its this mighty crusade-like undertaking of the jewish/christian world vs the heathen muslims, a real examination of the factors causing protest, violence and conflict has a lot more to do with secular power structures - thats why I think its pretty safe to say its much more akin to South African apartheid the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time. It also helps that the solution must be political.

> One thing that AJE will show is the conflict from the Palestinian side, which is not something western media shows. They will show actual towns and cities in the west bank and Gaza, the israeli settlements which are what are actually causing the flareups in violence. There may not be a neutral source available - reuters and the AP have a pretty consistent bias of rarely mentioning settlements or evictions.

I'm not saying that sort of thing isn't valuable or important, just that showing the suffering of one side in a conflict is not neutral reporting.

And to be clear, not everything should be neutral reporting. Understanding the struggles that the Palestinian people face is very valuable. Its just a different sort of thing than a neutral report on the situation in the area.

Re characterization of the conflict:

I'm not sure i agree with your characterization, although i do agree that most of the time religion is an excuse for secular geopolitical ends. Regardless i'm not sure it matters for the main point of this argument.

> I'm not saying that sort of thing isn't valuable or important, just that showing the suffering of one side in a conflict is not neutral reporting.

I’m not trying to claim its neutral, but that it is a perspective you don’t often get, and is helpful for building empathy for the people living there as humans rather than pieces on a chess board of geopolitics.

I don’t call my characterization the unfallable truth, just for me it’s a lot closer to reality than what a lot of lenses I’ve had to view the conflict in the past :)

They used to be pretty neutral. These days they have taken the left side and are boringly predictable.

I'm a fan of AJE for my headline blast style news. They're far enough removed from my day to day in the US that it manages to give a good "rest of the world" vantage point. It is often the case that a big story for a few days on AJE is some sort of major unrest in this or that country but on all the US networks it is something inane.

Because of their ownership I do tend to take a more critical view of their Middle East coverage. Need to view it (and everything really) through the "What does Qatar want?" lens. Although sometimes even that helps give a good "both sides" style comparison. For coverage on Israeli/Palestinian tensions I can use both that and the more standard US options and get a more well rounded view.

"...Good journalists put news in the context of reality."

Their reality, or the one of their editor. As it as always been.

It just looks more obvious now, with all cross sources we can get.

The Intercept? Even if I agreed with Glem Greenwald's world view, I'd recognize it as among the most biased out there. for American foreign policy, I have a much simpler suggestion: any news from sources that aren't in the US or its chief geopolitical rivals (Russia and China). As a special bonus, you'll get less garbage news about things that don't matter, like the political ramifications of what Joe Biden had for lunch. And you might even learn something about the rest of the world, which is practically impossible from US media.

Greenwald is no longer with the intercept, and he hasn't been an editor for a long time.

Much of the world is a part of the USs economic imperialism, and hence isn't as far from the mothership as you'd imagine. All sources have biases. At least TI does fully independent reporting.

Quick example from today of excellent journalism: https://theintercept.com/2021/06/16/joe-manchin-leaked-billi...

They also don't mix news and entertainment - the portion of the org that does TI is a non-profit.

Nice bit of cherry-picking there. NYT (for example) also produces some excellent journalism. Little gems buried in mountains of crap. Making either your only recommendation will leave people who follow that recommendation covered in crap. They're sources to be used sparingly when those good articles appear, not as part of one's day-to-day effort to stay informed.

> Greenwald is no longer with the intercept

Founders' influence often lingers long after the founders themselves. You think Greenwald didn't hire/collaborate with others who shared a similar world view?

Looking at the front page of Propublica right now and it's just a straight up checklist of stories that people of a certain ideology believe. There's no opposing ideas or viewpoints present. They only run stories that the people reading it expect to read.

One test I came up with recently is that if a source doesn't run stories that I disagree with, if they only have stories which I nod along to and agree with, then that source is horribly biased. It isn't that they're "right", that they only run "right" stories, it's that they're horribly biased.

I don't think that test does much. The original point was that there's no such thing as objective news, but rather facts put into context.

If you're finding that context setting is consistent in its narrative, that's not a reason to recoil.

As an example, put yourself in a highly contentious context of a historical situation - say the apartheid in South Africa. If you found a newspaper that always took a position counter to the white south African government, you would have found a good newspaper.

That doesn't always work, but neither does a simple test like you've deviced.

It's also interesting to check who owns a media outlet and what companies are its largest customers by placing ads. I find Russell Brand's YT Channel frankly speaking surprisingly illuminating on many subjects like deep state*, corona, environmentalism, data protection. According to him most of the largest news papers in the States are basically controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Guess who they will be catering to.

