Trust in newspapers and television news collapses to historic low
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There was absolutely no reason why such people would not buy out all news and use it as a tool to propagate their own private interests when those regulations were removed. Especially by using them to push their public agenda to boost their business interest and different corporations' stock prices. Just like how it was in late 19th century with the Robber Barons.
And don't even start looking at its effect on the elections - that's a bigger cesspit than what you can imagine.
But now we have journalists lying in the face of facts or ignoring strong counterarguments.
In other words they have more or less all have their personal slant and push it to the fore without much restraint. There is little nuance. And by god, do they copy pasta talking points. Today Shinzo Abe out of the blue acquired the adjective "divisive".
Or alternatively, before they had an editor to set that set of interests and agendas.
So yes, they had agendas too but they were kept from going into wild Pravda as well as The Enquirer territory.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/five-reason...
"All Murdoch editors, what they do is this: they go on a journey where they end up agreeing with everything Rupert says but you don't admit to yourself that you're being influenced. Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think: what would Rupert think about this? It's like a mantra inside your head, it's like a prism. You look at the world through Rupert's eyes."
...
It would not be different in any other corporate media outlet. Only maybe more subtle.
But now for years they have all been on Twitter and it is suddenly plain to see. Freed from the rules and conventions of their professional medium, they spot nonsense on Twitter and show just how poor their understand truly is. The illusion of impartiality is impossible to sustain like this, which is why the BBC has tried restricting journalists from Twitter, but it's just impossible. They can't stay away, and their credibility declines with every tweet they make.
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/02/598916366/sinclair-broadcast-...
https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/rupert-murdoch-thatcher-me...
It seems like the internet, powered by advertising, brought the 'attention' economy roaring back. In its wake news organizations and their hard-won subscriber bases were eroded.
Now we seemed poised to relearn the same lessons about what happens when your incentives are not for truth and accuracy but rather attention.
As the internet has evolved inexorably to take advantage of our psychology, I don't think we are going back.
I also have a friend who has fooled/manipulated the media on a National scale to humiliate the US Navy (he’s a Westpoint grad). So… there’s likely truth to the book.
The Form of News: A History by Barnhurst and Nerone is a dry and academic take but a pretty informative one.
https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
Other than that, I've compiled a "light reading list" which I still feel is a good starting point though I'd probably add to it. Previously mentioned in this thread, and inlcuding Holts's work, as well as several of the other suggestions responding to your question.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
- present multiple extremes
- find the recommended mid ground from their perspective
- show the consequences of extremes
To simply show a single perspective isn't journalism, from my own perspective.
The same can be said of anything on the internet, largely controlled by big tech, what is stopping them from manipulating information for profit?
"Newspaper X wrote Y" is factually true if newspaper X indeed wrote Y and NOT if Y is true. This in combination with the fact that they (who?) decides which newspapers are accepted, makes Wikipedia very much a propaganda tool when it comes to politically relevant topics and events. They do the "selecting and omitting" to support a narrative all the time.
Republicans view NYT as very biased, but democrats almost entirely believe it’s unbiased and accurate. The NYTs rides the line really well and continues to grow.
On the flip side, both democrats and republicans largely regard Fox News as entertainment news and more biased. They don’t ride the line too well.
That is not true of Democrats. In fact, everyone dislikes the NYT (which is excellent evidence that they are good journalists). For example, progressive Dems have long seen they NYT as a tool of the corporate mainstream, almost the epitome of it. For centrist Dems, the Times broke the Clinton email server scandal and covered the Wikileaks DNC emails.
Dems generally have more skeptical views and get news from more sources.
> democrats and republicans largely regard Fox News as entertainment news and more biased. They don’t ride the line too well.
They are exceptionally influential and profitable, so it depends on your standard for 'well'. And don't forget the Wall Street Journal, the elite outlet for the same organization.
See https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-political-economy-of-freedom...
If you think about it, does the typical journalist who probably trained in just writing really understand some of these complex topics they write about.
No, but I like to think that journalism is supposed to be about finding the real experts, asking good questions that the general populace would want answered, and judiciously recording and reporting the answers they get. I feel like most of the journalism we get today is more akin to bad interviews, where the interviewer doesn't know when to shut up and let the expert talk haha.
I don’t know who discovered water but I’m sure it wasn’t a fish.
(Seriously: very likely you know what I'm talking about, but what is it called? We haven't even named it, we are so paralyzed.).
The critical question to ask, of any radical revolution, is 'who benefits'? It's almost never the people caught up in it; they are usually manipulated or used or simply discarded by someone else who acts opportunistically. And the nihilism of this revolution ensures they will not benefit. How much damage will be done? How many generations will it take to rebuild? 1,000 years, like after the fall of Rome? I'm sure Romans thought that was impossible too, until the very last moment.
