When Americans lost faith in the news
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
That was the aberration. 120 years ago when newspapers owned by the likes of William Hearst were doing their best to start unnecessary wars for shits and giggles, would you have trusted the news media? I hope not.
The news industry was crooked then, and I don't think there's any reason to believe the American media briefly became trustworthy in the mid 20th century when public trust in the media was at all-time highs. I think Americans got caught up in a post-war optimistic fervor that blinded them to the faults of American media, and American society in general. Now the news media feel entitled to that level of trust which they never deserved in the first place.
Reminder that one of America's most beloved "founding fathers" was a newspaperman propagandist. A man called Benjamin Franklin, who founded numerous newspapers specifically to push the revolutionary narrative in colonial America. Say what you like about the man, but impartial reporting was not his priority. The supposed age of impartial trustworthiness in news media is myth, not history. Newspapers have always been the tools of those who own them.
He was a printer with a franchise of other printers already, and he did value-added stuff like print the news long before the first stirrings of revolution; are you sure he wouldn't have founded them anyway?
The brief time in the US that coincided with a relatively trusted news establishment coincided with a lot of painstaking efforts at professionalization and projecting an aura of critical neutrality. Customers stopped wanting that, and the professionals were too expensive anyway. Now, we're back to pogrom-of-the-month club journalism, sometimes mostly digital but sometimes also in reality.
That's not true. Reagan's Republicans stopped wanting that, and then non-fairness was forced onto the masses until people didn't know the difference anymore.
See also: same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, net neutrality, right to repair, et alia.
Eliminating the fairness doctrine opened the door for garbage content. That’s why Rush Limbaugh building off the fringe last night trucker talk show schtick became a force on hundreds of radio stations with millions of listeners in a time slot once dedicated to a half hour news segment and old ladies talking about knitting.
Rush created the mold for editorial that sounded like news. He had a real talent for entertaining commentary and good production value. His copycats had less talent and went more extreme, once they hit the bottom for broadcast, guys like Alex Jones took to the internet.
He was legit funny and entertaining then, as long as you weren’t the punchline. When he was past his prime, divorced and hooked on drugs in the 2000s it was different and really awful.
As a centrist, I love it, I think it would go a long way towards building more trust in news institutions, if they made a strong commitment to trying their best to present multiple viewpoints on an event and doing their best to not introduce bias into it.
Modern news with a fairness doctrine would probably be profoundly boring, which is good in its own way (I'm sure you would agree), but not something that makes a company like CNN a lot of money. Good journalism is expensive and laborious; cheap commentary on a 24hr stream is relatively cheap and easy.
And the fairness doctrine never really applied to newspapers — which instead sought centrism to broaden their distribution in a geographical-based market and attract more ad dollars. This is another trend towards centrism which has been rendered moot by the Internet, where firms compete for attention using partisanship — which has long been preferred by paying audiences (and was the norm in the 19th century newspaper).
Such regulation could be legally applied to the internet. It may need a different agency to enforce it as the FCC only ever had the most control over broadcast airwaves (though the FCC still has some control over cellular bandwidth and broadband cabling and could use those as leverage), but basic regulations like "ads need to properly labeled; news needs to be properly labeled; editorial opinions need to be properly labeled" could absolutely still exist within the rights of the First Amendment. (The first Amendment is a nuanced thing and primarily designed between you a citizen and your government, every other kind of relationship is mostly just assumed beyond that, and some of it depends on whether you agree with the Citizens United decision that corporations are citizens and money is speech, which is a massive rabbit hole.)
If there was a US Congress that wanted to regulate it, they absolutely could. The difference between 1949 and today has nothing to do with the First Amendment or technology changes and almost everything to do with a lack of will to properly govern with good regulations (and capitalism with no guiding hand regulation sinking to lowest common denominators for clickbait and attention seeking).
If a “will to properly govern” is involved then it will take far more than “good regulations,” it will take major substantive changes to the nation’s Constitution, with all that entails. It will not happen because the citizens of the nation still like that amendment and fear they will be exposed to abuse without it.
In that era, TV channels were a tightly-regulated, very-rare resource, and as a result the information carried upon them rapidly diffused to everyone because there simply weren't that many alternatives to turn to for information. In terms of the attention economy, attention was relatively cheap if you could get onto the channel; you had a completely captive audience with few distractions if they were using television at all.