*: I know this is a trigger word and I don't use it exactly in the sense of AJ or reptiloids. But it has its merit as a concise term refering to invisible power structures in the government.

I find it crazy that Russell is one of a very few people providing analysis of how power works. He’s extremely well informed and has gone away and educated himself. He also never gives out conspiracy theories, all of the things he says are based on experiences, for example being asked to leave Richard Brandson’s island because he suggested people in the British Virgin Islands pay their tax…

I respect him for his ability to think for himself and express his thoughts pretty eloquently. He's no doubt very intelligent. Having said - I find him absolutely not funny ... his humor leaves me completely cold.

To be fair I learned that at 7 in civic education class in Normandy...

The media is a counter power but a power nonetheless. Just like you cant trust the president to judge a criminal, you shouldn't trust the media to judge the president. Just let everyone speak, make your soup yourself and split responsibilities: the executive lead the police and military, the judiciary protects criminals as much as society , the media warns of big and small events and they each compete and drag the carpet to themselves.

This is healthy. The alternative is hanging liars and people with difficult truths rather than letting them both speak. Or: detecting lies from truth is only possible by opposing several (and not just two or the border is skewed towards the most sensational) views.

CNN will say there a radioactive event south of China, China will say there s absolutely nothing wrong, the minority owner of the plant will say it s worrying but the problems lies in China moving the red line regulation, experienced people will say this probably warrant waiting, panicked people will say it must shut down now, ecologists will say any nuclear plant is too risky for the cost, and the truth is somewhere in the merging of all these but you can only have a gradually improving view of the event as pawns position themselves over time.

> the media is a counter-power

Is it? Is it not the main power? What politician could rise whose profile wasn’t vetted by the media? Can any politician decide something different than what is broadcasted by the media, for example if all media say we should lock down for Covid, despite population disapproval, can any politician resist?

Media is probably the power, and the 3 other heads (executive, legislative, judiciary) are basically following, at our current point, in 2021. At least, if they want to stay relevant.

Corollary: The definition of democracy should include the 4 powers. Media should be free, and due to Loi Avia in France, and due to the state of emergency, media is not currently free to say what it deems correct.

Lots of politicians and wealthy people control some media. Also, "what politician could rise whose profile wasn’t vetted by the media?" -> isn't Trump a strong countexample?

Putting aside that the election wasn’t forged, didn’t the media make him fall too?

It is true that there was a breach in the fabric, which allowed someone billionaire to become president (albeit with little control over other key institutions), and that was probably because they hadn’t harnessed control over internet when it took off, circa 2012-2016, but that gaping hole is now closed: Someone reasonable is back as the head of state, media now agree with the president, social networks put a cap on network effect for viral news, people can be arrested in UK and Canada for mistweeting, and the accusations of rape/pedophilia will do the rest for the remaining figureheads - In France for the last 3 elections, accusations/investigations on tax evasion hit 4 figureheads (excluding the DSK story, not talking about Assange accused of rape intermittently). Everything is back on track, “Oops, you saw through the matrix, move on”.

If you think the news is bad, you should consider the hot takes that online posters come up with. :)

If the news is fake, imagine history.

I used to think "winners write the history books" was pithy and false. Then I realized that in the moment we can barely come to a consensus reality on even the most obvious and well-evidenced topics and that every historical account I had ever read was completely devoid of the debate over what was true. History is mostly propaganda. I'm sure if you get deep enough in the academic discipline you will find honest attempts to reconstruct the past in all its messiness, instead of just explain a preferred conclusion. Don't know that I have ever read a thing like that though, and certainly never read it in a book or seen it on tv.

So yes, if the news is fake, imagine history.

Then... you have never engaged with actual history?

Historians are extremely aware of the difficulty of determining what is true, and they certainly have no problem engaging with the messiness of it all.

Can you blame him? Throughout all my schooling at least, history was always presented as “this is what happened”. Never once in any history class I took was there ever any doubt presented about historic events. It was never “well, a lot of evidence shows that this probably happened for that reason, but theres also potential that it might have happened for this other reason.”

I’m sure real actual historians in universities have these sort of discussions, but history class as it’s used in schooling is pure propaganda.

Do you have any specific examples?

I'm fairly certain I was taught about conflicting evidence and, even more importantly, differing interpretation of events in school, for example we discussed the role of the US and the Soviet Union in the cold war quite extensively and controversially.

