US ranks last among 46 countries in trust in media
poynter.org
poynter.org
> It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
The advent of the Internet has rocked the "mass communication media" and exposed their "system-supportive propaganda function" in a way that is pretty hard to counter. It's a case of "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
> a World War I song that rose to popularity after the war had ended. The lyrics highlight concern that American soldiers from rural environments would not want to return to farm life after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_%27em_Down_o...
Both mainline ideologies constantly and pathologically deceive and withhold information to make things one sided increasing polarization.
MSNBC argues that its audience knows that its news isn’t actually news...(!)
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/560042987/russians-targeted-u...
* Distrust of traditional media
* Collapse of local media
* Rise in social media platforms
Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.
Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-cal...
The internet has opened pandora's box of mass psychological hacking.
The only way from here is to wait and see whether we can survive like this indefinitely - maybe we'll all collectively build a resistance to media constructed to hijack our emotions. In the meantime we will each have to one by one watch our friends and relatives dive down rabbit holes of propaganda and rage. I've seen this firsthand over the past year and it's not pretty.
I can’t help but speculate that the extremely polarized and partisan politics of the US has some thing to do with this. I know it gets old connecting everything to Trump, but he did hold the highest office in the country for four years and during that period systematically claimed that every bit of media coverage he didn’t like was false and fake news, while also helping to spread obviously fake conspiracy theories that still seem to be popular with half the population.
This is interesting given how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
I guess it doesn't help when they run segments like this, sowing more distrust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
I was never interested in politics , left or right and never listened to conservative or liberal commentary you mentioned but the coverage of BLM riots, Trump etc especially in 2020 was mostly fake news and blatant propaganda. That’s what brought me to vote for Trump in the first place, the constant lying and manipulation by the media.
I don’t know how otherwise reasonable people can not notice these 24/7 lies by CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. I’m a first gen immigrant, from former communist country, we have a good nose for propaganda and can smell it from afar, I’m surprised American-born Americans are so easily fooled.
(FWIW, I actually agree with you that many outlets have a consistently left-wing slant, for certain values of "left-wing", on a variety of issues, and I think most of what passes for news media generally is absolute garbage—but I also think that perceptions of that, on the right, tend to be only loosely related to reality, and that media coverage of media bias, to include social media, is itself ground zero for bias)
To give a salient example: I read an article this morning about the ongoing attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan, clearly something that has no respect for those people. Except... it actually has a lot of respect for them, far more than I think they deserve. It treats the request for an audit as nothing more than a request for the audit; there's no questioning on what purpose it could serve other than overturning the election results. There's also this quote: "Last week, a few hundred demonstrators carrying boxes of affidavits signed by thousands of people demanding a state ballot audit showed up at the Capitol." What it doesn't go on to explain is that the "affidavits" are actually foisted contracts that say in effect "if you don't agree to my demands in X days, you are in violation of the law," which has 0 legal effect whatsoever. Does it really "have no respect for [them]"?
Yes, media's biased. Yes, media lie a lot, often about serious things. Yes, some outlets on some topics tend to slant "left" pretty consistently. It's also true that, in the early days of post-fairness-doctrine right-wing broadcast media, there was a concerted and deliberate effort to promote the notion of the "left wing media" to a much greater degree than it was actually true, at least at the time that effort began, and that it was highly effective.
... but, if it's not possible that suddenly emphasizing the notion of a "left-wing media" may have significantly affected public perception of same, including possibly even if it wasn't true or was being grossly exaggerated, then I suppose we don't need to care about any of that. Right?
Just curious, can I see the article?
But note also that there is a distinction to be drawn towards a media source being biased versus "on the spectrum of 'has no respect for you' and 'likes to sincerely fantasize in public about the elimination of your culture'."
'Otherwise reasonable' does not negate ignorance and we are overflowing with ignorance thanks to our journalism(propaganda). Logic is some math term which automatically gets trashed because lolol im no good at math who needs that stuff amirite?.
>how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
...to itself be dishonest 'journalistic' spin, in this case perpetuated by John Oliver among others. "How many" local news outlets is irrelevant when you consider a vast majority of Sinclair's outlets are for tiny rural channels, meanwhile large urban and coastal channels will undoubtedly skew more liberal but be fewer in #.
When else has the metric of "how many channels" ever been used to determine reach and engagement?
Not sure of the numbers, just wanted to point this out.
