Most Americans think money comes before mission at U.S. news organizations
knightfoundation.org
knightfoundation.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hw0QSbDQNo
And then you'll read stories like this which are only about one single part of the trial:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/10/20/darrel...
The funny thing is that I don't think there's a single statement in the second article that's actually factually inaccurate with what USA Today said. They're just repeating what was said in court in that one part of the trial and just not mentioning that some of those statements are completely and utterly bogus for myriad reasons that anyone who watched the trial could tell you.
But damn if it doesn't give you a different impression of how things are going in court than actually watching the thing itself with context.
They don't have the time, skills, resources or experience to produce a good outcome. And so whatever they do produces either no outcomes or creates more issues.
There are only two know strategies for such scenarios
1. Find a simpler problem - refocus everyone on something simple, within their abilities to solve so that atleast outcomes are produced how ever simple they maybe.
2. Exit the room and disconnect from the people trapped in there (cuz they want to pull as many ppl into the trap hoping it will solve the prob)
Even when they're trying to be honest, most media completely screws up reporting on trials. They love to do things like quote huge demands for damages ("x files a $BIGNUM lawsuit against y") that are almost always either never granted or substantially reduced later, print big headlines for suits that are almost surely meritless (SCO), etc.
Mind you, I say "almost never" because there is that 1% of the time when $BIGNUM damages are actually granted, like the billion dollar Alex Jones trial. The later trillion dollar thing I don't know about, though, I'll wait to see how things play out in court and whether the awards stick on appeal (for the billion dollars, they actually might).
Having the weapon at his age wasnt illegal?
There was also a separate charge against Rittenhouse for carrying it that was dismissed at the very end of the trial due to a confusingly-worded law. But Rittenhouse wasn't carrying anything that counted as a short-barreled rifle. The judge ruled that the law did not apply to what Rittenhouse did, since the prosecutor did not allege any facts that the jury could have agreed with that would have made him guilty. The prosecutor was apparently going by the caption of the law (which says something about guns held by someone under 18) but that has no legal effect and the judge admonished him for trying to pull a fast one again.
This was covered right before it went to the jury as I recall, if you want to look up videos of how it went down at trial.
The defense successfully argued that the phrasing meant rifles and shotguns with a barrel length of sixteen inches or more were exempted.
There was no racism in the shooting inherently.
Pair that with the fact that they attacked him and you find out the kid didn't do anything wrong.
If you don't watch the news, you are uninformed. If you do watch the news, you are misinformed.
(Paraphrasing Denzel Washington)
1. Time - Television news, which is how most of America consumes news needs to fit a story into a 30 seconds to 1 minute spot. Even if they devote more time to it, it is a series of short spots. It is almost an art form to try and package it and they are doing it on a break neck deadline. Even written content will often have a strict word count.
2. They are producing content for the lowest common denominator. Since you used USA Today, they, for example, write to an 8th grade reading comprehension level. This often involves simplifying the narrative.
And then you add on top any biases or partisan news, which sells. There is a profit motive to have a lot of angry upset readers. This is where it gets dangerous.
I don’t know what the solution is. More and more people are turning to even simpler news sources like a Facebook post. I think reading comprehension is a major issue. We have so much access to information but a large portion of the population seems unwilling or unable to effectively parse it.
The problem with the proposal to make the news publicly funded is that that just replaces one set of incentives with another. If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much, then it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government. This same kind of thing has started to creep into other parts of society like the public education system where standardized test scores are often considered more important than a well-rounded education.
Personally, this is why I like the business model of places like Substack where you can find specific journalists you trust to actually hold people in power accountable and can support them directly. Finding truly unbiased information these days is not easy.
Speaking of Substack, I highly recommend this three part series about conflicts of interest and media companies:
- https://rebeccastrong.substack.com/p/big-media-big-conflicts...
- https://rebeccastrong.substack.com/p/the-monopoly-on-your-mi...
- https://rebeccastrong.substack.com/p/the-monopoly-on-your-mi...
So yes, each individual would be beholden to their audience. But it would be much healthier than everyone being beholden to the much smaller collection of groups who pull the strings of influence in our present situation.
I think it's a recipe for insular bubbles.
Invading Iraq on nonexistent evidence was actually 'saving the world from the imminent threat of an unhinged dictator actively developing WMD with the intent of using them, alongside endless irrefutable evidence.' The Iraq War, and especially the following two articles, played a major role in developing my worldview. I still return to read them on occasion. This is why you don't want media backed by the war machine:
Washington Post - "Irrefutable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...
NYTimes - "Irrefutable and Undeniable" : https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
That could mean hard hitting journalism that's truthful and unbiased, but it could also mean ragebait that keeps the audience angry, engaged, and affirms their views.
We know very different people. People I know say they want to eat healthy and learn new things. Then they eat McDonalds while watching TV reruns.