You really went to a different school than I did then. In the 90's, I was taught history purely as "This is what happened" with zero mention of debate, evidence or conflicting conclusions. I was explicitly taught that the civil war was fought over states rights alone. I was taught that the US was sparsely populated before Europeans arrived with glorious civilization. I was taught that democracy was triumphant and the best system of government that could ever be, and better in every way than the failure of Communism. I was taught that we alone saved the world from fascism in WW2 with barely a mention of the eastern front. I was graded on my ability to recite these facts.

Sure, I am aware that actual high quality historical scholarship must exist, but I honestly wouldn't know where to find it without waking into a university and asking someone close to the field for research help. Nearly every book of history on the shelf of my local library is in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel. I enjoy listening to some history podcasts, but have mainly experienced them as good storytelling and nothing about how the sausage is made.

Of course, if you went to school in the northern United States, you learned the Civil War was about slavery disguised as state's rights.

But yeah, 5th through 10th grade history, there was no nuance, just "this is what happened, this is History, this is the textbook, this will be on the test, the end." A handful of excellent grade 9-12 teachers would have you do primary source research[1], and there you might get some conflicting sources, but you just discarded the sources that didn't work with your thesis topic. (See how this works? Thesis first, then sources...)

It was only once I was in college that we really got into some of the nuance of multiple sources and working from the ground up instead of the top down.

[1] Specific examples that I recall: did an astronaut biography in 5th grade, I interviewed my grandparents on 1930s Depression-era life in 9th grade; I did a primary sources (newspaper on microfilm) paper in my college sophomore year (14th grade) on the The Rainhill Locomotive Trials of 1829 in London, England.

We teach high schoolers that F=ma. That’s not true either, but it’s approximately true. So it’s in no way unique that history is taught as approximation and simplification.

I recommend reading Axios. It feels like they're trying their best to stick to the facts and avoid editorializing.

I will happily listen to other recommendations.

Axios is also rolling out local newsletters! (? daily email but also available online as stories) they have a lot of cities check it out!

Can't go wrong with PBS either. I love a Frontline deep dive

And this is why state sponsored, but _not_ controlled media is what you want.

In most countries that have these institutions, these media outlets are consistently rated, by both sides of the local spectrums, as being the most balanced.

Note, that this is _not_ the same as saying that they cannot be biased, since at the end of the day every decision is the result of some bias or another, but their mandate is to serve the greater public, and so they don't try to carve out and to chase a specific demographic.

The internet destroyed the business model for old-school media. So now they just generate a never-ending stream of fake controversy to sell eyeballs to advertisers.

> the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew.

Could you link this out please?

https://youtu.be/Dv8Zy-JwXr4 https://youtu.be/9faQkIA6YNU https://youtu.be/R7mdc1r5-vw

“There’s no such thing as unbiased news” — high level CNN employee

Yeah, and that's true. Because people are biased. Not saying CNN is the benchmark so. But deriving that all news is bad because of that is going too far.

Don’t mix up intrinsic human bias with deliberate misinformation (which in the context of big media companies is informally called “bias”). I haven’t derived anything.

There's a difference between news that is trying to enlighten vs. trying to convince. When I start to feel like the news is doing the latter, I would call it biased.

There's no such thing as pure anything. That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive towards the ideal.

Or to put another way, just because nobody is 100% a saint all the time, doesn't make being an asshole ok.

Yes. But news should strive for thruth, not for objectivity. For example, if the president says something that is evidently false, the press IMO has the responsibility to say so, even if this is clearly biased towards the interests of the opposition.

Objectivity is not the same as giving equal weight to all sides regardless of what they say, imo.

Oh it's not a leaked video, it's an interview of an audiovisual technician done by Project Veritas, who are among the most biased and cynically named outfits in journalism. Cynically named (veritas is Latin for "truth") because they don't try to make their message correspond to reality (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/), but instead go to great pains to twist, alter, edit and selectively curate reality to fit their message. They're permanently suspended from Twitter. In my mind they are enemies of the truth. They were fertilizing the soil for the Big Lie before the 2020 US elections, spreading their deceitful manure into the minds of the vulnerable. Please watch more of their work.