LeVar Burton once opined in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air that the most special thing about the miniseries Roots was that because of its timing, it's one of the last dramatizations on racism that more-or-less an entire generation of Americans experienced. Once cable brought the number of channels from dozens to hundreds (and HDTV later pushed it into the thousands), the cost to fixate a message in front of every household skyrocketed. There's more content than ever to experience, but the odds of any two people having experienced similar content have commensurately gone way down.
It's entirely possible that the era of the cultural touchstone is nearly over (though firms like Disney certainly make a go of it with 300-million-plus dollar movie investments).
Many even most controversies aren't complex takes on deep issues. They are to be frank malicious bullshit. Taking pills to not continue a pregnancy isn't murder. There isn't a basement let alone kids under that pizza place. The election wasn't stolen. Societies without pervasive individual guns don't have people blowing away children meaning the issues with gun control are 99% logistical/legal. We could solve them we just willing and able to trade dead children for more freedom. There is zero moral implications to allowing gay marriage or gay adoption. Evolution is real as is systemic racism.
Shall we designate a ministry of truth to decide what controversies we ought to teach or force our media to carry malicious lies?
If you are saying that there is no nuance, no gray areas at all, to the topics of abortion, election integrity, gun ownership, etc then you are no better than the ideologues on Fox news, just in the opposite direction.
There really is little nuance regarding election integrity. Trump definitively lost. The only disputes with a shred of substance were themselves procedural quibbles like arguing that a given legislature overstepped its authority by offering mail in balloting and attempting to use this to argue that the proper resolution to overreach would be to throw out the legitimately cast ballots of those following government instruction in order to reach claimants preferred outcome.
Lets do abortion next. Almost all the meaningful brain development that produces a human like being rather than a human looking being happens in the third trimester whereas almost all abortions happen in the first and overwhelmingly consist of mom to be swallowing pills terminate something as intelligent as mold. The nuance was covered 50 years ago and then again and again with redundant laws designed to protect the fetus from fictional partial birth abortions that were already illegal twice or three times over. Having already achieved the goal of keeping human like beings from being killed decades prior there is little nuance left to deal with.
If you have an hour we could do gun control too. I noticed you didn't mention the other controversies presumably because you don't regard them as meaningful controversies. Kudos.
> The only way you can be against popping pills in the first trimester is...
You're being awfully free there with the strawmen...
But you said "brain development", not brain activity. Do you have some developmental milestone in mind? If so, what? My standard hinges on electrical activity in the brain, which is there by the 24th week - that is, the second trimester. (And maybe earlier - detecting brain activity isn't as simple as slapping EEG electrodes on the skull, when the skull is inside the womb.) I would argue for that, rather than for a particular developmental milestone.
Other possible milestones: The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.) If at that stage of development it has full human rights because it had the misfortune to be born prematurely, why shouldn't it have those rights if it wasn't born prematurely?
Or, first heartbeat. (The heartbeat used to be the deciding line on the death side, before the brain was.)
Or, fertilization or implantation. (I agree with you about the egg.) It will become possible to build an artificial womb that will take a fertilized egg and produce a baby in nine months. Does that change the boundaries for you at all? (Via my "premature birth" argument, does it change the boundaries if we can take an earlier, non-viable premature birth, stick it in the artificial womb, and have it survive?)
This last position loops back to my argument about the organ donor. The question was whether the brain had stopped, and wasn't going to start up again. Well, in the case of the fetus, it will start up if you just don't kill it. (Whereas the egg, by itself, will just die in 7 or 8 days.) The fetus is "default alive"; the egg is "default dead". To me, that makes abortion different from birth control.
This is an interesting line of argument.
The twist here is that a fetus is "default alive" provided resources are expended to keep it that way.
Consider:
> The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.)
as a point at which a host might say "I don't wish to support this parasite that I have no interest in any longer" and transfers a fetus to an artifical womb.
Murder? That seems unlikely.
But is the fetus truly "default alive"?
If the power goes out will it survive? Surely it requires external support much as various patients require life support but are otherwise not viable.
Things are rarely clearcut and this point at least is still within the grey of a Sorites paradox.
So... yeah. "Things are rarely clearcut", as someone said recently :-)
The baby's brain will triple in size during the third trimester including almost all of the development of the cerebral cortex features that are essential to being human or even being a mouse. It goes from something that as is is functionality incapable of being considered asleep or awake that doesn't posses the ability to drive even a mouse's experience to something that could aptly be said to be a sleeping human brain during this time. This is definitively when potential becomes reality.