In any case I think you'll agree this is now a much narrower point about Sinclair than ppl like Oliver intended to make.
(Got my account rate limited cuz too many fellow liberals downvoted me w/o comment. Seems like HN might not be a good place for reasonable discussion on controversial topics.)
I don't wanna go back-and-forth on this too much tho sorry.
I find it interesting first of all that local news -- and weather, especially -- are the most trusted in the US. It reminds me of that old half-joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson -- but more likely it's that the issues that hit close to home are less likely to be polarized across traditional political lines.
We've long passed the inflection point where people seem to judge trustworthiness based on alignment to their own predetermined biases. If I tell you that what you think is wrong -- even if I have a factual basis for that; or more mildly, just frame something in a way that you might disagree with, you can label me as biased.
How did we get here? I think a lot of the blame comes from social media. Local news really cannot trend -- by definition it appeals to a narrow audience, and no one is sharing city council minutes. People do share outrage -- forcing the most polarizing content to the top. And, not for nothing, newsfeeds often put propaganda and disinformation -- or just lowest-common-denominator ("7 child stars: where are they now?") -- to compete at the same level as traditional journalism.
I (previously) wrote some thoughts here: https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
Still, its the most trusted of the group.
I still found the local news to be much more professional about doing a matter-of-fact reporting job than national news, even for national outlets I may agree with in terms of bias.
Also PBS news has been quite good over the years that I watched it (though I haven't watched any recently, as the current events themselves have become such stress-inducing toxicity, regardless who reports it).
The news magazines and opinion journals used to be much more cordial and high brow on both the left and the right, more focused on digesting books and important issues and less dedicated to parsing the trending issue of the picosecond.
Now you have tons of casual news viewers participating in social media sharing mostly shallow 'opinions' which are just repetitions of what they have just consumed. It's kind of like what used to be the rich person seafood section with highfalutin organic varieties of wild caught fish has been replaced with 16 aisles of DISCOUNT IMITATION "CRAB" MEAT that all tastes the same and comes out of an industrial tube.
When social media was new I think most tech forward people's opinion was that this was good, and that people would move on from "CRAB." Sure we have one whole aisle of synthetic flavored "CRAB," but in the future it will be better. Instead we just got 16 aisles of "CRAB" and no more good fish, just the memories of what used to be a more refined news culture.
Mass participation in national issues is very distorting for the United States as it is constitutionally composed. Our laws are designed for intense local and state-level participation in politics, with representatives mediating the passions of democracy at the national level. The media optimizes for intense national/international 'engagement,' but this must lead to frustration and unhappiness because mass participation can have zero impact on national issues of import (for the most part) because of the fundamental structure of our system.
Unlike newspapers, TV and radio in the UK is regulated by a government-funded body called OFCOM (Office of Communications) where broadcasters are required to follow rules around impartial news coverage. These rules exclude opinion-based shows e.g. talk radio shows.
These impartiality rules apply to all broadcasters i.e. public service broadcasters (PSBs) like the BBC and Channel 4, and commercial broadcasters like ITV and Sky News. People often criticise PSBs for their news coverage (justified in some cases), but there is no editorial standard or code of ethics for national newspapers in the UK.
Most of the national newspapers in the UK lean to the right, and a few to the left. But they are all awful. The Financial Times is the only half-decent national newspaper in the UK and even they have their biases.
I have long held the belief that the national press in the UK has poisoned political discourse in the UK for decades. Despite declining newspaper circulation, they continue to exert outsized influence on public discourse (and on politicians). The relationship between journalists and politicians is uncomfortably close and unhealthy. (Journalists often move to positions of influence into political parties).
Interesting tidbit about UK newspaper columnists: attendence at private schools makes up just 7% of the general population. Yet, in UK national newspapers, the proportion of news columnist who were privately educated is disproportionately high: 44%. [2]
[1] EBU (European Broadcasting Union) Media Intelligence Service – Trust in Media 2020 Report
[2] The Sutton Trust: Elitist Britain 2019
I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself. Every argument is wedged into an imaginary Team A vs Team B battle and it seems that to remain relevant as a publisher, you have to play that game. People feel personally attacked/validated by every article now because those are the most engaging and publishers will omit certain contexts and facts in any story to facilitate that emotional trigger.
Given that the journalism industry is energised by advertising and political propaganda, it has reached a point where it has become nothing more than an itchy wound that the public keep scratching.