From MediaBiasFactCheck: > Project Veritas was created by James Edward O’Keefe III, an American conservative political activist. He produces secretly recorded undercover audio and video encounters, some selectively edited to imply its subjects said things they did not, with figures and workers in academic, governmental, and social service organizations, purporting to show abusive or allegedly illegal behavior by employees and/or representatives of those organizations. Project Veritas primarily targets liberals and liberal organizations.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/project-veritas/

Meanwhile the person interviewed was a technical director, as I understand it meaning an audiovisual equipment guy, so I don't know why you'd consider him an authority on editorial decisions. That all media has some bias doesn't seem so shocking, but rather mere common sense.

It's amazing how people will go from "mainstream media has bias" to "... but this random guy on Youtube doesn't!" despite the youtuber being far worse. As if they can only handle one level of critical thinking.

The only people dumber than that are people who straw-man…

But that’s exactly what you’ve just done.

My brother used to be a sound technician (and sound engineer on a lot of non-paid projects), and was named technical director on a small TV plateau during a cold epidemic, because his (our) family name came first in the technician list, and the 3 higher ranked/paid employees were sick.

> but instead go to great pains to twist, alter, edit and selectively curate reality to fit their message.

The video had long segments without cuts, that seemed to include enough context. Do you have any examples from that video in mind as to how it could have been misleading despite this?

> Meanwhile the person interviewed was a technical director, as I understand it meaning an audiovisual equipment guy, so I don't know why you'd consider him an authority on editorial decisions.

If I recall correctly, he only spoke of his first-hand experiences. So even if he were just a janitor, that would not cast doubt on his claims.

> “There’s no such thing as unbiased news”

FYI this is canon in media science, and probably something every journalist learns at university.

People keep repeating it almost as if there's no way to improve. I think that if we instead of classifying news as real/fake or neutral/biased, we should classify it as honest/misleading. If a story gives a different impression to reality, it's misleading. That can be easily identified sometimes, especially in articles based on numerical data. Has a stock price "plummeted" or fallen by 2 percentage points?

This criterion would only apply to the presentation of the information within a story, not the choice of stories or even the choice of information sources, since there could be too much to choose from. There, traditional honest unavoidable bias would still exist. But without this blatant dishonesty that commonly occurs, people wouldn't be quite so misled.

"Facts all come with points of view / Facts don't do what I want them to" -- David Byrne

Basically every single story was either placed by an interested party or hits our emotions in a way to keep us clicking. Lots of companies, political campaigns and advocacy organizations have highly skilled media relations departments that know exactly how to get a story printed on any topic. I have been on that side and basically have seen our talking points published word for word without being challenged or examined, which was the goal.

For awhile last year I felt like I needed the news to keep my family safe. After a while stewing in the fear factory, I realized that that the reporting didn't bare much relation to the actual scientific studies it claimed to be based on when I bothered to actually go and read them. I unplugged and only check niche interest news now.

I was becoming a worse citizen and person for reading the news, not a better one.

I think that news stories are more about the 'story' than the 'news'. They are about framing some perhaps genuine facts (but perhaps not) in a specific way, in such a way that a genuinely independent assessment is impossible for anyone taking their information from these sources.

I think when the stories and angles are so detached from reality, it is fair to wonder what is going on. You can call it conspiracy, or companies working together in a co-ordinated way for their best interests, fascism (with corporations and governments working in tandem), etc but its hard to dispute that there is an agenda to prevent the general population from receiving information that would allow them to make straightforward judgements.

I could easily find a lot of reporting on the "CNN leak", even in German online media, and from my understanding, we cannot, at this point in time, be sure that this leak is legit.

Right now, it's simply a news story that is very difficult to confirm.

In any case, my recommendation would be to apply "I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now." here, too. Everything else would be a bit inconsistent.

Why can't you just report facts and be done with it?

Something I always wondered, why journalists, news and journalism is always about the "story", the narrative, the emotion ? That would take away a lot of scope for manipulation, harder to misinterpret and easier to spot the culprits.

Till few years ago, it was brought to my attention, they, like all surviving orgs, adapt and simply give what "the people" want.

You used CNN as an example but these tactics apply to most media outlets. Isn’t this the thesis of Manufacturing Consent? Crafted mass messages to sway public opinion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

I don’t know how you learned about how media worked, but when I was taught about it in elementary school in Italy, I clearly remember my teacher explaining the concept of Agenda and News Cycle. Maybe I just had an amazing teacher (she is, indeed).

That said, this is not a new development. Mainstream media today are doing this in subtler ways because they are forced to transparency by the rise of the Internet. As long as media organization need to turn a profit, this will always be the case. By having a rich media landscape, with different point of views, we were always able to keep a general balance despite the singular imbalances. The radicalization of opinions and the outrage economy, along with the Internet, have disrupted that general balance, with mostly right-wing leaning medias seizing that unethical advantage, and liberal left-leaning media trying to decry it, while having a hard time swiping their own conflicts of interest under the rug.