The standard established by roe of between 24-28 weeks being set before this actuality is safe standard to balance rights of baby and mom to ensure we don't enslave actual humans to the needs of potential ones.
[1] http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped...
No. Not multiple viewpoints. Merely an opposing view. Of the station's choosing. So if your station's views are correct, and why wouldn't they be, then the best choice of opposing view is some crackpot, ideally not too offensive for the middle of the night.
"9/10 establishment approved policy experts think we should be balls deep in Vietnam. The 10th says just the tip"
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/412/94/
[2] https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
The key difference is that the government can put you in jail, or confiscate your property whereas Facebook and only harass you within the confines of Facebook.
The Postmaster General Albert Burleson makes up a solid part of chapter 3 of this march through a tragic & vicious time. Burleson told post offices to send any suspicious/un-American/not-war-supporting publications to him for review, which he then used either deny mailing to or used to attack directly the institutions. The web of publications not just suppressed but attacked here seemingly extended to basically anyone with a dissenting voice on labor, race, or seemingly most any topic where the governmemt wasnt portrayed in favorable rights.
We did (thanks to the courts) come to limit government power to censor & abuse eventually, and to your defense not that much longer after. We have only just gotten to ~100 years of there being some clarity, but after an enormous cliff where these ideas seemingly meant nothing, and from which we emerged only because of a very very few sensible & reasonable high placed people who reversed an animal & base anti-speech anger that government had been systemizing actively.
I still broadly agree with your distinction, but noting the dark shitty times & bring aware how bad things were not that long ago- at a governmental level- is also important. This book has been eye opening.
The problem with the linked article is it insinuates political bias is the only acceptable public opinion, propaganda in support of that one party is good, anyone in opposition to its aggressive propaganda is bad, and then weirdly implies lack of trust in that propaganda is somehow bad for democracy.
The main problem with trust in media is a diversity of ownership implies a diversity of opinions, and we had that in the past. There is no diversity in ownership nor opinion now. There is the one party which must always be supported at all times by the good people, and the evil ones who do not obey.
Top 10 Cable News Shows in 2022
RANK NETWORK PROGRAM NAME P2+AA (000) #Tlc
1 FOXN THE FIVE 3419 246
2 FOXN TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT 3031 228
3 FOXN JESSE WATTERS PRIMETIME 2857 200
4 FOXN HANNITY 2811 214
5 FOXN SPECIAL REPORT BRET BAIER 2511 244
6 FOXN THE INGRAHAM ANGLE 2269 215
7 FOXN GUTFELD! 2040 222
8 FOXN OUTNUMBERED 1858 245
9 FOXN AMERICA’S NEWSROOM 1761 496
10 MSNBC ALEX WAGNER/ MADDOW
https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/these-are-the-top-rated-cabl...
My son thinks MSNBC is worse than Fox but I’d say Fox was commercially successful from the very beginning and that liberals were ‘too smart for that shit’ until the Trump administration where MSNBC really had grist for that mill and got much better ratings.
CNN has the bias of ‘if it bleeds it leads’ and loved to promote antagonism with Trump because it was great for ratings. I would say though that even non-partisan business news on cable is awful. We will probably still be hearing the non-sensical FAANG acronym for years thanks to the ignorance of Jim Cramer. At least his stock picks are it much worse than a dart, not as bad as Jimmy the Greek’s football picks.
The absolutely breathless coverage about classified documents found in Biden's home, about whatever immigration problem happens to be going on (which often implies on both ideological sides of it that the immigration problem is the presidents fault), the economy, etc - the coverage is all about the same, critical, often overly so.
The only real difference is, there isnt some violation of norms or scandal every three weeks with Biden. One of the nice things I can say about Trump, is he had so many scandals, we stopped using the -gate suffix to them.
I shy away from telling people how to live, but I would consider looking at other sources if only for one reason: 'being able to detect bias and correct for it'.
I'm moderately good about detecting bias, but I see more 'gotcha' questions from the media interviewing administration officials, there is no answer, nothing that can be done, but they're still expected to answer the questions.
I can detect bias in both 'mainstream media', and and right wing sources.