The 24 hour news cycle isn't an issue in itself, but the power games combined with a dangerous economic model and all of the mass media manipulation on sites like reddit, are the core of the issues imo. Having the 24hr cycle (online, and on cable) just amplifies it all and makes it so omnipresent to the fact that despite the great efforts of dictators who put their picture in every place they can, I can bet that Trump managed to become a part of everyones daily life, and in a much more direct fashion, than any dictator could ever dream of, in the anglosphere during his term.
Which countries specifically? I know that German-speaking news outlets aren’t any less partisan, and I have little reason to think that the rest of Europe is much better.
That's not to say its reporting on the facts is wrong, but its editorials are very definitely partisan and what they choose to report/how they choose to report it often shows this too.
In general it's my favourite news source, but you do have to account for its slant.
I get the impression that most Americans see the rest of the world like some form of a cartoon. They are weirdly detached from the reality of it all. I even get that impression when speaking to regular Americans about other countries and I think the media feeds on, and feeds, this incredibly strange outlook.
If there is any truth to the Wuhan lab leak story, it is an incredibly important thing for every single human on the planet. The idea of a country purposfully, or accidentally, releasing a lab made virus is such a massive threat to every society in the world, even worse than chernobyl, that we need the story to be scrutinised and and reported on with perfect accuracy. Instead, it has somehow become a fuel left/right wing driven click-bait. The articles I have come across on this subject have been pretty much baseless nonsense, or incredibly untrustworthy, and that is just scary.
Europe has problems of course, but it is definitely better. They are partisan but they are less at taking digs at the opposition. America seems to be going through a media war. In the UK it is pretty rotten too, but the writing is usually more accurate and one can find well researched articles.
The most striking thing for me during covid was when it started to make daily news in the US. Up until that point, I felt like I had a really good understanding of what was going on. I found there to be a lot of scientific reporting making it to the mainstream etc.. As soon as it reached America though, it was game over. I was lost. I genuinely just couldn't follow what was going on because of all the noise generated by US media, which inevitably spills over, and intertwines, with all other media.
I probably can't explain it very well, but the amount of noise in American news just seems to drown out anything that can actually help regular people get a grasp on what is actually happening.
Funny, just yesterday I got convinced of the opposite. So yesterday Germany played Hungary in the European Soccer Championship; before that Hungary passed some anti-gay legislation and in response some German activists wanted to light the Munich stadium up in rainbow colors, which UEFA ultimately forbid.
Watching the match on ZDF (the most well known German TV channel), literally 50% of halftime was spent talking about how great of an effort that was. There was zero talk about the actual game (and there was enough to talk about), instead they showed people handing out rainbow flags and snippets of interviews, where everyone basically agreed that "soccer is unpolitical but the Hungarians definitely crossed a line with this law."
They never mentioned the actual law. Hungary banned homosexuality from children's movies. If you ask me that's about as softcore as homophobia gets, yet everyone in the segment was completely dramatic, like the Hungarians were going to deport gay people or something. The whole thing was devoid of actual information, instead basically just repeating "Hungary bad! UEFA bad! Activists good! Everyone agrees!" (keep in mind, without telling you what Hungary even did!) It was kind of surreal to watch, completely unlike what you would expect from a reputable TV station, and utterly out of the blue if you just followed the sport casually. Definitely a cheap stab at the opposition.
The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness. While luckily it's rare major media sources to just straight up fabricate false claims, fact checking has become virtually non-existent. Parroting the reporting of other journalists word for word is considered acceptable, and it has become common to see articles cite "according to another paper's anonymous sources." Articles get stuffed with filler disguised as context which often gets filtered as it gets rereported to cut out important details. Retractions are rare, and never prominent despite the clear prioritization of publishing quickly over taking the time to write a well researched article. They've also noticed its cheaper and easier to put the words "breaking news" in front of a headline which by no measure is than to actually go out and find urgent stories.
The partisanship and hyperpolarization is simply there to kind of cover up the laziness. Someone questions my lack of evidence? They're just a sea-lioning troll with an obvious partisan goal. Lots of other sites disagree with me? Clearly they're just shills. Someone points out I don't know the difference between a russian and a ukrainian? How would you know unless you're a russian bot! The gibberish of a monkey with a typewriter would be defended if the monkey had the right political leanings. We accept the shortcomings of many institutions because the ends justify the means, even though those ends could have been achieved with better means.
After Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, I heard a discussion on NPR where they talked about failures of the coverage of the primaries [1]. There were a lot of candidates in the Republican primaries: besides Trump there was Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and a few others.
The reporters in the field covering each candidate would send in items, both positive and negative, about all the candidates.
For all the candidates except Trump, they were seeing about the same ratio of positive to negative. For Trump, the ratio of positive things he did/said to negative things was quite a bit lower than that of other candidates.
The editors and producers had an implicit assumption that all candidates would be about the same in this regard and so killed a lot of the negative Trump items so as to keep in line with the number of negatives for the other candidates.
It wasn't until after Trump had locked up the nomination that they realized that Trump really did do/say more negative newsworthy things than the others, and that in trying to avoid bias or the appearance of bias they had actually introduce a pro-Trump bias.
[1] For those not familiar with the US system, each major party holds elections to determine who its nominees will be, and then those nominees compete with the nominees from the other parties in the general election.
What does "fabric of the country" mean? Is it a euphemism for American culture? If so, I definitely think there's a problem with American culture (i.e., political polarization), but I think it's largely a product of this manipulative media model rather than the cause. Note that we're not just seeing this in America, but also in Britain and Europe (and certainly elsewhere), although perhaps to a lesser extent.
I would be interested in solutions. Specifically, I'm curious if there's an intelligent way to limit the amount of revenue media companies can generate from online advertising. For example, 75% of a media business's revenue must be from subscriptions.
Naively it seems like people are more likely to subscribe to news that aligns to and reinforces their political ideology, which could lead to more polarization/bifurcation, not less
As for my speculation about the underlying mechanics, perhaps people who are willing to subscribe to media (rather than consume it for free) are more likely to be interested in the truth (i.e., useful information about the world) rather than having their biases reinforced and their hateful prejudices stroked.
There's nothing special about advertising revenue. It's incredibly rare that I see an ad on a site that's related in anyway to the article that I'm reading, nonetheless that there is some financial motive to modify the article. I'm no more likely to click on an ad for diet pills on an article saying there was voter fraud then on one saying there wasn't.
If I were required to read every single thing published by an outlet I subscribe to, then I would definitely reserve my money for institutions that published a small number of high quality works. But if I can select which articles I read, it makes sense for an institution to produce as many options as they can so that I'll be more likely to find at least one thing I want to read.
I don't know that this is true, nor widely accepted. I think it'd be accurate to say that the decline in general _quality_ of journalism is downstream of the dynamics you describe. But there are ways to be click-driven beyond building closed-loop narrative worlds for your readers. The obvious example is sensationalism and disproportionate emphasis on catastrophizing negative news for your readers, and this is entirely possible without being partisan. If anything, committing to a dishonest narrative view of the world cuts off half of your potential pearl-clutching: if the New York Times were breathlessly writing about the dangers of critical race theory the way Fox does, they would get _more_ clicks, not less.
Subscriptions work the opposite way here. Most people don't care about (or aren't capable of?) being informed, and subscriptions to the correct news source serves roughly the same function as choosing a church to hear your Sunday sermon at and make a part of your identity.
As far as I can tell, it fits the evidence much more cleanly to model journalism's narrative/polemical turn as downstream of the broader increase in polarization in society in general. The NYT spins alternative-fact fantasies not because of the economics of ad-based serving, but because of the characteristics of contemporary consumer demand.
No doubt there are other ways, but partisanship seems to be the optimal way at least in today's social media landscape.
> If anything, committing to a dishonest narrative view of the world cuts off half of your potential pearl-clutching: if the New York Times were breathlessly writing about the dangers of critical race theory the way Fox does, they would get _more_ clicks, not less.
That's kind of the point: NYT isn't going to write breathlessly about CRT because that's a conservative boogeyman (to be clear, there are a lot of valid criticisms of CRT or at least the movement born out of CRT, but as it's just entered the conservative lexicon 5 minutes ago they don't understand it well enough to critique it gracefully). NYT have their own topics about which they write breathlessly, consider from whence the 1619 Project came, after all.
The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.
> Subscriptions work the opposite way here. Most people don't care about (or aren't capable of?) being informed, and subscriptions to the correct news source serves roughly the same function as choosing a church to hear your Sunday sermon at and make a part of your identity.