Surprisingly enough, this is mostly true for generalist media, though. I’m lucky enough to be a tech journalist, and despite having to deal with a lot of companies and a lot of products that they want to ultimately sell, I feel that our conflicts of interest are way easier to navigate, and easier to address.

Picking your news from carefully selected sector-specific publications, and putting together your own media diet, is the equivalent of eating organic and cooking your own meals vs eating out at McDonald’s every night. The equivalence, sadly, is true also for the level of education and income (and time) you need to have to do that, though.

"Balanced"? There's far more to the world than politically exciting topics. News media is entertainment, it's optimizing for engagement, not producing accurate impressions in the viewer's mind. Following multiple sources of news just means you are being focused on lots of things of questionable relevance and importance.

An example that comes to mind is the various investigative interviews being conducted in the UK about the covid response last year. The news media focuses on gossip rather than the structural issues, institutional biases and lessons. Though even covid itself is probably not the most important issue today, it'll probably be something obscure like the reverse Flynn effect in Europe.

The British media's coverage of the Covid-19 crisis was and still is really blatant. For example, there have been a lot of decisions which involved tradeoffs, with each option having both upsides and downsides, and the press has pretty consistently focused on the downsides - you could pretty much pinpoint the moment the government decided to put off the latest loosening of restrictions based just on when the BBC switched from pushing the reasons to delay it to focusing heavily on the downsides of doing so.

During the run up to iraq war, our history teacher would bring in the newspaper and deconstruct the headlines.

> I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever.

Maybe that's because of the stories you select for checking. Did you ever deeply research something non-sensational? Like a feature about new-years celebrations in Nepal?

And where is this news outlet that specializes in non-sensational things?

I've looked at coverage of things I was personally familiar with - particular subcultures, the rural area I grew up in, the field I work in - and seen a similar pattern. The inaccuracies didn't seem to be ideologically driven (indeed they sometimes went against what I think of as particular outlets' biases) but they were very much there.

Anecdotally, whenever I've had insider knowledge of a news story, it's always been the case that some of the basic facts are reported wrong. Even small local newspapers twist the truth slightly in order to present a more easily digested narrative.

Maybe they did not have insider access to info and were wrong? You don’t have all day to do research on news, you have to rush it out i guess?

That does not matter, it is just an aesthetical thing.

It’s like when they report that some pandas got offspring in captivity in zoo X.

Even if they lied about it, even if they invent a new country where there are celebrations, it makes no difference.

It is useful to consume and fact check news on what could have an effect on your life.

It also brings about the bias you are talking about.

Because the newly born panda might matter to the local veterinarian.

Well my train of thought certainly took a 180 degree turn there..

More like, the zoo pr team reached out to news and other organizations months in advance of the panda birth to create tens of thousands of dollars of marketing and word of mouth, in order to increase zoo attendance, donations, and memberships.

Well, also, people like pandas because they're cute and cuddly and as such they like to read stories about baby pandas.

Not everything is part of some giant capitalist conspiracy. Sometimes people just like pandas.

It's not a capitalist conspiracy, it's just the path of least resistance, if you are in the morning meeting deciding what stories to cover, it's a slow newsday and you have a press release from the zoo announcing the birth of the panda it's easier to just report on that than to go looking for a story.

You're right, but that's not the scenario the comment I responded to was implying.

There's a difference between "oh look, there's a baby panda, this is an easy one" and participating in a months-long coordinated campaign designed to make money.

It's not just about news and journalism.

When I was in my late teens and eagerly devouring the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor Coevolution Quarterly for their reviews and pointers to new tools and ideas, it was easy to trust what I saw written there. Until one issue when they had a long survey of backpacking equipment, which even at 17 was something I knew quite a lot about. It was ridiculous, so bad (*)

Most people who write for a living don't know as much about the things they write about as people who do those things as the central part of their lives.

But it's worse than that: even when the author is a bona fide expert in the subject, there's still plenty of room for disagreement within the field.

The dream of reading "authoritative" accounts of more or less anything is a dream. Instead of being mad that journalists and other writers don't live up to your dream, accept this situation as it is, and understand that deepening your understanding of anything will require significant effort on your part. That doesn't mean that there are not better and worse sources of information, and understanding how to identify this is important. But there's nobody who is going to write "the true story" because there is no true story, just a complicated mess that you can put more or less effort into understanding.

