It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors.
I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, but their literal job is to check things out.
I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, but their literal job is to check things out.
Even when their fact-checkers are utterly wrong, they will just update stating "needs more context".
But once I started doing that, I couldn't turn it off for regular media sources. Reading articles critically was a huge shock: there are a LOT of really low-quality articles at (eg) the NYT, cases where they get the most basic of facts wrong, and are trivially fact-checked by clicking through to the study they reference.
However. I don't think the vast majority of people are capable of exiting "pour facts into my brain" mode when reading an article. Your position that we should bite the bullet and stop pretending to be neutral would bolster the epistemology of the few who already think critically, but do horrible damage to that of the masses. Maybe the NYT is the best society can do for honest, mass-market journalism. If that's the case, it seems dangerous to give up what little commitment to rigor and honesty they have. I certainly don't want to live in a world where even more people get their news from Breitbart equivalents.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the only successful examples of opinionated, high-quality journalism are denser and less accessible, from The Economist all the way up to specific blogs. Perhaps because simplified narratives are required to hold the attention of John Q Public, and every simplification is an opportunity for bias.
[1] My favorite example of this was when I followed a chain of links and read an article that I disagreed with much about, but retrieved a very novel insight about how to better achieve social justice, a cause which is important to me. As I got deeper into the article, I started having more and more strong disagreements until at a certain pt I realized the guy was a (self-identified) Christian reactionary monarchist, ie a paleo-paleo-conservative. The second thing I learned that day was the meta-lesson that even someone whose values are incredibly alien to me can teach me something tangential to his values.
What? Business Insider has always been known as a low-value clickbait website AFAIK. Maybe people don't talk about it much because it's assumed?
It's really not that difficult a skill to build though. The trick is not to get perfect at detecting sarcasm or trolls but to realize that if you're talking about an individual or a minuscule group of people online (like the 57 members of the "bounty hunter ring"), it's almost never worth paying attention to regardless of its trolling status. Best-case they're trolling, worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit. Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world.
I'm serious, it's really, really easy not to get taken in by bias-confirming dumb things. In fact, there's a force running counter to your framing, in which the average person has _less_ excuse to be taken in by trolls. Journalists have an economic incentive to jump on a story, while an individual is free to avoid having an opinion until there's enough usable information to shift your priors.
Careful though, QAnon was once an infinitesimally small amount of nutty people, and now they have at least two[1], likely more, sitting US Congressional representatives, with 36 running next year[2].
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/11/04/congres...
2: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-36-qanon-supporters-runn...
As long as it fits into a convenient, simple, marketable narrative that isn’t unacceptable to the outlet the journalist works for, its not that hard. Bonus, sure, if its one that the outlet the journalist works for is already pushing (which is probably more important in most cases than the journalist’s own priors; in fact, that this is the case is pretty visible when journalists switch outlets.)
The professional journalists feel much less like the sources of information that they should be, and more like definers of "truth".
There have always been media personalities, but Twitter has made that the default mode of the industry, and removed editorial safeguards from a dramatic amount of the journalistic conversation.
Less interestingly but probably more saliently, the economics destruction that the internet wrought on journalism has just destroyed the economic buffer that allowed them to build a culture of standards and principles (such as it was). People have always liked being affirmed over being informed, and the journalism market now forces journalists to deliver that.
It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as they know it will get clicks. FTFY ;)