I agree that most people aren't interested in being informed, but I disagree that subscriptions work the opposite way. First of all, there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low. IIRC there was some increasing partisanship as a consequence of cable news advertising which is just a less-gripping form of online advertising (if only because online media is truly on-demand and we carry access to it in our pockets 24/7), which is to say this observation supports the thesis that advertising and not subscriptions drive partisanship.
Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.
> As far as I can tell, it fits the evidence much more cleanly to model journalism's narrative/polemical turn as downstream of the broader increase in polarization in society in general. The NYT spins alternative-fact fantasies not because of the economics of ad-based serving, but because of the characteristics of contemporary consumer demand.
As previously discussed, if traditional and social media companies' ad-based revenue model were torpedoed tomorrow (say, due to legislation prohibiting ad revenue altogether, or at least online ad revenue) I strongly suspect the market for partisan media would largely evaporate. To say that media companies increasing polarization is just "responding to demand" in the same way that the tobacco industry was just "responding to demand" by making their cigarettes ever more addictive.
Yes, of course, but the statement I'm responding to was claiming that the economics of ad-based publishing drives agenda-driven "news". I'm saying that this doesn't fit the evidence, as agenda-driven reporting is if anything more consistent with a subscription-based system. The fact that it's agenda-driven instead of broadly sensationalist has roughly nothing to do (at least first-order) with the Internet and everything to do with consumer demand. To put it another way, in a hypothetical parallel universe where ad-funded news was banned, you would still see the turn towards agenda-driven reporting, as it's reflective of much broader trends in journalism and independent of ads-funding.
> The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.
Yes, I agree, but my point is that this is an _exogenous_ factor. Competition from an ads-funded Internet had nothing to do with driving newspapers towards partisanship; an exogenous shift in consumer demand did. I brought this example up not as a description of the world as it is but as a contradiction in your hypothesis. My claim is that consumer demand for partisanship is driving partisan news. Whether it's funded by ads or subscriptions is irrelevant.
> there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low
I know it's trite to say that correlation doesn't equal causation, but it's very relevant in this case. The postwar decades of relatively high journalistic standards were a historical anomaly. Yellow journalism existed in the past, well before online advertising, and the strategy that got people to buy newspapers was broad-based sensationalism, not the construction of elaborate filter bubbles.
I get that it's cheap to dismiss correlation without elaborating, but the causal hypothesis (ads -> partisan news) both has data pts contradicting it[1] and a more-plausible alternative mechanism, or at least the sketch of one[2].
> Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.
Ha, we differ pretty strongly on this factual question. Though perhaps this is my fault for being a little glib: when I say people aren't interested in being informed, I am very much (perhaps centrally!) including the modern information junkie, the core of the NYT (or Fox, or CNN, or MSNBC, or WaPo) subscriber/viewer base. They would probably claim they like being informed, but my point is that watching infotainment opinion shows and reading whatever the fuck the NYT calls what they do these days is a grotesque mockery of "informing oneself". There are undoubtedly hyper-literate, intelligent news consumers out there that have every subscription and use them all sparingly, but these are a vanishingly small minority; my claim is that anyone who thinks that a single-source news subscription is likely to make you understand the world better instead of understanding it worse is not "informed" by any useful definition.
All of the educated, affluent coastals that make up my entire social group use their NYT subscriptions and John Oliver viewings as nothing more than keeping up with the latest approved narrative[3]. For them, the value of their subscription is the feeling of religious harmony and comfortable, predictable single-mindedness it delivers. Broad-based (non-partisan) sensationalism is much less compatible with subscriptions than it is ads-funded articles.
[1] a broader rise in partisanship that is not plausibly driven entirely by journalism, the fact that the NYT et al has gotten substantially _more_ partisan as they've become increasingly subscription-based, etc.
[2] Ads funding and the decline in journalistic quality were both coincident with the earth-shaking, epochal rise of the Internet. Ads funding doesn't need to be causing this decline in order for them to co-occur, because they both arise from complex changes in the way information is distributed and epistemology is carried out. To use a contrived example, the correlation claim here is like saying "literacy expansion causes urban slums, just witness the correlation across the late 19th-century Western world" and ignoring that industrialization is the shared upstream node in the causal graph.
