People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.
What is the relationship between more trust in a mainstream source and susceptibility to disinformation you are implying here?
For example, IIRC Rush Limbaugh's audience gave him a lot of credibility and was less informed because of that.
For example Russian Today is often a great source for all non-russian news. But its a propaganda tube for russian news.
My point is if you want to hear about BS happening in your own country you'd probably read about it from foreign papers/sources first.
Those have no incentives not to bash your homeland, as oppose to local sources that have to balance not pissing off government (for access to interviews, news, sources) and ad revenue by reporting on the sensitive topics.
Your esteemed Main stream does not have an army of jurnos running around the world, they are throwing hissy-fits on their tweeter feeds and article about article and opinion about opinion - the circular reference of their own in group is mind boggling.
Suppression of real News and exaggeration of the mundane to make a political point is the biggest problem.
It is up to the individual to go to rich sources of information not shallow ones like news papers.
1) The mainstream news media is under enormous economic pressure, because the internet kneecapped their economic model: people got used to getting things for free (including bread and butter stuff like classified ads), and "engaging" crap (e.g. ideological hot takes) can be produced far more cheaply than valuable journalism (and is far more "viral"). That means the media often literally doesn't have the resources to even cover the number of stories they used to, let alone everything they arguably should.
2) It's important to be specific about what stories you think are being omitted. Are they actual stories of import, or ideological smears that happen to tickle your biases? We can't know unless they're specified.
Unfortunately, we appear to have something towards the opposite - large media outlets that aren't good, aren't trusted, and are trying to manipulate the market (à la Youtube with it's now completely useless search and its nefarious recommendation algorithms) to stop people going to competitors who might actually be doing a better job.
Until more people actively seek out more objective news sources and are willing to fund it with something other than ads, I don't see the situation improving.
Because they drive clicks.
As soon as gossip and unedited "news" blogs started appearing with rumor and unsubstantiated claims, it was a race to the bottom.
Why? Because the majority of people prefer mindless trash to the idiosyncrasies of a local county commission meeting.
I don't have a good answer because media companies have to make money to stay in business. Making them backed by the state is an even worse idea.
>I don't have a good answer because media companies have to make money to stay in business. Making them backed by the state is an even worse idea.
An excellent point. Local media outlets (in the US at least, not sure about elsewhere) are few and far between these days.
We need local news that focuses on "county commission meetings" and other happenings of local concern.
Unfortunately, unless you're in a big media market (NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Boston, etc.), odds are that your "local" news is written by folks hundreds of miles away, with no real understanding of local issues.
Here in NYC, we have dozens of local papers, blogs, independent news sites and local TV news outlets. As such, coverage of local issues is quite good.
But the days of small towns/counties having their own local newspapers and TV news are long gone in the US.
Anyone not living in a big media market will likely get only the broad-brush, zero nuance reporting that comes from national/regional news outlets.
That's a big problem for small towns, as there's no one with "skin in the game" watching the goings on of local and state government actors.
I don't have a solution (sadly) for this issue, because local news outlets in small media markets had a hard time staying in business long before the Internet, and the loss of classified ads in those small markets killed local journalism.
And so we have big national players like Fox, CNN, WSJ, NYT, USA Today, etc. that provide coverage of national issues and very limited (and inferior to real local reporting) coverage of regional/local issues.
This leads to really poor governance at the state and local levels and a lack of nuance about regional/national issues as they relate to local populations/economies.
More's the pity.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...
If you don't care about most of the decisions, and the people who make them, that directly impact your life, then no.
But if you care about the legal, civil and societal issues in your local area, like land use, taxes, local services, etc., you might have some interest.
Having answered your question, I'm starting to wonder if it was rhetorical or not. Not sure which I'd prefer it to be.
I am in the UK and I cannot trust any of the outlets at all. They lie by omission in many cases or simply do not cover it.
e.g. We've had massive anti-lockdown / vaccine passport protests in most of the cities in the UK this weekend. There are protests in France from what I understand around vaccine passports / health pass as well.