::: THIS ::: Is the AI apocalypse. We'll figure it all out, and route around the damage, I hope.
Can't we just call it post-structuralism or post-modernism?
Cynicism so extreme it crosses into naivety.
While I can see who may be benefitting from it, I suspect a significant part of it is people moving up the Maslow’s hierarchy combined with deep-seated mental issues (some likely left over/inherited from much more financially insecure times).
https://apnews.com/article/business-immigration-deregulation...
That’s not to diminish the role that Fox or Reagan has had, but rather, that it’s a much more complex problem.
And, you would be remiss laying it solely on Conservative feet.
Also, from the article "Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'". How does that square with "republican distrust of media"?
Prior to deregulation, all news organizations were required by law to present both sides of the story fairly — after it, the were not. Without deregulation, Fox as is would not have been legally possible. Policy was explicitly pushed by Regan’s executive team at the FCC and Regan vetoed bill passed by US Congress to over turn it; if that’s not the definition of being politically driven, not sure what is, given Supreme Court had already ruled FCC was allowed to enforce fairness in the media.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
Without fairness being legally regulated, media will never gain the public’s trust again — which at this point is unlikely because the government has become so corrupted by its own self interest to do so; this includes governments preferring monopolies in industries that relate to national security such as media & telecommunications. Decline in the public’s trust is not a result of fair media not being trustworthy, but of biased media intentionally sowing distrust.
I have repeatedly seen individuals who lean towards biased sources be more biased when presented with fair accounts of news events. On flip side, my experience is that individuals seeking balanced accounts of news events tend to be more fair when accessing the events.
Fox is not the problem the USA has. Fox is the solution. Would all the people who think news media is untrustworthy be lapping up CNN if Fox didn't exist? Again, other countries provide the answer - no, they wouldn't. They would just assert that all TV news is biased and refuse to watch any at all, whilst simmering in anger at the system that tries to eliminate them from public life.
Did you even look at the link to the Fairness Doctrine?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
If not, and you don’t understand it, or the impact it had, maybe consider that you’re talking about a topic you don’t even understand.
Fox as is, would be illegal under the fairness doctrine and would be shutdown.
Lately we seem to make a lot of proclamations about how terrible things are, and then we feel bad because we think things are "worse than ever". But usually they aren't as bad as they used to be.
In reality, there's been a long-term secular decline remarkably constant over decades dating to the 1950s and the end of WWII. That's been punctuated by a number of factors --- the advent of television and television news, mass advertising, cable TV, media consolidation, financialisation, the Internet, neoliberalism, 9/11, the US-Iraq War & War on Terrorism, the 2008-09 global financial crisis (which tanked ad spend), and the rise of the smartphone and mobile social media.
I.F. Stone interviewed on the PBS show Day at Night in 1974 spoke of what he saw as a golden age of American journalism in the 1970s, largely with the reporting on Watergate and the Vietnam War. That's the zenith to which the present situation might be compared.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g
The topic is of course fare more complex. I've compiled a "light reading list" which I'm still working through myself, and need to add to, here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
I've somewhat tried to stick with older sources, preferably over 25--30 years old, for similar reasons to the Ask Historians subreddit: the works are time-tested, and older history is more settled and generally less liable to stir up present partisanship. The general principles seem to be surprisingly consistent over time, and it's often useful to consider modern information technologies and implementations through the lens of earlier forms and variations. Scale and speed do seem to be a significant deviation from that rule.
Where I've made exceptions for newer works, it has been those which focus more on the technology, organisations, and institutions rather than the parties involved.
That said, I'll give it a look.
There has certainly been a rise in the availability of low-quality crap since then - especially post-Twitter - but I have a pet theory that if people's politics hadn't shifted towards the extremes in a way that caused them to distrust the old mainstream, there would be less interest in the crap. (E.g. Fox News didn't "convert" anyone in that house, it was just a previously-unavailable sort of preaching to the choir that hit a ready audience. Funnily, after a couple decades of it, though, it lost its flavor to them.)
tldr: common view is "lower quality media" -> "partisanship and division" and I don't know how we'd be confident in that vs "partisanship and division" -> "more demand for low quality media."
See Umberto Eco's description of Ur-Fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
Robert O. Paxton's "The Five Stages of Fascism" (https://web.archive.org/web/20170221113224/http://theleder.c...) and The Anatomy of Fascism (https://archive.org/details/anatomyoffascism00paxt_0) make a case that I interpret as much of what we view as fascist behaviour seems to be information-theoretic, and typical of any culture or community under increasing stress. (This raises several grim prospects.)
Dwight MacDonald's 1956 take on mass media describes much, "A Theory of Mass Culture": https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...
