One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour. Most boring, non-sensational broadcast there is and yet, they fill it up with sold content and reporting. Also, no advertising.
The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it.
It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.
News being "all the time" is the true villain here. When news was infrequent and on a schedule, stories had to compete for relevance and often wouldn't dominate airtime and our thoughts nearly as much as today.
Now it just means “something we found out happening now and don’t have a lot of information about, but a couple of Tweeters “report” blah blah blah…
I occasionally like to go back 10 years or so and read some of the ridiculous fear mongering of the time, now that it's well out of context.
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...
Everything was moving to this direction for a long time, but having 24 hours news let people optimize such headlines faster than before, and the internet made it possible to optimize millions of headlines.
This is a trend that’s been existing for a while, and since now we have better tools to experiment as a society the progress of this trend is accelerating.
As an outsider watching from across the ocean, the 2016 election (the race itself and its media coverage, I'm not talking about the result) really hurt you guys.
The NYT still does world-class journalism, but not even a paper with that kind of rock-solid journalistic tradition fully recovered from the moralistic crusade it had become.
I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.
NYT has also published pieces about my country that I'd hardly could classify as any other thing than undisguised activism.
So I remain very skeptical. It seems to me that there's a wave of new journalism culture in all the west that it's not being challenged from the inside.
Here in Spain journalist make their ocassional reunions, interviews and stuff and they moan of the low consideration people have about them, then they go back to their seats to write or record what is basically political activism.
What I'm saying is that papers like the NYT were at least trying to separate facts from opinions in their reporting. It's just painful to see such a healthy tradition become overshadowed by the political trend du jour.
Journalists have to write about everything, and they arent experts at anything. My hypothesis is thqt the lazyiest of em just become activists and make this a way of life.
If you have any doubt about this, write any of the most common names in major publications in google and try find their twitter.
Having good information is very difficult, and it typically involves paying for it, or accessing specialist publications, or niche ones.
It is one of those unconfortable truths.
Cheerleading the Iraq War did it, for me. Especially for the NYT, but media generally. I sincerely wish them all the worst.
Then again, journalists as stock characters in fiction have been morally grey at best for just about all of the 20th century, at least, and I think to a substantial degree before that, too. I'm not sure where the idea that journalists have typically been, or been regarded as, forthright and virtuous, in the past, came from. The whole thing seems like a fiction built on a very few examples from a narrow time period (Cronkite's usually cited, for example)
Maybe my formative years were part of a relative anomaly in journalistic history--maybe journalists were always ideologically homogeneous propagandists and the last decade is naught but a return to form. In whichever case I know from experience it doesn't have to be that way and I emphatically reject the backslide.
I think to those on the right the last few years really opened their eyes to how much bias there is in journalism. I wish more people on the left noticed it as well, though I’m sure some did.
Either way, I’m surprised nobody has taken the opportunity to start a news source that actually attempts to be objective. Maybe it’s impossible, or maybe people just don’t want it…but I do.
RCP prints outrageous stories from both sides of the aisle. They don't try to find the center, they give you both sides.
Sorry but …you're gonna to have to back that up with pointer to some kind of records of this event .
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-...
The reckoning was indeed severe, but it was deserved.
Also completely agree that the "both sides" coverage did not work as intended.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-fa...
that’s ambiguously overstated. perhaps 1% of nyt journalism is “world-class”, meaning well-researched, investigative, and impactful. 99% is of the “moralistic crusade” kind of journalism, trying to influence the popular sentiment, rather than reporting on it.
and while 2016 was an inflection point, it’s certainly been on a longer slide, observable during the 2008 financial crisis and somewhat before that.
The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.
>Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial.
and then a link to an article from the very next day[2] explaining what happened in fuller detail after more videos came out.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-hig... [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...
> I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:
That was added later, hence the italics.
Nah anyone old enough knows this shift happened with cable news and a shift to 24/7 news. You cannot find enough content to make that interesting without filling it full of sensationalist bs. This was an issue far before the internet was a ever a major news source.