Or put your trust in some external organization, which is what you're doing if you accept reported news as fact.
This means the journalists are now beholden to the class of people who pay substackers; I suspect the feedback loop is much tighter (lose subscribers soon after publishing an article that speaks truth-to-the-new-power). This also encourages echo-chambers - writers will learn to know what their readers like and will stick to it: their income literally depends on it!
At least the choice is the reader’s, the feedback is immediate and the start-up costs low.
They definitely advertise in all sorts of media, especially stuff heavily read in Washington. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/20/us/nation-challenged-sale...
> James Fetig, a Lockheed spokesman, said that Lockheed resumed running print ads for its own Joint Strike Fighter model in The Washington Post and trade publications on Monday, and only after it saw that Boeing was pressing ahead with radio and print ads.
One, your ad profile is similar to people who may be in positions to make decisions about weapon spending.
Two, maybe the "look at this cool tech" ads are meant to attract talent to build them, not people to buy them.
Three they cast a wide net to influence voting decisions of Americans in regards to military spending.
Not sure about airport in the US but this is what you used to see when getting into the Australian capital from the airport.
Me too, but Twitter leans heavily toward people who are anti-war. It doesn't really support the parent comments' claims of journalistic conflicts.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/intelligence-matters-a-cbs-news...
Parliaments decide how and how much funding media outlets receive. Not governments. And the people elect the members of parliaments. You make it so that every outlet that reaches over a certain threshold of viewers gets funding proportionate to the share of viewers it has. Just like public election funding and how parties receive funding based on their vote shares.
Yes, people elect the govt, but they don't get to oversee every decision. So most people simply vote along part lines, because when you have a choice of 2, party affiliation is the only criteria that matters. And those people are only on the ballot in the first place because they are overwhelmingly party loyal.
So then fundamentally media funding would be based on viewer numbers, not quality. I'm not sure that incentivising a pure head-count would lead to better quality. Facebook has fantastic viewer numbers, but is tgst the standard of journalism we aspire to?
A better argument _against_ govt funding is that the media is there to hold power to account, which would seem to be impossible for the media to do if power was paying the bills.
Im assuming that you are talking about the Angloamerican political context because your arguments seem to be ones which people who are used to only that context make.
In the majority of the world, there arent 'party lines'. There are party PROGRAMS. Each party publicizes their program if they get elected, and ask for votes based on the program. If a coalition government is founded, the program of the government is created by negotiations in between the member parties by combining their programs based on their electoral weights. It works very well.
The same party programs would decide how to distribute the public funding, and based on what criteria.
> And those people are only on the ballot in the first place because they are overwhelmingly party loyal.
It doesn't work like that outside the US or the UK where FPTP is used. A large swath of parties in Europe use internal elections in which the leadership is elected based on their own program, just like how a party is elected to the government based on its program.
> So then fundamentally media funding would be based on viewer numbers, not quality. I'm not sure that incentivising a pure head-count would lead to better quality. Facebook has fantastic viewer numbers, but is tgst the standard of journalism we aspire to?
Facebook does not classify itself as a news organization. If it does, it will have to oblige by the journalism regulations in those countries. The US has practically none, obviously, so it wouldnt make a difference. But for the rest of the world that isnt a problem.
> A better argument _against_ govt funding is that the media is there to hold power to account, which would seem to be impossible for the media to do if power was paying the bills
That's the case with private media as of this moment.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/five-reason...
And that's the UK. And that's the most blatant and unrepentant. The US is phenomenally worse with ~3 corporations consolidating a whopping 90% of the media and news and the people have absolutely no say in it since there is absolutely no alternative that can compete against those due to the capital difference.
Party lines still exist in multi-party systems. Some parties are known to never deliver. Other parties are tiny and won’t ever make it to parliament. There’s next to no chance to find a party which program looks entirely fine AND you can trust the party to deliver. In the end, you just vote along for least worst option. Or strategically against something.
Ideologies exist. Not 'lines'.
> Some parties are known to never deliver.
No party which consistently does not deliver gets elected in a proportional representation system.
> Other parties are tiny and won’t ever make it to parliament
10 or more parties in a parliament are enough.
> There’s next to no chance to find a party which program looks entirely fine AND you can trust the party to deliver.
Sorry. Thats just nonsense.
> In the end, you just vote along for least worst option
You are literally projecting the Angloamerican system to entire world and claiming that is the norm. It isn't. That's one mistake of the people who live in such FPTP systems. Thinking that 'everywhere is the same'.
Left, Right, American, European, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Israeli, Ukrainian -- all with their own perspectives, agendas and their own "white lies".
Cross-reference, distill and enjoy the complexity of an objective reality and all the perspectives on it.