Not a mention of it at all on the BBC. Instead I find out about it via "Right Said Fred"'s twitter account. Who are "Right Said Fred"? A 90s one hit wonder band.
of course I'd love to hear how you determine rush Limbaugh listeners to be uninformed, especially since 90% of his show was reading/playing and then responding to mainstream news articles.
There's a difference between legitimate criticism of a publication, (which nearly any publication would deserve to varying degrees) and lazy, automatic dismissals of the news as "broadly untrustworthy."
(To be clear, and at a personal level, I don't particularly like the NY Times. Their headlines are often politicized and the editorial section is completely awful. However if you get off the front page and just read some of their in depth reporting, you'd be crazy to write them off as wholly biased or untrustworthy.)
And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing?
The most effective misinformation tells the truth, but not the whole truth.
> And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing?
All editing is selective, that's pretty much definitional.
I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The alternative to the NY Times (and similar publications) isn't some ideal publication that gives an accurate picture without distortion, it's talk radio and other opinionated sources that give pictures that are even more distorted.
The NY Times is like a plate of food with a fly in it. There are salesmen out there that spend a lot of time talking about the fly, reminding you how gross it is and how bad they must be for it to get there, etc. Then they'll offer a plate of dogshit as a substitute, and distressingly a lot of people will take it because they've been successfully fixated on that damn fly.
Uncritical acceptance of any source leads to mistakes like believing the Steele dossier and claims about collusion between Trump and Russia, whose claims even the NY Times itself now admits "have never materialized or have been proved false".[1]
That was one of the biggest pieces of disinformation in the last five years, and the NY Times pushed it wholeheartedly for many years. Their mistake here is summarized well in their own article:
> To learn from the dossier episode, news organizations would have to examine their ties to private intelligence agents, including why they so often granted them anonymity. But as long as the media allows private spies to set the rules, journalists and the public will continue to lose.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...
Real people who are actually engaged in the business of participating in society--holding down jobs, going to school, being citizens--don't have the time to effectively "research" every important issue, and, as a corollary, those who do tend to be cranks.
For sure nobody should engage in "uncritical acceptance", though to me this seems like a straw man. The test of a good newspaper isn't whether you can read it uncritically, but whether reading it critically leaves you more or less well informed.
* A distinctive phraseology which, as detailed in "Pale Horse Rider" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQS4DYQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...), goes back to at least William Cooper and the 1990s, but has recently come to be used for things like vaccine skepticism and QAnon.
A phrase that I didn't use. If you're going to put words in my mouth, don't try to overanalyze what they might have meant had I said them.
As you said "there's a lot of valid criticism to be had". All I'm saying is to be aware of that and seek out that criticism. And don't believe everything you read, even in the NYT.
Not having time for in depth critical reading is understandable, but if that's the case, recognize it and adjust your confidence level appropriately.
For sure. :) My point was only that there's a weirdly fine line between asking readers to be critical--which I think is valid--and the crank-laden calls to "do your own research."
I think that's kinda right, but I have some quibbles. Basically, I feel the attitude that they're not trustworthy and distorting the truth leads to a kind of paranoia, feelings of helplessness, or succumbing to the trap letting an uncritical indulgence of one's own biases dictate what's "factual." I think there's a better way to say a similar thing:
You can trust the members if the mainstream media to try their best, but realize they make mistakes for understandable reasons and have their own biases, so you need to read with those biases in mind and try to correct for them with a measure of skepticism (e.g. a grain of salt, not a boulder). Realize that they're all sharing a part of the truth, dig deeper, and withhold judgement. The news is a first draft of history, written before all the facts are in.
> “What I’m saying is that our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told his staff in a town hall on Monday.[1]
No doubt some members of the media are still trying their best, but look how many of the best have left the media for Substack or other independent pursuits, because the climate in the big media organizations no longer permits the pursuit of truth over politics.
1: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-m...