I am only aware of the different bubbles, because I seem to belong to several social circles with very much opposed views and I don't know how common it is today ( I am not really joking ) since the weird trend I have been seeing is cutting off 'toxic family members', which effectively means people actively work to maintain their particular bubbles making already bad problem even worse. And since I tend to listen to everyone, everyone seems to think I am in full agreement.
The only place I did not see it hit hard is work, but that seems to be the case only because there is still some expectation of 'leaving non-work related stuff outside', but even that seems to be changing.
As I am re-reading your posts, I do not think we are disagreeing.
I also am not a big believer in cutting people off, or avoiding opinions that make you uncomfortable, it leads to a certain kind of intellectual stunting - the inability to try to understand the perspective of the other side - and like, in politics specifically, you must understand what the other side believes and why they believe it to effectively argue against it.
To circle around (and be clearer), the media consistently promotes the idea of the imperial presidency - the idea (mostly on a subconscious level) that the president can solve all problems.
In reality, 80% of the problems (which can be solved) facing America must be fixed legislatively - but because of dysfunction in the legislative branch.
Which, I should explain that - the causes of this are manifold:
* From special interest groups dominating the law writing process (which isn't always bad, but its not transparent)
* Congress being non-majoritarian (i.e. not well reflecting the actual views of the voters) because we've failed to expand the number of congresscritters since the 20's, leading to widely unequal district sizes)
* To issues with primary elections which result in the most extreme views being on the general election ticket, rather than the most moderate ones (which actually reflect the median voter).
* Bicameralism and the Filibuster also makes it harder to pass laws, laws that might have a good agreement of 59% of both houses, but if it cant meet the threshold in the senate it fails.
So instead the administration and the courts have stood in the legislatures place to do the business of the people.... with mixed results.
The media however, doesn't talk about that, they instead gig administrations for issues that are just plain outside of the remit of the presidency and thats just for the solvable problems - some are not (lots of reporting on the pandemic was like this) but by asking "well what are you going to do about X?" and the poor secretary of whatever has no answer, because its not a solvable problem by government, it just makes our government look incompetent.
This is from a larger piece (https://alohawolf.substack.com/p/an-evergreen-america) a friend of mine and I wrote -
"Government cannot be there to solve every problem, cure every illness, and redress every grievance. The progressive left often mistakes things the government can do for the things the government ought to do. The regressive right often demands the clock be turned back to a time where the government did very little--ignoring the changes wrought on American society by advances in science and technology since then."
Put another way - The lefties I know broadly assume government to be more competent that it is and private industry either greedy or incompitent than reality shows, and the conservatives I know broadly assume private industry to be more competent than it is, and government to be more incompetent than reality shows.
The reality I know is America has a nice spread of competency and its not regional, and government is no more, or less competent than private industry, it does move slower however, for a variety of very good reasons (regulated utilities are often the same way, for the same reasons. Our media does a poor job of reflecting that, and does a poor job explaining to Americans why things are broken - and I have little love for either party at this point, both seem (on a spectrum anyhow, republicans seem worse about this, they keep ending up as the dog who catches the fire trunk, then fail to implement their ideas, because of either - how profoundly unpopular they are, or because they dont have any implementable ideas int he first place - dems - at worst - mostly just seem to have trouble organizing a one car motorcade) more interested in political power than doing the peoples business.
I want a media that holds the rich and powerful to account, keeps the people informed enough to make good choices, but also reminds the people of their duty to ensure the system works - and all of us, every citizen has a duty which we are doing a poor job at carrying out - which is staying invested in the system, and keeping enough tabs on what government is doing to make informed choices about who ought to run it, and why.
Anyhow, thanks for reading this wall of text ;-)
I look at these statistics and it tells me conservatives have one place they go to to watch the news, while liberals either don't watch cable news and/or they split their viewership amongst several outlets.
Cable news ratings are meaningless in trying to reflect media bias.
Is this referring to the "Republicans and Democrats are the same party" trope, or is there a different intended meaning here?
You're comment indicates you think there are multiple parties. I'd assume you mean the Republicans and Democrats, but both of those parties are supported by various news outlets. So yeah, I don't think I understand what is trying to be conveyed here.
I think people perceived Reagan was successful at solving the problems of the 1970s and I think Clinton basically picked up most of Reagan's approach to governing the same way that Tony Blair followed in the steps of Margaret Thatcher in the UK. The polarization was different back then. I remember George HW Bush getting on TV when Rodney King was beat by the LAPD and saying that he'd watched it on TV with his wife and he was shocked, whereas you'd expect Republicans today to say something like "it served him right". For that matter his son signed into law the expansion of Medicare benefits to include prescription drugs which was a huge new social program.