Anyway I actually agree that traditional media fails to put the truth first. But the reasons are way more complicated than your post indicates. Raytheon is not buying ads in the Condé Nast magazines, the WSJ, CNN etc.
There are a number of reasons these media orgs fail the truth. Certainly money is part of it. But I think the biggest single reason is how they source their stories. It is rooted in history and inertia and laziness and a certain awe of power. They are very comfortable talking to institutions and way less comfortable dealing with individual actors. Workers, dissidents, whistleblowers, the disgruntled, call them what you will. Finding a real human experience is so much harder than being spoon fed by people paid to make you swallow easy truths.
I mean, it’s 1000x easier now than it was 25 years ago. But learning how to listen to and vet that information is still hard, and digging on it is hard, and it’s all incredibly risky. No one ever got fired for printing an Apple statement. No one ever got dragged on Twitter because their corporate PR source got exposed and arrested.
I can’t find references to the US advertising campaigns, but here’s some that ran in Canada. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/f-35-ads-on-oc-transpo...
And I’ve seen blogs writing about f35s and I have no doubt defense contractors are tied to that somehow, whether through ads or putting the journalist in a simulator or whatever.
But when CNN puts a pro f35 ex general slash Lockheed board member on air, or the nytimes writes a story suggesting Taiwan needs more advanced jets, the reporter or producer isn’t being pushed to help sell ads. They are making a choice that’s easier and more logical for them professionally given incentive structures that go way beyond ads.
You’re not advertising Northrop Grumman or Lockheed or the F35 like the new iPhone, you’re advertising them like coke. If you live in the DC area their ads are everywhere.
Lack of trust in media is split strongly along partisan lines, at least in the USA. This is IMHO a result of the heavily reliance of the media on public sector / government / university / NGO employees as a source of quotes. Journalists like to present themselves as neutral voices but want their stories to sound informed, so almost every story must come with a quote from someone. Public sector orgs rarely punish people for speaking to journalists and often actively encourage it, as long as they promote the organization's goals and ideologies. Even when theoretically forbidden e.g. intelligence, military, what you see is a massive culture of leaks and off-the-record briefings that's tolerated and encouraged from the top. Universities meanwhile are pretty much quote factories for the press, with the result that in the media "expertise" is now synonymous with academia - journalists love the fact that academics are perceived as independent from their host institutions, can turn up on the phone or in a studio at the drop of a hat and there's an unlimited number of them to pick from.
By contrast in the private sector it's standard for communication with journalists of any form to be forbidden and penalized with the sack, regardless of the message being given. Employees are not perceived as independent of their institution, even when talking off the record or as an individual. It may not even be easy to find the right person to talk to.
This leads to a self-reinforcing problem in which journalists get repeatedly exposed to the ways of thinking found in the largest public sector organizations that have a well funded press operation, without getting any balance from other areas of society, making them sympathetic to those ways, which in turn discourages other kinds of people from talking to them because they correctly perceive the journalists as biased. The journalists shift ever further towards the views of the people who talk to them until they basically become arms of the state. As time passes this feedback loop has become so extreme that the media aren't content to merely repeat whatever public sector workers tell them, but actively persecute anyone who tells them anything in disagreement. The bias becomes ever more visible and trust collapses.
There doesn't seem to be any easy way to break this feedback loop. You can't tackle it from the supply or demand side. Trying to restrict who can talk to the press is probably hard or impossible, especially in the USA with the First Amendment. Trying to increase the supply of people outside the public sector willing to talk to journalists, also hard. The most obvious way forward is to support and encourage a different style of journalism that doesn't try to present a fake view-from-above, in which bias is injected via quotes from hand-picked pseudo-experts, but rather a more analytical and data oriented form of news in which the only allowed quotes are things people said to other people, in public. This is the style of journalism found on Substack.
Your whole comment blew my mind but this part at the end is especially fascinating. Wow.
I would love to see more of that approach you outline. At the same time, don't you think any journalists who goes that route will get slammed for not having the requisite expertise? Or maybe the data will "speak for itself."
When you're one of the only companies in the world that makes something like the F-35, you don't need to advertise the F-35, you need to advertise the need for the F-35. NYTimes is great for that..
That's why you need both. You need private journalism to serve as a check on government, and public journalism to serve as a check on private interests. Forbid political advertising in private papers, and forbid private journalists from working for government after leaving private media; forbid corporate advertising in public papers, and forbid public journalists from working for corporate interests after leaving public media.
The (publicly funded) BBC is plenty critical of the British government. The same is true of ARD in Germany.
Often public broadcasters are set up where their funding doesn't come from taxes but from a license fee that they collect themselves.
What I've seen in these countries is that public broadcasters still have a bias (due to journalists generally coming from the same background/education/maybe even geography) but it's not strictly aligned with whoever is currently in the government.
The problem is basically everyone seems to be trying to see how far they can push the line on “good enough” without ending up getting fined.