So what that they're partisan? It's a myth that a good journalist must be personally detached and disinterested, since that's frankly inhuman. They should strive to act that way in their work, but they're not going to be perfect at it, and they'll still have their personal opinions. It's one of those things to understand and correct for.
> No doubt some members of the media are still trying their best, but look how many of the best have left the media for Substack or other independent pursuits, because the climate in the big media organizations no longer permits the pursuit of truth over politics.
I haven't been following Substack, but the format only seems like a good fit for self-important pundit types and maybe few name-brand journalists that cover a few narrow but particularly popular topics. Honestly, IMHO, the op-ed section (where the former live) is the least valuable kind of journalism (but it's unfortunately the only kind of journalism a lot of people pay attention to).
So it's led them to uncritically publish lies time after time.
They claimed "Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage", but the medical examiner found no evidence of injuries, and a thorough review of the tapes found no event that would have caused his death.
They pushed the Steele dossier, whose claims, even they now admit, "have never materialized or have been proved false" and which was the work of a "renegade, billion-dollar [private spying] industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news."[1]
They said “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church” but a thorough investigation by the inspector general, published under the Biden administration, found that “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.”[2]
Something that claims to be the "newspaper of record" should have higher standards and not just run with any story that suits their partisan agenda.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...
2: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/yet-another-media-tale-trum...
If you don't want that, wait a year or more for someone to publish a definitive history after all the investigations are done.
And you're seeing that process in action: the NY Times wrote about the Steele dossier in a timely fashion and later wrote about how it was false after new facts come to light.
Worse, the attitude seems to be "so what if they're partisan", as you said. Neither they nor their audience have learned anything from their many mistakes.
And that's being generous by allowing that they were mistakes. One would expect mistakes to happen in both directions, but as Glenn Greenwald said of the media in general, "The most notable aspect is that they all go toward promoting the same narrative."[1]
I suspect what's really happening here is that the standards for publication are drastically, catastrophically lower when the story is both powerful and politically convenient. That is not a mistake; that is prioritizing politics over truth. That is a publication that's in the business of propaganda, not journalism.
1: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-w...
That doesn't match my recollection. For instance, I recall the reporting I read about the Steele dossier reported that it existed and made claims X, Y, Z, but it did not endorse those claims. And that's not just me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier:
> The media, the intelligence community, and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations...
On the Lafayette square thing, I don't recall how tentative the exact language the stories used was (and I certainly didn't read every one), but the the timeline of the events makes it very clear that crowd clearance and the photo op were closely coordinated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._J.... Which does back to my last point: it looked like a duck, it quacked like a duck, they reported it was a duck, but after a year of investigation and a battery of DNA tests, it turned out it was a mutant goose.
I wouldn't draw too strong conclusions from Greenwald's list. And frankly if those things are embarrassing he should be embarrassed too, because the "Havana Syndrome" story (#6) isn't over, yet he jumped the shark to claim it's been debunked. He honestly seems to be cherrypicking to support his narrative, which is one of those things you have to correct for.
> The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.
That's an op-ed, but it's making a factual claim, so it's doubly dishonest: it's misinformation and it's pretending factual allegations are just "opinion".
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-2016...
Wow, this quite possibly is the stupidest thing I ever read on NH. No, there is no trade off between accuracy and timelessness! If you can’t guarantee accuracy then you can report that “a questionable pice of information that can’t be easily verified says X’. So that people who are into gossip can get their fix, while people who are only interested in undisputed facts do not. And yes - undisputed facts are where 99% of all people agree that this is a fact, rather than 49% or 53%. I also understand that it would eliminate 90% of news and stories, which admittedly is the point.
- https://www.nytimes.com/section/world/middleeast
- https://www.nytimes.com/section/business/economy
- https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/nuclear-energy
- etc.