[3] The pandemic was an incredibly stark example, since for the first time they had significant skin in the game of being informed. No surprises there: everyone did exactly what you'd expect them to do, switching multiple times from "X is a terrible anti-science Trumpist conspiracy theory that people shouldn't even be allowed to think about!!!!" to "X is the science how dare you not believe it" on a _dime_ as soon as their news orgs of choice told them to.
Just to clarify, I don't think any of the events listed above will ever happen in our lifetime. I am just using them as a way to reinforce my expression of non-expectation on any real change to this in our new found normality.
A significant portion of our economies are interdependent at the moment. The US pays China to manufacture our products because the Chinese have fewer scruples about human rights or pollution (which obviously implies that our American scruples are at best superficial). So the only way I see us coming to a head with China is if we decide that we care about people (workers and the environment that we all depend on) and make China account for their pollution and human rights costs (either by forbidding trade with them outright or making them pay steep import taxes to level the playing field with countries who don't profit off of slave labor and pollution, including hypothetical US domestic manufacturing). That might make China desperate.
A huge problem is that the US does not have many foreign news correspondents posted abroad anymore. This leads to uncertainty and confusion when a crisis occurs. I personally rely on the Financial Times for foreign correspondent coverage. It also has great tech coverage. I have only been disappointed once when reading a tech article over 3+ years of being a subscriber.
the irony being that this is all assertive, emotive opinion and no rationale, no chain of plausible statements to consider and weigh, a narrative to either agree with or implicitly be relegated to the "fucked up" contingent.
emotions, which lead to narratives, are (perhaps more primitive) mental processes that help us survive (perhaps imperfectly) in the world. it's worth understanding and exploring that, rather than reeling off an overly dismissive, and ironically twitter-worthy, rant.
That is the main problem.
They no longer see themselves as a medium to disseminate events but rather shapers of opinions about events.
Like laughtracks for situational comedies, they see themselves as having a responsibility to tell people how to think of an event.
It’s like Pravda but worse. Pravda at least had the decency to not want to pit a population against itself.
Not so sure about this, there were a lot of purges...
Journalism has always been shaping opinions, alone by selection aka what gets reported in the evening news and what not. The only ones who manage to pass that mark are the huge news agencies with a worldwide presence, but no reasonable human can consume all of that content.
Reporting about science is another ... hotly debated issue. It is scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and that the virus SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19, a disease that has caused the death of at least 600.000 people in the US and about 3.9 million people worldwide - but for some parts of the country, mostly on the right wing, simply the act of reporting these facts is already seen as "opinion shaping".
And finally, even reporting on events can be seen as "shaping opinions" - think of events like mass or school shootings, where the 2nd amendment crowd complains that the victims or their relatives are being interviewed and calling for gun control. Or BLM and LGBT events - some people see the mere mention of these as "political".
Some missing facts:
The CDC and Fauci recommended against masks to protect the mask supply for health providers. Media pushed this messaging.
The vaccines seem to cause heart issues with some people dying from it. Only months later is the CDC admitting supposedly minor heart issues. Furthermore they are pushing people to take it (even those who stand to lose more than to benefit from it). Media pushes this narrative.
The vaccines do seem to work for most people and seem effective against the variants of COVID-19.
Many BLM protests were peaceful but some were taken advantage of and just became opportunities to loot.
Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime.
babesh is adding facts, mixed with pure opinion, of his own choosing to also further a narrative. Is "Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime." a verified (or even provable) fact? If so, what was omitted from that statement that would have made it less biased. And ultimately, how is he not committing the same sin as corporate media?
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra...
https://neonnettle.com/news/14685-los-angeles-votes-for-36m-...
Which facts would you like to dispute? What are you calling an opinion?
Your sources don't even support your opinion/narrative? If anything, I'm afraid your claim to the high ground has worsened.
Look who is picking and choosing which facts to ignore and choosing to spin a narrative. Go watch all the news even of left sided news. There are a lot of complaints about how businesses and communities are hurt. There are increasing calls to fund the police and some communities are starting to do that. Even Chesa Boudin is now saying that businesses need to protected. Even London Breed is saying the same.
They just arrested a person who was on a serial shoplifting spree. Police were complaining that they would arrest people and the DA would just let them free.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/suspected-shoplifter-fr...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/san-francisco-confronts...
Here is the shoplifter that they finally arrested after letting shoplifting go on for the past year.