And the FCC knows how dangerous it is to try to rein that in.
And media consolidation means you can produce crappy news and not fail because you only compete with yourself or one other corporation that also happens to try to send as little possible on news.
All incentives to do a good job (as a corporation) are gone. And as long as the slide wasn’t too fast they wouldn’t get called on it.
So here we are.
Edit: and oh yeah, not airing a prime time presidential address to the nation because your ratings would go down. I’m sure the public interest rule was designed to protect your ratings above all else.
"TV networks not wanting to air a prime time presidential address because of ratings" is one way of framing it. The other is "TV networks giving what their viewers want and not shoving a presidential address down their throats". In the era of cable TV and c-span.org, people who want politics can get it. The person tuning in at prime time to watch NCIS or whatever doesn't care for the president's speech, and I'm not sure what good can come from trying to force people to watch it.
for the purpose of argument, let's assume this premise is true. It's not hard to imagine that a biden supporter would be amendable to the idea there's a "public interest" to hear from him. However, how would this work if it's a president you oppose? Would you support allowing trump in 2020 to hijack prime time TV so he could rant about how "biden and ANTIFA democrats are mounting a dangerous attack on the country’s values, and Americans must fight back"[1]? Absent a principled way of determining what counts as "public interest", what you're saying just boils down to "people should be forced to hear the speech that I like".
[1] quote adapted from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/01/biden-sla...
>With on demand streaming and syndication folks with get their NCIS fix one way or another.
I haven't had cable for a while, but I'm pretty sure that "on demand streaming and syndication" doesn't allow you to watch episodes as they're being aired. Moreover, not everyone knows how to operate a streaming service. In contrast if you wanted to hear biden's speech you could easily tune into CNN or c-span. Therefore it's pretty clear that canceling prime time TV has more of an impact on people's options than not airing biden's speech does.
With broadcast TV giving way to on demand it's my hope there will be a way to at least prompt the nation to take a moment to hear from our elected leader. Even if it's just a text with a link to a live stream.
The networks didn’t air it because it was deemed to be an election year political speech.
That is, the advertiser had no influence on the editorial coverage, and opinion doesn’t bleed into the content.
I think in the digital age, the complicating factor is that the decision-makers have winnowed down this work so much that the firewalls just don’t hold up as well as they used to. Owners with an agenda may not care about church-state arguments. In the case of small publications, the writer or the editor is also the ad-seller. And in publications that lean more ideological, opinion-oriented content can prove deeply influential on the editorial coverage. (See what’s happened to cable TV over the last quarter-century.)
All of which is to say that the reason this point of view is prevalent is because we haven’t done enough to invest in these institutions to ensure that firewall exists in the first place. To do it right, you need:
- An owner that actually cares about having a firewall
- Strong ethical rules for the journalists
- Advertising standards that help ad-buyers understand where the wall is
For newspapers, a key element of show a limit of ad influence is the front page. If there’s a deeply integrated ad of some kind, that reflects a negative influence on the coverage. But in the online world, we have native ads and tracking, and both of these can be deeply integrated into the experience.
I think what we’re seeing is that there aren’t strong enough firewalls—and if I were to blame anyone, I would blame the ad department. They allowed their standards to lower to the point where publications simply gave advertisers too much. We need to get back to more magazine-style advertising in publications where a single sponsor buys a premium spot and it pays for a good chunk of the coverage.
The problem is that digital is cutting the revenue up into too many pieces and customers have been resistant to paying in many cases. The solution is not to discourage financial support for products, as businesses need to business, but to separate these influences internally. Journalists reporting about global conflicts or crime or political corruption shouldn't have to think about how the lights are kept on to do their jobs.
I felt things like PBS are a public good. Growing up I got educational programming from there and that should be available to the public as a last resort.
These are just extra words :) I like PBS a lot
It’s a lack of integrity.
You need aligned incentives.
Getting all the facts is as bad as getting no facts, because we aren't capable of paraing then all. Curation of facts is what these companies do, and how they curate them is how they express their bias.
News companies aren't lying (even if some pundits do). They just present facts in ways to support the narrative they want. It is impossible to relay facts without doing so, but how objective they are and how much vias is injected is variable.
Facts are meaningless without proper context. You can take the same facts and present them under a different light and get completely different stories. Check "selective editing" if you are not aware of the term.
It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who suggests any major news media operation in the US is “left-wing”. This country doesn’t have a big or strong enough “left” to matter.
My best guess is you think anything but pure anti-capitalism must be right-wing, but if you view the left-right ideology spectrum as a reflection one's views on economic policies, it's quite clear that would not be the case.
You don't get to hold me accountable for others failures. If you're hazy on the definition of the term "leftist" I expect google could help you with that.