Edward Jay Epstien's News from Nowhere (1973) discusses the considerations in national television news production. Many of those constraints have been lifted (it's now far easier to capture, transmit, and edit content), others have been introduced (there's far more competition for audience), and some remain largely constant (there are only 60 minutes in an hour, or 30 in a half, of which a substantial portion is lost to advertising). The news business is a constant juggle between sourcing material, producing it for broadcast, audience maintenance, and working within the confines of a time-bounded medium.
https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst
(Several of these works are NOT on my previously-linked biography.)
A general consequence is that commercially-organised media and majority-based governance seem to have a number of factors and dynamics which drive them toward demagogic / nationalistic populism. This may be problematic.
Which may feed the thought that it was never that much about "quality journalism", but about "quality debate arguments". So another view on this may be rather about the decline of the quality of prefabricated debate arguments, which are arguably hard to find on social media. As it seems, the apparent answer for subscription based media was to double down on partisanship, but also to embrace the easy-to-digest quality of electronic media formats.
One basic principle is the "I cut, you choose" heuristic for fairly allocating some resource (e.g., cake). The agent who determines the portioning is not the agent determining the allocation.
This appears in the context of central bank management policies in the case of the US Federal Reserve whose dual mandate is to address concerns over inflation and unemployment. The Fed regulates these, but does not measure them --- both are instead calculated by the US Department of Labour, through the Bureau of Labour Statistics. The Fed acts, Labour judges.
In biological contexts, we can refer to external or internal selective pressures. The latter are often called "mating preferences", and are the explanation often given for (biologically) expensive, but generally non-functional adaptiations such as antlers on deer, elk, and moose, or the peacock's tail. These are generally seen as signalling mechanisms demonstrating indirectly fitness criteria.
Market-based feedback mechanisms for epistemic systems seem to me to be dangerously endogenous, in the sense that the recipient of the information is also engaged in judging that information. We have the term "shooting the messenger" as a description of this.
Robert Anton Wilson expressed what's come to be called Celine's Second Law: "Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws
That is a necessary but insufficient criterion. My extension would be that accurate communication is possible only when the ONLY reward criterion is accuracy of the information.
That is, popularity, entertainment, commercial viability, ideologcial conformance, convenience, conformity with tradition or institutions, are all bias-inducing reward mechanisms. Most of these can be found expressed in various informational biases or discredited bases for truth. Virtually all of them have the characteristic of being positive feedback loops, that is, information satisfying the biased reward system strengthens that reward system. Generally until it doesn't.
News that comforts or feeds narratives should be immediately suspect. Truth is generally inconvenient.
How to apply these principles to human epistemic systems remains something of a challenge. Though I'd argue strongly that the market is a distortionary mechanism.
That's a popular claim - just like the claims against journalism - but also historically ignorant. Human biology hasn't changed in ~200K years, but human nature has changed dramatically. It took 190K years to discover agriculture and 195K years to discover writing, and look what happened since then! Look at our natures compared with humans 200, 500, 1K, 10K, 100K years ago: We're democratic, free, incredibly prosperous and safe and peaceful, etc. etc.
You say that agriculture, writing and democracy have changed human nature but I argue they have only changed the backdrop against which the play takes place, the players and the lines are the same as ever. People didn’t think any differently when they were hunter gatherers, illiterate and living in a family group instead of a city. The subject matter would differ but the nature of the thoughts would be the same as if you were thinking about the same things.
That I agree with to an extent. I don't have thoughts that a witch cursed me, for example, or that I can accuse people based on a revelation rather than objective evidence.
> Our wider scale dealings and political intrigues are largely the same
Unless I misunderstand your meaning, that claim is clearly untrue. There was no democracy, rule of law, freedom, etc. etc. etc. for most of human history. We handled political issues much differently; intrigues don't involve murder and civil war.
Things are far from "worse than ever": https://nypost.com/2018/03/03/9-charts-that-prove-theres-nev...
Everyone who was alive then is now dead, so of course we are having to relive that era.
Now it is consolidated under the control of very few.
That doesn't seem like a positive change to me.
This is certainly true of my own experience. I am surprised to see it being pointed out so plainly in what appears to be a relatively mainstream sort of news outlet.
Journalists like Judith Miller of the New York Times were accused of being "stenographers" who reported whatever they were told by sources in the government without doing any independent verification, with many of the claims they reported later being shown to be false. They would report on things like Colin Powell's testimony to the UN on Iraq rather uncritically, when Colin Powell's own privately stated opinion of the draft of his speech was, "This is bullshit".
The effect of this was that the US public was misinformed about the role of Iraq in terrorism and the 9/11 attacks, as shown by surveys where a majority of the public would get the facts wrong about basic questions surrounding Iraq and 9/11, and both the public and politicians supported the war more than they would have if there was a more balanced debate in the media.