“ Homicides and aggravated assaults in the city has increased over the last two years. Year to date, homicide up 26.5 percent over 2020, up 44.9 percent over 2019. Aggravated assault is up 12.8 percent year over year, and 11.3 percent over 2019. Overall violent crime is up year-over-year 5.8 percent, driven by homicide and aggravated assault numbers.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-car-...
So given that you are baselessly attacking him, and the only thing that drew you to him was the facts he stated; clearly you don't want him stating them. So again. I ask, why do you want those facts suppressed? And why are you being evasive about answering the question?
Attempted robbery of reporters in front of Oakland City Hall in broad daylight while the reporters were interviewing a cop about Oakland supervisors defunding the police and shifting resources to his crime prevention division.
When was the golden age of journalism when this wasn't the case?
There tend to be exceptions to everything. What’s important is the average or the trend.
Then the disruption of the 60’s happened and the Vietnam War drove a schism between official govt stance and the truth on the ground and some media personalities were famous for exposing it.
Now everything is fractured and when you dig into it you realize both side are trying to shape the narrative, so both are being selective about the truth.
By fighting over whose wool to pull over your eyes they inadvertently pulled it off entirely.
The interesting question is what will replace what we now call "journalism", and how it will work.
Interesting times ahead!
One might well call it for what it is, PR and propaganda, but in my experience one will want to retain the title "journalist" for all the positive emotional weight it contains.
I've had drinks with a few local paper "journalists" of the current, young generations and the reality of their work is shaping of narrative rather than reporting, but on the topic of job title view themselves in the same light as an Upton Sinclair. Brings to mind the early 2010s "positively changing the world" startup software engineers building Orwellian systems.
For instance, CNN is left leaning and Fox is right leaning. They should just explicitly state their viewpoint so viewers can calibrate how much credence they give to unsourced claims and see past the political posturing.
While I agree that NPR puts out a lot content that can be described as 'lefty', NPR News feels pretty straight down the middle.
Personally, I find the https://realclearpolitics.com model of just putting headlines from different outlets in a list to be more useful than outsourcing some sort of "bias rating" and "fact-checking" to YAMO (Yet Another Media Outlet).
I think the real subtext of this chart isn't so much to portray any particular outlet further to the left or right than it is, but rather to boost the credibility of fringe outlets.
That being said, I do appreciate that allsides uses an interesting method to blind bias surveys to help categorize. But sometimes things don't always line up.
I see it differently, subjective opinions aren't journalism.
It is a true statement, but it doesn’t mean that all models are equally wrong, or that all journalism is equally biased. Objective journalism is an ideal to strive for, even it if cannot be perfectly achieved.
That just isn't the case. People trust you if you re-enforce their biases. The news sources that are getting the most traction aren't the most objective ones.
Hopefully at least some news organizations will figure out a better path, I'm sure we won't go back to the old days but the fact that the younger demographic has pretty much left news media behind means that that generation will have to figure out something more balanced.
Yes this causes conflict. But in the end multiple echo chambers are an improvement over one big one, plus a few small alternatives that only weirdos like me were in.
That path seems to be pretty clear: charging for a subscription. But that's probably only a path open to global brands and popular niches.
― Mark Twain
Social media conveyed news took over the country like crazy. People are so misinformed, it's beyond scary.
One particularly shameful episode I remember was Trump being described as finally 'presidential' when he fired missiles at Syria. I genuinely think if he had started some disastrous war it would have rehabilitated him with the MSM.
Media sources are so politicized you have to question anything you read.
I had this graphically illustrated in the gym one day. There was a wall of televisions, with Fox on one tv and CNN on the tv next to it. Both stations were showing then-President Trump as he addressed a group of elderly veterans.
Fox ran subtitles extolling the popularity of the visit, explaining the increased benefits Trump was bringing. CNN ran subtitles describing looks of 'disappointment' and calling the benefits sub-standard. Both ran the exact same video.
The media richly deserves it's poor reputation.
When one party consistently attacks "the mainstream media" for decades for telling the truth about reality, you get this. It's not a "both sides" problem, the problem is only on one side.
>Interestingly, partisans, including conservatives, at least say that they prefer a range of views (74%) and neutral treatment of issues (66%) rather than reports that just reinforce their views.
People say they want that, but people also say they hate negative political attack ads, and we get something other than what we say we want because the product we actually get instead is appealing to many people.
More like telling part of the truth about a carefully selected aspect of reality:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/17/fact...