I'm holding you accountable for self describing yourself as an "actual leftist," which obviously means your idea of what it leftist means deviates from what is the commonly held belief. The person you initially responded to said that all the sources the person listed was left-wing. You obviously took issue with that but you failed to explain why they're not, you simply used it as an excuse to lazily jab at the right-wingers.
If you don't want people to hold you accountable for your words, don't make asinine comments completely devoid of substance.
Left-Wing: the section of a political party or system that advocates for greater social and economic equality, and typically favors socially liberal ideas; the liberal or progressive group or section.
There you go. Those are the definitions provided from the Oxford English Dictionary. These clearly fall in line with what most people think of the terms and coincide neatly with what the above person was suggesting — those publications are left-wing.
> being unable to accurately place political ideologies on the political spectrum
This is largely because the the left-right political spectrum is bogus. Clearly you think you're a "real" leftist even though your idea of leftism is quite clearly contradictory to its definition which was my whole point. You had an opportunity to elucidate your point of view but instead you expect other people not only to perform that labor for you, but get upset when it doesn't match your head canon. No one else knows what "Leftist" means to you except you.
> Incidentally, assinine is veering off topic to try to fabricate a shit-flinging contest over easily defined vocabulary terms. You certain you've got a handle on who the ass is in this exchange?
The whole conversation is about what words mean, so no, it's not veering off topic.
If one person says "These publications are left-wing" and you say "I'm a real leftist and I say they're not," it is not unreasonable to ask you to define those terms. You are contradicting them, it absolutely is your fault when you don't define what those terms mean from your point of view. So I once again ask you, what is a "leftist" and what is "left-wing," from your point of view? If you can't even define them, how can you claim to be them?
WSJ is probably the closest. They don't dig into culture wars but definitely skew capitalist. The Bulwark is a decent independent source but they're small and do more opinion and analysis than reporting. Mainstream conservative news like Fox is just garbage and hopelessly corrupt. The level of direct collusion between Fox stars like Hannity and sitting republicans is utterly shameful. They aren't just biased they are downright running campaign ads disguised as news. And they're staring down a $1B defamation suit for stories they ran at the behest of the Trump admin which should bury the last shred of credibility.
Case in point: The last time I looked at the conservative news was a few weeks ago. They were making a big deal about some lawsuit one of the states was bringing against the Biden administration. The administration allegedly censored news outlets, starting early 2020. The lawsuit even provides a specific example from October 2020, and names Biden specifically as the defendant.
Reputable news agencies mostly ignored these allegations because they are complete nonsense: Biden wasn't president when the incidents occurred, so his administration could not have been responsible!
You can say whatever you want about how/if you think that influences their coverage.
But it is not an arm of Amazon.
I don’t think it changes my point too much, but it’s absolutely a worthwhile amendment.
I remember a while back (maybe 10 years?) NPR spent some airtime trying to address head-on their alleged liberal bias. I respect that, I think their effort was sincere.
What left me frustrated, though, was they never addressed what I saw as their main vector of bias: they seemed to broadcast many more interviews with people unhappy about conservative policies, than people happy with conservative policies.
E.g., illegal immigration was a hot topic at the time. NPR provided a lot of sympathetic interviews with illegal immigrants, both adults and children. I don't think I heard even one NPR interview with individuals in other groups, e.g. construction companies that get out-bid by competitors who pay illegal immigrants under the table, or would-be immigrants who are awaiting their turn to legally enter the U.S.
Again, I don't doubt the integrity of Bob Edwards and other NPR staff who tackled that project. But I think it shows how hard it can be for liberals to accurately understand conservative perspectives.
The results are then compared. The findings are apparently always the same when this is done: conservatives pretending to be left wingers give answers much closer to the real left wingers than vice-versa. That is, the right understands the left but the left doesn't understand the right. It's been some years since I read about this but iirc the failure mode was that the left imagined people on the right as having far more extreme views than they really do, amongst other problems.
W.R.T. the construction companies - see my comment elsewhere in this thread about the quote-sourcing feedback loop. Not so many companies are willing to talk to journalists about illegal immigration, because they know journalists are left-biased and because it'd realistically have to be the CEO doing it, and he/she is busy. That in turn means journalists don't hear alternative perspectives, causing them to become more biased, and repeat.
https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...
> "In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?"
I believe this passage refers to work done Study 2 in "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations"
https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhaidt/articles/graham.haidt.no...
In my brief reading of the paper, it's not clear to me whether they've reporting their findings on the understanding aspect, though the materials section for Study 2 sounds like the situation described. (They may have, I just haven't read it closely.)
> "As with relevance items, there were three versions of the moral judgment items—answered as oneself, as a typical liberal, or as a typical conservative. For both types of items, only results for the self versions are reported here."