The argument is, basically, "If the US public knew the truth, they wouldn't have approved of going to war". Which of course is the case in most wars the US gets in - the role of the US media in the run up to a war is to make sure the public doesn't know the truth.
Even readers with relatively low media literacy understand now that mass media doesn’t just give you curated stories about what is happening, they are also telling you how to feel about what is happening. This has probably always been happening but ordinary Americans are more aware of it now.
They are about as credible as the US Supreme Court which claims to apolitically “call balls and strikes”.
It's sad that aside from the dated examples, it rings so true now: https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/
I remember speaking to some younger folks recently, and I mentioned journalistic integrity, and they didn't even believe the concept ever exists. I doubt they have ever consumed any significant amount of content produced by professional journalists operating under the stricture of formal editorials and fact checking, but it is still somewhat concerning that they don't even acknowledge its existence.
There's some things to be said in this space:
- Newspapers were never competently replaced, business model wise
- Web ads were never sufficiently constrained to not break web pages
- Ad blockers ultimately started to completely destroy any last chance that ad powered solutions could pay for professional journalism
- Entertainment journalism has a different business model, enabling it to be more readily available, and popular, than formal journalism
- I don't think anyone knows where to go from here
I really dislike the term "media" in these discussions, because it seems to lump "entertainment news" squarely in with formal journalism, and I do not think they're equivalent - moreover it's clear the difference is not well observed anymore, and that's extremely concerning.
That's why it's a travesty that there aren't journalistic outlets that can be reliably counted on to stick up for the truth when that truth happens to be contrary to their political leaning.
I don't think the eyes only world exists anymore. You're absolutely free (I hope) to try to ignore the rest of it, but you'll interact with it regardless.
I could argue that it is orthogonal to integrity seeing as I believe integrity to be about intent and not result.
What cannot be argued however is that this viewpoint definitely casts a shadow on journalism as a profession, even the "serious" journalism.
What always struck me in Chomsky’s lectures are the constant barrage of examples of big, serious publications pushing agendas left and right.
I guess what I am trying to say is that serious is a low bar here, not that much higher than entertainment news.
Does anyone really question the existence of objective truth in general? Even those who claim they do, don’t actually act like they do-when it comes to non-controversial factual claims such as “1+1=2” or “Canada is north of the (mainland) United States” or “World War II happened”.
People only really question objective truth when it comes to issues connected to social/political/ideological/ethical/philosophical/etc controversies-on issues distant from those controversies, everyone accepts it in practice.
And I think a lot of people don’t make a careful distinction between the existence of objective truth and our ability to know it. Some people who question the existence of objective truth, what they are really trying to say, is our ability to (confidently) know what is objectively true has been significantly overrated-which is a claim far more worthy of intellectual respect than what they are literally claiming, especially if one restricts the scope of that claim to certain topics.
If not then why?
There is an external reality independent of people's thoughts. We have spend so many centuries insulating people from it that they can believe all sorts of nonsense that would have killed them near instantly in previous ages.
I tried to ask this part in the conversation. It was their belief that no one producing media demonstrates any interest in trying to be objective. They expressed a belief that no individual or organization ever even attempts to do so, that agenda is ever present. This expression seemed to imply that they believe it is possible, but that no "they" can be trusted to attempt do so.
Look at Windows Update. It's a great feature, makes the OS many times more secure - potentially can patch 0-day exploits almost instantly. But Microsoft cannot use it just for customers good, they have to abuse the feature and use it to push advertisement, push more telemetry (aka snooping), push unwanted OS version updates, push unwanted option changes (oops, Edge is now the default browser). They fear that if they use Windows Update just for customer's good they are leaving money on the table and they hope the majority won't notice/understand the abuse.
Same thing with mass media. It's a great feature of modern society and technology - a key element in any modern country (both liberal and unfortunately totalitarian - like Russia and China). But the owners cannot use it just for the society good - they fear they are leaving money on the table (and leaving money on the table means you're an easy target for take over) and they hope the majority won't understand the media is being abused (but as the article states the majority now does understand mass media is being abused and is not trustworthy).
This is called “mainstream media”.
Budding writers of mainstream media are then forced to craft a disingenuous storyline to befit their masters.
This is called a “narrative”.
Unless they can secure their own wage and seek out the truth to the bottom of a story, they are called “muckrakers” and they would be practicing “yellow journalism”.
And this current situation is not healthy for a freedom of press needed to maintain a robust form of democracy, pure (simple) ot not (Republic).
For now, your local bar and neighbor shall remain closest to the kernel of truth.
I say this as someone would be an independent or Democrat on this graph.
edit: To clarify, I laugh not because it’s funny, but because all the other more appropriate emotions have long since run out.
Obviously the West is not there yet, but if the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for, we'll get there.