That has nothing to do with click bait and more to do with keeping loyal user base inflamed and plugged in. That’s why NYT doesn’t even bother how 50% of the country would feel when they blatantly call the worst pandemic in century “red COVID”. Or when Fox News cheers at the sitting presidents inability to answer a question without completely losing the thread as if it is a win for the side they are in. Real loser is the American people as always.
I just started watching this over the past year, not every day, but when something interesting happens and I want a mindless way to follow developments.
PBS broadcasts and uploads to various places, which makes consumption so much easier than others that are seeking profits. Between NewsHour, FrontLine, and their local broadcasts, PBS has done a great job compared to other media outlets.
I too like PBS NewsHour and modeled https://legiblenews.com/ off the idea of being non-sensational with no ads.
Another thing I did that this crowd would appreciate: I made sure that each page would have one and only one web request. Check it out in your network activity area in your browser—its fast!
The media in America is 100% dependent on Gell-Mann Amnesia (https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/) and some have pushed it so far that it's starting to wear off.
Hatred for CNN and other mainstream news is fed to a huge swath of the population by conservative politicians and pundits. They also heap scorn on excellent news sources like the NY Times and Washington Post because their factual reporting is damaging to their dishonest campaigns. Meanwhile, conservative media has shed any semblance of civility and just run blatantly agenda-driven stories. There's no both sides to this. It's almost entirely due to conservatives.
I can guarantee you that you don't just happen to hold the "right" viewpoints across all areas, removing the need to ever be exposed to other ideas. (And no, having CNN set up caricatures of other's ideas to make a mockery of them is not being exposed to other viewpoints). The idea that you're so right and everyone else is so dumb/wrong/evil/etc. that they're not allowed a voice, is really not a good position to hold.
That's not actually remotely true. People Are Subjective, and "real news" is written by people, and often about people. For one example, they gave Sanders less coverage than Clinton in every single week of the Dem primary; about 2/3 overall.
Their visuals, style, tone and presentation are meticulously crafted to give the impression that they're trustworthy and patriotic; that things are simple. That really ought to give you a clue that they're selling you something.
Tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies
I'm not comparing them a mythical platonic ideal media organization. I'm comparing them to outlets that are willing to push blatant falsehoods like birtherism or vaccine denial while giving "equal time" to climate deniers or the Laffer Curve economists. Fox was run for decades by a guy who loved conspiracy theories and was not bothered by colluding with politicians on one side and not the other. OAN and Newsmax are worse.
And on top of that a lot the hatred towards CNN is based purely on politically motivated lies. Trump hated them and told his supporters to hate them for spurious reasons. He would accuse them of lying about "the Russia thing" without citing an actual bad report as a way to distract from the factual reporting that made him look bad. Spreading mistrust of the media was part of his playbook to control what people believe and it worked extremely well.
Search CNN.com for Donziger and see how many results you get. I'll save you the effort; it's ZERO.
Here's a CNN page full of facts on the kids in border camps - https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/04/politics/biden-a...
People will read that, and think to themselves, oh what an even handed tone. What a large number of facts, and nice graphic breakdowns. But the crucial context is missing - who is running those camps, and what are their contracts like? Those people are making money hand over fist, on the back of the misery of children in tin-foil blankets drinking water out of toilets.
Same with their "fast facts" section on Assange - an exercise in misinformation. The information might be "factual", but it's carefully selected to give a particular impression. Crucial information isn't there, such as the US' key witness admitting he gave false evidence, or Nils Melzer's observations.
Yes, a search for Nils Melzer yields TWO articles - compare to a search for 'Kardashian', which yields 1,700 hits. There are more stories about the Kardashian's shoe line than the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
A search for 'Chomsky' yields 7 result; none seem to be about him or his observations. Yes, SEVEN, the single digit number. 'Zizek' yields ONE (and 'Žižek 'yields zero).
'Snooki' yields 116.
That's not News bud; not any more than Fox. That's entertainment. If you want to learn about a fire in California there are hundreds of ways to do it, and they're probably mostly better than CNN.
... Wow. Well, enjoy following the news CNN choose to tell you, I guess. Those Kardashian shoe lines are much more news than anything Chomsky has to say for some people, and I guess you're one of them. lol