That is a US-centric viewpoint. I'm in the US now and I don't find any need for those. Maybe because I'm too busy outside doing fun stuff most days and living. I don't know of a good reason to give those publications more than a glance once per year.
Maybe, that's literally the problem. It's become a massive echo chamber. Not hard to imagine how the conspiracy theorists have come up with the mockingbird media moniker
Whether you agree with that or not is one thing, but I'm not sure why you're ignoring it.
White people, at least in America, aren't a group with shared culture. The only thing that really unites them is the color of their skin. White people also tend to have an actual ancestral culture they identify with highly-- usually the culture of a European country their predecessors emigrated from. And as far as I know the vast majority of them don't want to identify as 'white', as they value their ancestral culture more.
[0]: https://archive.ph/aqpJM,
Archive since they've merged the ratings for clarification, but haven't actually changed their minds.
We don't have a "White History Month" because white history is the default in the US. In a sense every month is a white history month here. Note that we do have months for some subsets of white, e.g., Irish-American Heritage Month (March).
Same for why we have LGBT Pride month but no straight pride month. Straight is the default.
That said, it’s still driven by ideology — “good” being defined by someone. You can see it in the titles of their documentaries and programming.
If you go through their programming objectively and put yourselves in the mindset the opposing side it becomes rather clear. This includes things like portraying nationalism as bad or Christianity as evil (see some of their frontline documentaries)
While the bias is there. PBS is generally one of the least bias in the space, I think that’s what makes it so frustrating. A slight improvement in breadth and depth would make it amazing.
I also have to give credit to pbs for often releasing full-length interviews. I’ve really appreciated watching hours long interviews with various people about a specific topic. See “Putin files”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk9igTqTx9s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88
or Steve bannons interview on frontline.
> We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions
Terence Samuels, NPR's Managing Editor for News on the NY Post Hunter Biden story
https://mobile.twitter.com/nprpubliceditor/status/1319281101...
Even when I read unbiased information/data driven articles there’s still a bias - someone chose this information for me to digest. Did they choose it to influence how i feel? Maybe just because they think the most people will click on it so it’s published? Anyways, I’m not entitled to “truth” so I guess I have to keep reading/doom scrolling.
It makes me sad. Sometimes, I listen to old archives from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/npr-all-things-considered
and stuff like Car Talk on NPR. It was a beautiful world.
I have no trust left for NYT, WaPo or whatever right wing media is around blasting stuff on TV today. It is toxic.
As much as I personally think the Republican party is absolutely fucking evil for the specific issues they capitalized on — because good god lower taxes, eliminating government agencies, and less powerful unions doesn’t pour gasoline on festering racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia creating a tire fire of hate and violence that will outlive me — I’m not mad at the game in abstract, Democrats play it too.
AP is just as biased as the rest. Even if you remove ads the people with agenda are still everywhere.
> PBS are a left public good.
Fixed that for you, because it's so obvious how it has changed.
reuters.com is free as an invdividual, you just need to make an (entirely free) account or you get limited to X articles per month. I don't think apnews.com even asks you to make an account.
Strike that, even the weather report has become politicized.
It makes me wonder, has it always been this way, or do I just notice it more as I grow older?
As for government funding of news media, we all know where that leads - all you'll read in it is the government's political agenda. Do you really want to get your news from the White House press secretary?
Do people in America (or anywhere else) actually believe that news organizations actually follow some kind of "mission"? Why? How does being a news organization suddenly puts you apart from any other organization/corporation with all the corruption factors?
I don't really get this mythos of journalists being white knights in shining armor or wise sages with a holy "mission".
From where I stand, it seems like an over-glorification of people who are essentially just experts on writing texts, and not much else. And just as all the other people and organizations, they will have their own agenda, their own biases and their own ways of corruption.
Personally, I don't really see much point of modern journalism, other than maybe political signaling. Narrative writing style became a weird norm and it just feels like you are being treated like cattle. I want facts, references, comparisons, critical analysis. Instead I get a story-time and have to do all the analysis myself - most of the times the story ends up being a misrepresentative or omitting crucial facts. And you just sit there wondering, whether it was a deliberate "control the narrative" kind of manipulation, or maybe it's just the author being an idiot, or maybe today it's this post-truth thing of not addressing the parts of truth that may be beneficial to adversaries.
Think of it like a drug. It’s totally amoral, but it will take you to the end if you let it. Blaming the drug shifts accountability. Once you realize the drug is amoral and it is you who must stop, that’s when you take accountability.
The institution of the Media is amoral. If we sit here and say they do things for money is the same as saying such and such drug is addictive, or even more ridiculous, such and such drug has nicotine in it. Okay? It’s amoral.
Facing something amoral within yourself or outside of yourself is often unbelievable. You will always try to describe it or comprehend it, but the answer is simple and frightening.