> But, the 8 years of Obama demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
> But, the 8 years of Bush demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
I'm sorry, I just really don't like statements like this. It literally tells me nothing except what political affiliation you have and it does not give any coherent argument for/against why "the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for".
And no, it doesn’t tell you my political affiliation. It tells you that I believe Trump to be a brazenly corrupt individual and that I hate brazen corruption.
I also respectfully disagreed with a lot of things about the Bush, Biden, and Obama administrations but they were in no way comparable to the transactional corruption of Trump.
He had massive conflicts of interest from day one and refused to step back from his business interests: https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/313864-government-et...
>> In business, a conflict of interest arises when a person chooses personal gain over duties to their employer, or to an organization in which they are a stakeholder, or exploits their position for personal gain in some way.[1]
I fail to see how giving your paycheck away results in any sort of personal gain other than some tax write offs. In that article you linked, it also said he handed his business over to his sons. I recall our current president had his son making business deals in China based on his dad's name and reputation[1].
>> But the new documents — which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden — illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.[2]
How is that not the same level, or greater corruption than what you posted? Seriously, I don't get why people believe any administration is not corrupt.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-donation-salar...
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conflict-of-interest.as...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/30/hunter-bi...
How many senators, congressmen, and presidents have made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from their "government service"? Why, I can think of a president off the top of my head who used his earlier position heading US anti-corruption in a country to get his son paid millions of dollars by corrupt people in that country.
News used to serve a very necessary purpose. People simply didn't get much information and the news was a very necessary way to learn what was happening in the world around you. But times change. Now we live in the information age. People are constantly bombarded by information, so much that they can't even process it, myself included. The news media simply had no hope.
So they executed a strategy that absolutely succeeded in the short term: reporting to induce mass hysteria. Covid is the worst pandemic ever, Trump destroyed the entire country, the US is a fundamentally racist and awful country that must die, etc. As I said, they succeeded in the short term to boost revenues, but the truth is that it was all mostly bullshit. And this strategy could only work once. Most things the news reports are just idiotic bullshit or opinions of people who don't matter, and people en masse are recognizing this.
So yeah, I think this was inevitable. In the words of CBS president Les Moonves, the whole shift was "bad for the country, good for [CBS's] business". I definitely agree that the modern clickbait news is bad for the country, and I am not a shareholder of CBS, so I personally celebrate the collapse of trust in news and can't wait for it to completely die and for the new grassroots era of information to take hold (but I do dread the impact of deepfakes and the like).
The amount of money spent on some research stories is tremendous how will grass roots journalists be able to do that
The news was the only thing capable of pointing out corruption in business and politics. It was perfect, it didn't always work, sometimes they lied, and many had an agenda. Now it isn't trusted. Guss who will benefit.
It's hard not to end up nihilistic and hopeless in a world filled with those stories.
The route around it is to ignore those institutions that have failed us, and build our own networks. HN is one of those networks. Pay attention to what people tell you, and if it turns out to be right or not in the long run. That's what I do.
Why News Used To Have Less Bias
Exploring the claim that American news in the 50's and 60's was unbiased.
There are some exceptions, but most media fails.
I don't want a news source to tell me how to think. Or even to validate my thinking. If anything, I want to understand why I might be wrong & other ways to look at a topic.
4 headlines are about Musk and Twitter, as if this event has any importance to our lives. In any case, there is no need to rehash the same thing four times.
4 headlines are about abortion. Yeah, we know what's happened, you've told us ten times this already. It seems they just need to fill space with something.
2 talk about the Japan's Abe. As if they didn't talk about him yesterday.
Then there's a bunch of cheap space-fillers like "The summer of subvariants" and "Handshakes are back". Trying to resuscitate the corpse of covid. These are budget click baits: mouse traps without the bait. GPT-3 would do a better job.
The style of most content there is a mix of fearmongering, opinion forming, omission of details, and so on. Needless to say, they never ever report the opposite side of things: readers might start thinking, forming their own opinions and we don't want any of that.
Where are the actual news, Axios?
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust...
I am doubtful whether this loss in legitimacy can be recovered.
If I’m losing faith it’s got to be a bad sign I think. So I believe these stats. I never thought govt was great, but very often “good enough”.
Then we got cdc blocking Covid testing, Biden doing his big EV summit without Tesla and going on about GM being the one changing things, the space launch system boondoggle, just makes it hard to trust govt will spend money wisely
Some might frame this as a chicken-and-egg issue: did the media outlets feed our instinctive bias towards flashy-shiny-blinky-zoomy, or did our natural bias pull the media outlets in that direction? At the end of the day, however, it seems likely that it was probably both; the addiction demands ever-increasing dosage and so on.
The better question, to me, is this: do we, as individuals, have an ethical or moral responsibility to condition ourselves to be more appreciative of bland fact, for the sake of the species as a whole? Are cold, boring facts like broccoli for our brains?