It seemed in the Bush years the public was still not getting a clear choice on many issues, one of the things that alienated people from "the establishment" is how voices opposed to the 2nd Iraq War were excluded from respectable opinion. I would tell anyone who listened that the war would likely turn out the way that it did but nobody in power listened, despite very large protests against the war. With Kerry in 2004 the Democrats did not clearly distinguish themselves from Bush and his policies as Kerry had this strange ambiguous position between being a war hero and an anti-war organizer who would not come to a clear position on Iraq.
I think though the next trend started w/ Newt Gingrich in the 1990s who tried to block Clinton at every turn (who maybe helped Clinton paradoxically because he could pursue a basically conservative agenda but have groups like the National Organization of Women support him in his philandering and have environmental groups not complain about him doing nothing because he was under attack from the other side)
That kind of negative politics went into high gear in the Obama years and today it seems there is little sign of the swing voter. You certainly couldn't say that Donald Trump didn't clearly distinguish himself from Biden, which was not so clear in the 1992-2004 time frame.
I’d say the secret in politics can be found in the work of Mancur Olson who would say a large group like ‘women’ or ‘white people’ cannot really organize on its own behalf because of the free-rider problem. A union has to have a ‘closed shop’ otherwise one could get the benefits of the union without paying dues. A membership organization might get small donations from 1% of that group but those members do not have any say or representation in what the group does. It is like a turbocharged engine which has a huge amount of energy cycling in the shaft, in this case 95% of donations go to overhead and getting more donations and there is no change and little advocacy but it is a great job if you can get it.
A special interest like ‘the 100 biggest farmers in California’ can organize much more effectively and the people involved see a much more straight line of getting influence. For a group like that, politics is a business expense and spending $X on greasing politician’s palms makes $20X for the interest it is a great business. (One answer to the problem could be to try to make political spending and bribery more expensive. If it cost $10 to get a $5 tax cut all but the most cantankerous rich people would shut up and pay their taxes)
The democrats and republicans pretend to represent great warring general interests and it is a lot of fury signifying nothing. Spamming the agenda with that stuff prevents any real changes but leaves space for special interests to pursue ‘politics as usual’. It’s a bit like pro wrestling.
Sullivan’s conclusion that the press should take sides put her in conflict with the Washington Post’s editor during the Trump years, Martin Baron. She quotes from an e-mail he sent her: “When we’ve done our work with requisite rigor and thoroughness (also known as solid, objective reporting) we should tell people what we’ve learned and what remains unknown—directly, straightforwardly, unflinchingly—just as people in lots of other professions do when they’re doing their jobs correctly. That’s what ‘objectivity’ was intended to mean when the term was developed for journalism more than a century ago”—that is, when Lippmann wrote “Public Opinion.”
Sullivan’s position is an appeal to the original rationale of the First Amendment. We have a free press in order to protect democracy. When democracy is threatened, reporters and editors and publishers should have an agenda. They should be pro-democracy. Reporters should “stop asking who the winners and losers are,” Sullivan says; they should “start asking who is serving democracy and who is undermining it.” The press is in the game. It has a stake.
Also according to the article she has a "memoir slash manifesto" called “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” (St. Martin’s)
https://www.amazon.com/Newsroom-Confidential-Lessons-Worries...
And 150 years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle editorial staff founded Bohemian Club to “facilitate the arts” and throw parties up in the Sonoma redwoods every summer. Some pretty high-profile guests over the years too. Move along, move along — nothing to see here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee
>Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information, as long as it’s genuine, by whatever means and with whatever motives. Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him.
So basically, "we're saying something that will turn our audience against him, but as an aside we mentioned that a couple organizations you've probably never heard of spoke out against something we're not going to explain, and that on balance means we're defending him."
Unfortunately, it has only grown.
This weird variation of navel gazing is very weird though. Is the author seriously suggest they should stop doing that? At that point, even the remnants of their current credibility will perish with the first source they burn since no one sensible will be stupid enough to disclose anything of value.
If it is not sincere, then I am in full agreement with you. It is a poster child why Americans lost faith in news.
You have an easier time arguing that it's not a crime. Certainly the Podesta hack itself was a crime, but it's plausible that Assange merely got the emails after the fact and published them because they were newsworthy. That's... pretty arguable, but it's at least an argument.