The media actually hasn’t shifted from its virtues. We want them to be divorced from what they report and who they report it to. The amoral quality is of the essence to do it right. They should not care about right or wrong, just do, report. That same underlying trait is manifesting in another way, is all.
Real news should be mostly local, about all of the good and bad things around us that actually matter in our lives. Otherwise, there’s really no sense in following the “news”, it’s just a meaningless waste of our lives.
We know politicians play to the cameras constantly. It’s obvious. Politicians have made their entire careers by becoming famous for their speeches on the floor.
Do they really make a lot of those ridiculous charts and pictures for other politicians?
I remember hearing from reporters and maybe even ex-representatives that things changed once the cameras came in. Things got worse. You couldn’t look weak by talking to/compromising with the other side. Bombast worked. It made polarization worse. It wasn’t a big club anymore, it was “us” and “them”.
It won’t fix the rest of the media, but maybe C-SPAN is a failed experiment. The observer effect took over and changed the outcome.
You can guess where that leads. Nothing but grandstanding to the cameras. No horse-trading. No compromise.
It's awful.
Then they whine that said news chases views.
Like Republican communities that underpay teachers and wonder why their kids have no futures because someone with a brain built a robot to do their repetitive trivial job.
I worked for a non-profit news org in 2016 and we spent a lot of time and energy covering the presidential race. One of the biggest ethical challenges we constantly faced as an organization was the reality that a certain candidate for president drew astronomical traffic to our site when his name was in a headline compared to everyone else, which meant more revenue for us. It wasn't even close.
We hated this because we wanted to apply coverage to candidates equally, but the discrepancies in traffic were impossible to ignore. And so every time we ran another story about this candidate, we had to ask ourselves if it was appropriate or not since he was not local to our state or region.
The news industry has been dying a painfully slow death ever since the internet arrived and it's not easy to leave money on the table with any sort of regularity. And when news organizations do choose to leave the money on the table, they are never recognized for it because nobody will come out and say "we really wanted to run another story about X, but we chose not to because we didn't feel it was right to keep doing that". It's a no-win situation.
Here's the bottom line: ad-based news models rely heavily on traffic metrics to generate ad revenue, which is derived from serving ads. I believe this is the single most poisonous aspect of making news today because those who make news can quite easily see what kind of news sells and what doesn't. As long as news organizations are focused on driving traffic to their site to generate ad revenue, this will be a problem. But people don't want to pay for news, so where does that leave our system? We're not willing as a society to give up the convenience that this deeply corrupt system gives us.
So shaming consumers will solve the problem? Is that what people who've worked for news orgs think?
The things I pay for and point my friends toward don't treat people that way.
> news industry has been dying a painfully slow death ever since the internet arrived
Well I go to Substack and Rumble, among others. The news industry is dying because it can't handle competition. R.I.P., "The News." Now let's imagine a world a little more informative than three television networks telling us all the same stories the same ways . . .
If people wanted news to be as objective as news could be, then they better be prepared to apportion their taxes to news orgs (should news orgs be privately or publicly owned is a longer discussion but the latter is implied), to read news that are as boring and as declarative as an encyclopedia article, or to avoid news altogether and to be physically present in the places where news happen to see events for themselves, but people are not willing to do any of those nor are those always feasible. So up to what extent is the expectation of objectiveness from journalism realistic?
I mean, I never thought for the life of me that news are supposed to be 100% objective, precisely because events are being reported from the understanding of someone else. This is why you consume information from more than one source. What if the people consuming news are part of the problem?
I don’t know that that is actually true. I know that for me, I’m not interested in paying for:
- The daily homicide report
- 3 minutes of news per half hour, mixed in with 19 minutes of “stories” that are paid placement for products, movies, recording artists, etc., followed by 8 minutes of advertisements, mostly for medications I don’t need for some reason
- Weak interviews and reporting that ignores very obvious lies from the people being reported on with absolutely no mention of that fact
- Both-siding a story where one side has clear facts and the other side is quite possibly literally crazy, or at the very least being obviously heavily manipulated by special interests and that’s not mentioned at all
- Reporting on what someone tweeted, especially with no indication that what was tweeted is known to be bogus or unconfirmed
I do happily give to PBS and NPR because they have reasonable coverage of most news, but over the last 5 years, even they have been sucked into the sensationalism and reporting on tweets that regular news outlets have fallen victim to. They’re still miles better, but it’s a low bar to begin with.
“Representative X said A. When asked about it, representative Y said they were wrong so B. Now sports.”
Huh? Who was right? Was it a matter of fact you can judge? If so why don’t you? Even on opinions there is usually good contextual facts you can add.
But when you just repeat crazy or dangerous or factually incorrect you normalize it. And by never calling anyone out on things you signal it’s all equally correct.