In many ways, it could be mapping knowledge that there is more than one opinion on the matter. Which could be interpreted positively (once you know there is more than one perspective you might evaluate them all more objectively) or it might reflect people doubling down on denouncing the other people's gods, or a mix of the two.
Without any context on who has faith in what sources it seems somewhat useless. Particularly as "mainstream" media seems particularly slippery to define.
"Do you believe in superstitions?" Is going to give weird answers if a more secular voting group is also aware that their particular religion is a superstition vs "No, I don't believe in any superstitions, I'm a Baptist".
It's cool, fully half the country is no longer tuning in and prefers to get their information from more reliable sources like Alex Jones. CIA fucked up SUPER hard and people aren't going back onto the farm's pastures, ever again. Can't take it back, can't fix it. Only thing that could help is honest reportage from a neutral perspective, and let's face it this will never ever ever happen.
It's the end of an era. And America will become more healthy and diverse because the media failed so badly. Fifth estate became the fourth column decades ago, but people finally noticed once it became just farcical.
The problem is that news that isn't sensationalized and hyperbolic is so dry that it will never be palatable by the average news consumer. There's a couple out there that manage to ride the thin line of both objective and entertaining like The Intercept, AP, Quillete.
There's no reason to read it.
TV news is also highly ritualistic. Why do they mention the stock exchanges every day? It's not really information, and those who care about it already know.
With both sides of the story you see what is being emphasized or downplayed by each party. You also see the shared themes.
Add in international sources and see how they differ.
>Politico founding editor and editorial chairman John Harris reminded Smith on stage that "in the old days," a handful of people at a small number of outlets had all the agenda-setting power and they "would’ve all been white men."
Diversity in the newsroom eroded trust!?
>"All of us have biases and that maybe true objectivity is, what does your newsroom look like? How diverse is it?" said Al Jazeera English host Femi Oke at the event.
Al Jazeera is Qatar's state-funded news agency. It's not the diversity of their newsroom, which probably isn't any higher than average, that matters but the topic that determines how much you can trust them. The language of coverage also apparently matters, since their Arabic coverage often has a significantly different slant than their English language coverage.
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I probably put more trust in traditional media than average, but that trust has definitely declined. This is for a few reasons not really covered in the article.
Practically all but one or two newspapers in my country are owned by the same corporation. They target different demographics with different papers, but show a remarkable unity on topics that the owners have an interest in. Consolidation of media into a smaller number of wealthy, corporate hands has undeniably introduced significant bias, but it's gotten harder to identify that bias as the diversity of news publications has decreased. We are no longer presented with multiple independent viewpoints on a given event. Rather, we get multiple columnists from the same media conglomerate under the same editorial pressure.
The internet has also played a role by making the monetization of news more difficult, and the typical corporate response when revenue drops is to cut costs. Why fund a bunch of war-zone reporters to get different views of a conflict when you can fill the same amount of air-time for a fraction of the cost with a bunch of pundits arguing with each other? This is cheaper, but also produces far less reliable information about the conflict.
Bottom line, we need to find a way increase the diversity of ownership of news sources and also find a way to fund quality journalism.
I still do appreciate traditional media because, if you're aware of their ownership biases, you at least know what you're dealing with. Alternative and social media are often much harder to vet.
Well... This could be trusted or not. It is just on our decision if we trust in information that is given to us or not. Or why even bother in first place if most of the news are actually irelevant for me?
It favours the Democratic party. Of course many Democrats see bias in their favour as being simply reporting the truth.
This stat says it all:
Just 5% of Republicans said they had "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in newspapers, compared to 35% of Democrats.
Only 8% of Republicans said they had "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in TV news, compared to 20% of Democrats.
*Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'.*
They used to control the narrative, not so much anymore.
They are in a spiral of death: lower revenu, more clickbait titles, less trust, more clickbait until there is nothing left of substance.
The conservatives could feel how much media was perverted a few year ago, now it getting clear for people close to the center.
This is from a ruling in the case against foxnews that they tried to have dismissed: “Even assuming that Fox News did not intentionally allow this false narrative to be broadcasted, there is a substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” Cohen wrote in his decision.
Just a note, this is not a judgment just a finding that the case can proceed
How many false accusation have you seen against Trump? It was a constant barrage of attack. Even humorists where no longer funny by hitting Trump so many times it got boring.
Anyway, you are free to believe that the media is unbiased.
I saw this with the way they treated Dr Peterson, they attacked him and tried to discredit him before trying to understand.
I think it is mostly a question of temperament: people who are more open and creative are more on the left. Those go to work in media, big internet company and filmmaking and get a huge megaphone.
This can’t go on forever, it create a huge dissatisfaction and warranted distrust for those companies.
amusing comment, since so-called "fact checking" is just pure horse-shit mechanism to call something disinformation by using some fake experts that are in your pockets.