I'm not suggesting that these stories are all perfect. But, my claim would be that they don't suffer from the same problems (or at least to the same degree) as the very loud Trump vs. Biden bias that may exist there. It ought to be possible to say something like the following: "The NY Times probably has a measurable slant when it comes to reporting on the major US political parties, however that particular bias does not directly bleed into all other areas of their reporting."
That's always seemed rather strange to me. When I see that a newspaper isn't trustworthy on one subject, I think it's reasonable to doubt them on all subjects.
I'm not saying they're always wrong; sometimes they're even right about Trump. But no one should trust something simply because they've written it.
I don't think being wrong on one subject damns a whole paper.
I would agree in general. A paper that was consistently wrong about sports might still be trustworthy about science.
But almost every story touches on US politics, so misleading the public about US politics casts doubt on all of the stories. They're probably still trustworthy on sports and celebrity gossip, but politics influences science, medicine, business, economics, international news, etc, so their bias in politics is likely to infect all those other topics.
> Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.
...
> But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.
> What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.
What's ironic is that this attitude was described in the quote hobs responded to:
> If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.
My thoughts exactly. The other thing I find so frustrating is that people online will assert that bias is a terrible thing and that people should be open minded. But they also assert that it is a bad thing to be an "enlightened centrist" and they immediately become dismissive of anyone who utters the term "both sides". It's maddening.
> They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
I am so tired of this trope. Nothing is ever 'true leftism' and yet everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, *-ist, etc.
Yes that happens, in the New York Times. It's wonderful for a center-right organization like Democrats to pose as leftist in their party organ. Rational people, including rational actual leftists, are less likely to try to "de-platform" anyone.
Quoth your link "The shift coincided with the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, when trust in the media was often juxtaposed with trust in Trump’s presidency."
The problem the media has is that it can't please everyone's biases. If it's appropriately skeptical of Trump, the people who hate to see Trump criticized will be unhappy (and in that case there's an ideological media alternate universe willing to capitalize on that unhappiness and turn it into mistrust). If it becomes a Trump love-fest with either muted skepticism (e.g. Fox News) or hardly any at all (e.g. OANN), then a lot of people with mistrust it (because it's arguably not doing its job).
It's a lot like Congress, actually. People mistrust "Congress" but usually like their Congressman. That's because their Congressmen likely to be ideologically similar, while "Congress" as a whole has people who are very different ideologically (and it may be controlled by those people). And to top that off, the electoral strategies of both parties often play up fear and mistrust of the other side in order to drum up votes (which unarguably helps the candidates most of the time, but hurts the institution).
Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server. This made no sense on any level; neither Trump nor anyone in his circles controlled the mail server or its DNS, they were behind so many levels of subcontracting he'd have to involve a bunch of people he had no reason to trust and who all denied any such thing happened, all to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need some other, undetected, much better communication channel to get any meaning out of it and that was tied to the Trump brand for no good reason. And this was supposed to be a better explanation than other mail systems which had received promotional hotel e-mails merely doing automated DNS requests as a result, like many e-mail systems do.
So naturally, the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate this in a way that implied they were somehow supporting Trump if they didn't, and went massively viral on social media with this demand. The New York Times pushed back against this in the mildest way possible, by saying that the FBI had looked into these claims and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal email systems doing ordinary things in response to marketing emails. (This was also what nearly every technical expert seems to have concluded regardless of party.) Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.
Do you have an actual link to that?
Another problem is that some people have the mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that was timely.
> Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.
Maybe, to make my point more explicitly: the main issue with the media nowadays seems to be many of the people who consume it. And frankly, most criticism of the media's trustworthiness that I see online is the kind that will only make whatever problem that's being complained about worse.
I personally lost the last of my faith in the USA over the pandemic and the Trump era. We needed a vaccine agains News Corp about twenty years ago. What we got instead was normalization of “alternative facts,” and now everyone is worried about cancel culture or some other b.s. while I’m over here watching the end of the age of reason.
It really is turtles all the way down with the media and political parties. It's time to remove the artificial divides in your mind and fight these issues from a more party-agnostic position. We need your help.