“The president said F. We said no, G. He said but F, H, and I are all true, I said them. Sunny tomorrow…”
Soundbites without analysts are horrible. Repeatedly letting people get away with lying about objective facts and continuing to give them airtime to say it is useless.
Reporting “science” that comes from press releases on non-reviewed pre-release papers in journals no one has heard of that contradicts what you said was real last week destroys trust in science.
And telling me feel good stories about kids who started lemonade stands to pay for their own chemo completely misses the point.
And I don’t care about Kanye. It doesn’t matter other than the fact that at this point people appear to be taking advantage of his mental illness. But no one is covering that that I’ve seen.
Why? I have no doubt it was more profitable to cover that one candidate, but the point of a non-profit news org is that you shouldn't have to follow mass market dictates like that.
> when news organizations do choose to leave the money on the table, they are never recognized for it because nobody will come out and say "we really wanted to run another story about X, but we chose not to because we didn't feel it was right to keep doing that"
I feel like that's your own fault. You're a news organization, you could have gotten the word out. IIRC in 2016 there were lots of articles about the meta of covering X, and by 2020 X explicitly not being covered the same way was an official stance of news organizations.
That basically sums up the state of "reporting".
Payout is view-driven which means anything goes to survive.
Media today is the equivalent of going to work sick "whatever it takes to not become homeless, frack everyone else".
I apologize for my American-centric view of politics, but something fundamentally changed about the world around the time Trump, Bernie, etc were making waves in 2015-2016 in US politics. It’s almost like we entered a parallel reality. Shortly after the media has gone extremist, not only in the US but globally.
Reagan [wrt Mexico]: "rather than talking about putting up a fence... and open the border both ways by understanding their problems"
The thing is, everyone wants to blame politicians. But we as people have deteriorated. These people are who we choose. We're so concerned about winning at all costs that we don't even care about the abhorrent behavior of our candidates, on both sides. It's a race to the bottom now. Hopefully our experiment survives.
I would love to hear theories of what the root cause is. Is it due to massive state sponsored manipulation campaigns via social media?
Worth reading: https://consilienceproject.org/social-media-enables-undue-in...
And then all the men in the crowd cheer and clap, and all the women boo. And vice versa if the joke had been for the women.
The two sides enjoy the clamoring.
I’m sure you heard this song:
[ANNIE] Anything you can do I can do better I can do anything better than you
[FRANK] No, you can't
[ANNIE] Yes, I can
[FRANK] No, you can't
[ANNIE] Yes, I can
[FRANK] No, you can't
Is that from a Broadway musical or the News/Internet?
Or a comedy show? Hah, maybe that’s what’s going on.
a tendency to be too ready to believe that something is real or true.
"moneylenders prey upon their credulity and inexperience"
It's silly to compare money to mission of a news organization (or any other entity for that matter). It's like asking what influences a human being more, food to air? You need both. For a news organization to have impact it needs money. Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't even NPR solicit money on a regular basis - don't they have to cater to the supplier of that money to some extent to continue their service? I hear their fund raising and they often read comments from contributors which all more or less say "you give me what I want". So their money comes from those with whom their style and nuance of reporting resonates and it's reasonable to assume that NPR reporting then continues in that direction.
There’s also a built-in, base audience.
In some cases, there’s prestige that comes with working for certain publications.
The demand that the media be generally truthful has disappeared since the abolition of the fairness doctrine. This is a reflection of the growing cultural battle not between left and right but rather between authoritarianism and Liberalism (big L liberalism). If you control what speech is amplified, you don't need to control what speech is uttered in the first place. China, in particular, has learned this lesson well.
Meanwhile, the lessons that western culture has learned from WWI and WWII about the dangers of no separation of government and media is resulting in Millennials and gen-z being willing further to expand the role of the government in media.
Wow, that is so cool. TIL.
I only wish my country would copy things like this, instead of things like "Foreign Agents Registration Act" :\
Everything is biased, too.
Like people on the right think Fox is unbiased and fair, and on the left, they think NPR is unbiased and fair.
Not only does money come before mission, so does policital agenda. Both sides.
You also forget about the role of shareholders.
Does that mean you regret nearly every purchase you make?
> Making your customers angry
As a businessman, I can attest that making my customers angry is very unprofitable.
> People make poor rational choices with alcohol, drugs, junk food, media, and pretty much everything else.
That doesn't mean they aren't pleased with their purchase.
Are you in the news business?
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Left-%20and%20Ri...
> That doesn't mean they aren't pleased with their purchase.
That just goes to show you that "pleased customers" is a bad metric to optimize a society on.
People are fickle though, voting for politicians who promote small government, low taxes, and economic inequality, then complaining about things like price-gouging during disasters (which is basically economics 101 in a free market, supply and demand curves), or monopolists setting their prices to maximize their profits (also found in economics 101), or wanting safe food and buildings or better newspapers.
Making money IS the mission.