For me it shows:
1) Mass shooting porn (several different items)
2) Something about Twitter
3) Different shooting
4) Assassination of the former PM of a G7 country (somehow below the fold)
5) Trump
6) Abortion
Only after much scrolling do you get to a story about the economy, which polls report is the single most important issue to most Americans.
Contrast with FoxNews.com, which doesn’t have the numbers at all on the homepage (as far as I can tell, maybe I’m missing them, it’s late) and instead has an opinion from Larry Kudlow about how he thinks a recession is coming. Also after much scrolling. They did report the numbers though.
What is your point exactly?
The point is that, at best, CNN is out of touch with what people actually care about, and also milking tragedy for profit. Less charitably, they’re focusing on stories that could help democrats in the midterms while burying economic stories that are bad for democrats, while milking tragedy for profit. In the last decade they’ve completely dropped the pretense that they’re not openly rooting for one side.
Fox News is partisan entertainment, and deliberately so. I’m not sure why you’re even bringing them up.
The point was to bring another datapoint into the mix. If CNN were burying economic stories bad for Democrats, why isn’t Fox News the partisan entertainment network featuring them? Maybe the stories just aren’t so interesting to people? Or maybe they’re not so bad as you think?
I tend to watch all 3 cable networks and inflation, recession worries, good jobs and unemployment numbers, and high but declining gas prices have been topics on all 3 this week. I just don’t see how anyone is hiding anything. The information is there, as you pointed out. Every story I saw yesterday about good jobs numbers had caveats about inflation and recession worries. I mean, are you suggesting that people aren’t aware of these things?
The same will happen with the other institutions. We already have large amount of people skeptical of the CDC, WHO, and other health oriented orgs. We have growing skepticism of large financial institutions (fed & inflation, IMF & "you will own nothing", etc.). There is widespread skepticism of academic institutions, which will cause the value of academic titles to depreciate.
All this because the people who control these institutions insist on using them as political instruments (at certain times).
I wonder what the situation will be 50 years from now...
"So might as well listen to the liar who I trust is on our side"
Believing "institutions are corrupt" without addressing specific instances of corruption is an abandonment of critical thought itself.
You can LARP life for a while, but reality continues outside your fantasy, and at some point you will have to reconcile the two. You may find at this point that you weren't on the side of truth and justice after all.
True for any social system that grants one group power over another.
Only constant and consistent demonstration of honest behavior signals otherwise. Trust is a delicate thing, and must be maintained.
Trustworthy institutions enable people with conflicting interests and values to cooperate. When people lose trust and believe institutions are biased against them, they don’t seek an alternative source of trusted authority. Instead, they seek a champion who will be biased in their favor and fight for them.
You see this in third world countries all the time. The factions there aren’t built on leaders being trustworthy, but instead sectarian affiliation.
This USA Today comic explains it well: https://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13. For better or worse, climate change is used as tool for advancing political agendas with a certain vision for the future.
Conservatives have been complaining about “liberal media” since forever. But the divergence in media trust between Democrats one hand and Independents/Republicans on the other grew dramatically in the Bush era, and again during the Trump era: https://www.allsides.com/news/2020-12-31-0913/trump-era-driv...
In the 1980s I assume most NYC news anchors hated Reagan, but they at least tried to hide their contempt.
"And distrust in traditional institutions could force them to reckon with institutional problems, like a lack of diversity."
I don't even know what to say, I'm shocked by the complete lack of self introspection.
Even three lines up we have -
"Data and experts suggest the public struggles to distinguish fact-based journalism from opinion content online."
So I guess a gay black man would be able to somehow report facts better? The entire article is baffling.
There are too few (good) jobs and too many qualified people, so it's a kind of gatekeeping. College is similar for the most part, but they do you the favor of teaching you something (while fleecing you at the same time, but that's another issue).
>I don't even know what to say, I'm shocked by the complete lack of self introspection.
My "favorite" example of this, from CNN before COVID19 became a worldwide problem: "Coronavirus task force another example of Trump administration's lack of diversity" <https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronav...>
Can't say I agree:
Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-blast-minister-id...