Broadly... I just don't see the bias here. Assange is credibly accused of political crimes. Stating so isn't "bias", it's just describing a reasonably held opinion. That it isn't your opinion isn't the point.
Maybe pick an incident that he's charged with?
> You have an easier time arguing that it's not a crime.
Especially since nobody has claimed that this is a crime, and he's never been charged with it. You're spreading misinformation in order to justify the prosecution of a journalist.
I'm confused what you mean here and whether you are saying I used biased or unbiased phrasing. If you are saying it was biased, why was my comment neutral when the original "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal." was not? If what I said was biased, how would you describe the fact that he has been accused of crimes?
I'm not asking rhetorical questions here. I'm challenging people to write an unbiased version of that original paragraph. I don't think it can be done. We can't address "Americans Lost Faith in the News" without being honest that this ideal of a universally agreed upon unbiased reporting of facts isn't truly possible.
What I meant is that the sentence you wrote was sufficiently neutral in tone along the lines of 'this guy accused of a political crime.'
<< why was my comment neutral when the original "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal." was not?
I think the issue is with the context. Would you be willing to rewrite the paragraph written by article's author, because you may be right in a sense that it is hard to judge it based on that one sentence fragment alone? My initial response is that the article pushes a clear agenda vis-a-vis Assange even though it seems to have a tenuous connection to the point author seems to be trying to make. So initial difference is there ( possibly criminal vs guy accused of crime reads very differently ) and it is hard to argue in good faith for an entity with a lot of editors no one thought that may read a tad biased.
All that said, my own personal bias may be showing here, but then I am not sure Assange was obligated to keep that information secret -- whatever else you may think about qualitative goodness/badness of that action. Naturally that leaves 'hacking' angle, but I will admit I did not follow story closely enough to offer a useful analysis.
edit: "Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information"
I am starting to think you may be right in general. This paragraph cannot be rewritten in an impartial manner, because it is at its core very partial. It is arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind.
No, because I don't think I can do better than the original author.
>I am starting to think you may be right in general. This paragraph cannot be rewritten in an impartial manner, because it is at its core very partial. It is arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind.
I don't think the paragraph is necessarily "arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind". It is remarking on a world which has an anti-Assange bias because many powerful people in the world, namely the US government, view Assange negatively. How do you report on that without either repeating or refuting that bias in the world?
Maybe a less controversial figure is a better example of this. The FBI monitored MLK Jr. That is just a fact. How do you remark on that fact neutrally? The FBI as an institution has some inherent level of trust. Reporting simply that they monitored MLK implies to a certain extent that he was implicated in some wrongdoing. Do you therefore try to qualify that? Do you say the monitoring was "inappropriate"? Is that too strong? Doesn't that imply that the FBI is racist or corrupt? Do you say it was "potentially inappropriate"? But doesn't that imply you think it might be appropriate?
I don't think the objective reporting of facts is nearly as easy as people seem to imply in conversations about media and in many cases it is impossible.
Maybe, Pratchett's work was onto something when he indicated that in Discworld universe poetic license was somewhat limited[1]:
“Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.”
So in the case of Assange, the writer should have added a short narrative indicating his particular perception of the issue ("Assange is possibly a criminal") absent a completely generic and neutral in tone ( Assange did something US governemnt did not like ).
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/586782-poetic-simile-was-st...
In short, I don't think it is impossible. There is no willingness to agree on some basic standards.
Assange clearly was selective about release of information and timed his releases to affect political outcomes, which discredited him in my eyes and many others.
But that just adds to the pile doesn't it? It shows that trustworthy agenda-free journalism is exceedingly rare even in the "alternative" media and activist journalism world.
If you have an audience that trusts you, you have power. Power corrupts.
I don't think there ever was an age in which journalism was significantly more trustworthy than today. I think we just had fewer options and less opportunity to look behind the curtain.
The Guardian also timed the release of the Snowden leaks, what do you think about that? They were very careful about how they did it, and dripped it out to keep it in the headlines because they, as a newspaper, knew how the headlines worked. They were also selective.
Also, what are you challenging when you say he is "discredited" in your eyes? Surely not the veracity of the information, which isn't impacted by the timing of its release.
So did the rest of the American media, starting with the Biden laptop fiasco. I don't see anyone from news orgs being under arrest and not charged for the past 10 years.