(*) granted, some of what made it so bad was the clash between my UK-based understanding of gear and conditions, and their western US equivalent.

> I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever.

This applies to a lot more than just media, including important to mundane issues inside of an organization. Path of least resistance (aka bullshit) and all that.

I think of them as PR firms now. Unfortunately, journalism has probably been like that for a long time since special interests can pitch stories to journalists. They've put a lot of effort into making themselves seem like mere unbiased reporters of what is newsworthy but it's becoming apparent that they can and do push certain viewpoints on behalf of their 'clientele' which may include political parties.

> I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now. You have to ask why they chose to report this, why they slant things one way or another with their choice of wording and emphasis. What is the aspect of this story that is too politically incorrect or unfashionable to be included?

You say this like it’s a bad thing. That’s exactly what everyone needs to be doing.

I think "the technical director" and "very senior" bits are misleading. You can google "cnn" "technical director" site:linkedin.com and find lots of people with that job title, some as "senior technical director" and so on. It's like "vice presidents" at banks.

Find news that are published independently. For example if you want (mostly) Australian news that are funny, see https://www.youtube.com/user/thejuicemedia

Being published independently doesn't guarantee honesty or the lack of an agenda or bias, it only guarantees any agenda or bias isn't being dictated by a third party, rather than the company itself.

Also, The Juice Media appear to be satirists, not journalists. While this and other satirical sources like the Daily Show may seem more truthful than mainstream news because they provide an emotional catharsis, they can actually be far more distorted than the mainstream media in terms of fact. Because while satire can express the truth, being honest isn't its purpose, so much as being funny.

I agree with your first sentence.

The Juice Media are satirical journalists, but as far as I can tell all the satire is contained to the presentation, not the facts. The Daily Show is not independent, so putting them in the same bag as The Juice Media doesn't seem fair.

One vise man told years ago "The facts are true, the news are fake" - and was ridiculed. And look where we came to with media.

> I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued.

For anyone who may not be aware of the contents of the actual recordings, here are some quotes.

  Trump was — his hand was shaking, he was losing it.  He’s unfit. We were creating a story there. I think that’s propaganda.

  [Trump's] hand was shaking or whatever, I think. We brought in so many medical people to tell a story that was all speculation -- that he was neurologically damaged, and he was losing it. He's unfit to - you know, whatever.

  We had nothing else to run with at that time. We were like, just taking shots off a bow, just hoping something would hit, you know?

  We were creating a story there that we didn't know anything about. That's what - I think that's propaganda

  Look what we did, we  got Trump out. I am 100 percent going to say it, and I 100 percent believe that if it wasn't for CNN, I don't know that Trump would have got voted out.

  Like our focus was to get Trump out of office, right? Without saying it, that's what it was, right? So, our next thing is going to be climate change awareness.

I found this claim really intriguing and rabbit holed on researching it for a bit... but upon further research I am skeptical. It strikes me that I'm basically only seeing articles out of News Corp outlets and random blogs which appear to be rehashing the same content. News Corp outlets definitely dominate here.

But let's agree that CNN's agenda was obviously anti-Trump because it was a major driver of their traffic... here's what really made me skeptical:

> our next thing is going to be climate change awareness

This line is really telling. The CNN tech director, ostensibly caught in an unguarded moment, draws a line directly from Trump's fake news/voter fraud claim all the way to climate science. This is really, really fishy.

It is a _moral imperative_ for humanity to live in greater harmony with the planet, which includes reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. This is not politics, it's an informed take based on science that aligns with an understanding of physics, a long record of paleoclimatological data, and things I can literally see with my eyes (I enjoy mountain climbing and have seen glacial retreat firsthand over years).

I don't believe it's a coincidence that Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the News Corp outlets, has enormous fossil fuel holdings and would be negatively affected by this inconvenient moral imperative.

I hadn't heard of Project Veritas, the originators of this claim, but a little research into their past history also makes me want to take their presentation with more than a little skepticism.

Again, I don't have any _direct_ evidence to claim that the quote is fabricated. I do believe that there are significant ulterior motives here in the reporting of this claim, and the claims are reported by outlets that themselves have a spotty record of journalistic integrity.

I'm not sure you read my comment prior to replying. I didn't make a claim, only posted quotes from a video that was referenced by a different poster. That way, people unfamiliar with the video would know its contents. So, I don't understand what claim of mine you attempted to debunk.

Instead of reading endless articles about a recording to determine if the recording exists, why not watch the recording itself?

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