"Highland Park gunman's family was in turmoil for years before shooting" <-- neutral
"Shinzo Abe's assassination shocks Japan" <-- neutral
"Musk tells Twitter he wants out of deal to buy it. Twitter says it will force him to close the sale" <-- neutral
"Here's what's in Biden's executive order on abortion rights" <-- neutral
"Trump considering waiving executive privilege claim for Bannon but prosecutors say he was never shielded" <-- neutral
The top headlines on foxnews.com at the moment are:
"Dems reportedly full of 'outright worry' president won't be able to rescue plunging polls by midterms" <-- neutral
"Twitter squawks back after Musk reveals he's terminating $44B purchase" <-- neutral
"FBI director issues stern warning about biggest long-term threat to US" <-- neutral
"Mom gets terrifying call after dropping young daughter off at airport gate" <-- neutral but click-baity
"BORDER BATTLE: Biden admin fires back as governor takes spiraling migrant crisis into his own hands" <-- biased (alternative version: Biden admin criticizes Texas governor after executive order)
"GAFFER-IN-CHIEF: Biden widely mocked after he appears to read instruction right off teleprompter" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
"'Joe Biden and the Democrats are lying' to the American people: Rep. Malliotakis" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
"School choice advocate slams 'despicable' criticism from unions of Arizona school voucher bill" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
Fox and other conservative sources publish a lot of "conservative personality SLAMS liberal personality"-type articles. Left-wing publications do the opposite of course, but credible sources rarely publish this kind of article unless it's from someone important and about an important subject, and try not to use formulae like "as governor takes SPIRALING migrant crisis INTO HIS OWN HANDS" or "widely mocked".
You're more than welcome to provide your own data, or at a bare minimum, state your standards or criteria for what a sufficient or credible response might be.
Keep in mind that there are in fact organisations which do just this over time, with Ad Fontes Media being among the better known and more credible:
The most notable CNN bias indicator would be having to pay out nearly half a billion to a minor for slandering him. It's not the only event of that nature either.
But usually the bias is omission of facts and even stories, speculation, and slant within the story. In the Sandman case it was only showing partial footage that cut out him being approached and made him look like the aggressor.
Reason Magazine is probably the pinnacle of very good right-leaning journalism, filling the same niche as VICE on the left. I really enjoy the excellent journalism of both.
EDIT: I have reproduced your original comparison with WSJ taking the place of CNN
CNN:
"Highland Park gunman's family was in turmoil for years before shooting" <-- neutral
"Shinzo Abe's assassination shocks Japan" <-- neutral
"Musk tells Twitter he wants out of deal to buy it. Twitter says it will force him to close the sale" <-- neutral
"Here's what's in Biden's executive order on abortion rights" <-- neutral
"Trump considering waiving executive privilege claim for Bannon but prosecutors say he was never shielded" <-- neutral
WSJ:
Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Former Premier, Is Assassinated <-- neutral
Musk Moves to End Deal for Twitter <-- neutral
Google Offers Concessions to Fend Off Antitrust Suit <-- neutral
U.S. Jobs Market Remains Robust <-- neutral
Investors Bet Euro’s Woes Are Far From Over <-- Somewhat editorial, but no clear bias
Housing-Affordability Index At Lowest Level Since 2006 <-- neutral
If you're interested in looking at broadcast rundowns by day, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is invaluable. It permits keyword searches (for how a specific story was covered), or looking at broadcasts from the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News), dating to as early as 1969 (for ABC, CBS, and NBC, with CNN and Fox being added at later dates).
https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/
For websites, navigating archives by date on the Internet Archive can be useful. It's difficult to pick a canonical time of day for stories, and archive timing varies, but you might choose a target such as 6pm US/Eastern to designate the end of a daily news cycle and find the copy that most nearly matches that.
As noted, there are organisations which perform this work themselves, including Ad Fontes (which I've already mentioned), Media Bias Fact Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/), and more. Sourcewatch (https://sourcewatch.org) is another.
There are of course partisan bias-check organisations (e.g., the Media Resource Center on the right, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on the left). There are also groups which look for under-reported stories, most notably Project Censored (https://www.projectcensored.org/).
Eg, "Highland Park gunman's family was in turmoil for years before shooting" isn't neutral, it is narrative building. It isn't relevant to anything important - there are lots of families in turmoil out there. Most families, I suspect, face some sort of turmoil every few years. But the style is more high-brow and their clearly targeting people who are/want to be emotionally sensitive.
Bias is different from whether the headline is pitching at high- or low- class audiences. You're probably picking up that Fox news isn't written with people like you in mind and CNN might be.
Only for the credulous
At this point, the best thing people can do is to just glance at the news when it presents itself and then otherwise move on with their lives. If there's any good to come out of the age of disinformation, it's that maybe people will stop doomscrolling the news.
Now if only I could break the news consumption habit!
How it comes up in search results: https://twitter.com/jeremyreporter/status/154545145897532211...
How it appears now: https://apnews.com/article/japan-shinzo-abe-shooting-22ec224...
Thank you
However you said _those_ weren't good, or least not unbiased enough. So what are the unbiased, or at least better about handling bias than those they posted.
Taleb would call them IYI (intellectual yet idiot).
>Taleb would call them IYI (intellectual yet idiot).
Lenin's "useful idiots" term is always apt.
If the media wants to be trusted, they need to stop lying