> The classic statement of the problem [that objectivity journalism is a problematic concept] is Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” published a hundred and one years ago. Lippmann’s critique remains relevant today—the Columbia Journalism School mounted a four-day conference on “Public Opinion” last fall, and people found that there was still plenty to talk about. Lippmann’s argument was that journalism is not a profession. You don’t need a license or an academic credential to practice the trade. All sorts of people call themselves journalists. Are all of them providing the public with reliable and disinterested news goods?
Most people have limited amounts of time and with their free time I'm sure they want to spend the least amount getting to the bottom of a story on the news.
People skim, fill in the blanks, and fulminate on twitter.
But seemingly smart people kept falling for it. They'd get angry and then dismissive if you showed them clear evidence.
I thought people would get wise to the bullshit after evidence came out - instead they all kept following the Piper. People who should have known better started attacking the whistleblowers, even though the smear campaigns were as blatant as could be. Basically all anti-war media is banned from Wikipedia - and 'the liberals' are fine with it.
I believed people would wise up as the true costs of war (20 trillion plus if you count the interest and don't count the societal destruction) started to be felt. Instead, the anger was successfully redirected to 'others' of various stripes; immigrants, refugees (from the wars we incited!), 'Russian hackers', blue vs red, "gobal communist elites" (ffs), etc.
My own parents minds were melted by corporate media over the last twenty years. Close friends got baited into the same permanent fear/rage state that they complained about Fox News promulgating.
And people seem to have forgotten it all, let it slide, to the point where a key architect, cheerleader and enabler of the disastrous invasions is now President. And people are happy about it, even as he breaks strikes and sets record military budgets while talking shit about nuclear and economic superpowers.
I'd love to see America get its shit together, but now it feels more likely that Santa Claus will drop me a PS5 and a Ferrari. Constant ceaseless propaganda has more of an effect than I gave it credit for, and people are way more likely to put up with it that I could have believed.
Me too. It's the self-reproachment then self-cannibalising following darks periods that is tragic and painful to watch. In my own conservatism I am exasperated by iconoclasts toppling statutes and badmouthing our values as if that could put things right or undo acts of a few whose ideas were clearly wrong even at the time.
Going back to the German experience, they more or less had an "intergenerational war" in the 70s. Not to over-psychologise but Tolstoy would clearly name the devouring guilt of our own crime and self-punishment. Nations that wage unjust wars are as traumatised as those they destroy, just in a different way. Again with the Russians, I can't help but think the ghosts their boys brought back from Afghanistan ate a good portion of the values they needed to keep people like Putin out of power.
I was too young to follow the Iraq invasion as it happened, only look back on it sometimes as a clear example. Now with the Ukraine war, while I understand it's a different situation from Iraq, I don't expect our news to faithfully report any facts that could possibly be used to support the Russian narrative. Among the first mainstream reports here were straight martyr propaganda about the Snake Island guards, repeating unconfirmed reports of their deaths later found incorrect. And anyone pushing the Russian side isn't more trustworthy. I give the overall US-Ukraine side in this conflict the benefit of the doubt only because I knew enough about Putin's antics before the war started, otherwise I'd honestly be lost.
Trump shouldn’t be given so much credit for the present moment. It should instead go to the iPhone, twitter, Reddit, Facebook, 4chan, blogs - the internet fire hose. And it’s not just the United States, it’s happening all over the world.
E.g: "X heavily criticized for Y action"
Supporting Tweet screenshots : 1 like, 4 likes ....
... Sprinkled with a lot of bs on top.
Let's be frank here: the Internet, as we currently use it, gives voice to _everyone_, regardless of the accuracy of the information, and while I agree that the upside is that we do have access to more information, it has not significantly changed the quality of it.
>As the press of this country now exists, it would seem to be expressly devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and destroy all that is good, and to elevate and advance all that is evil in the nation. The little truth that is urged, is usually urged coarsely, weakened and rendered vicious, by personalities; while those who live by falsehoods, fallacies, enmities, partialities and the schemes of the designing, find the press the very instrument that the devils would invent to effect their designs.
> The characteristics of the American journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace; and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors.
And that's just TV news. I also stopped participating in unfiltered social media. No more Facebook except close friends or family. But if they start sharing garbage then they get muted. No exceptions. I'll go look at your feed if I care about what you're up to.
My "news" comes from highly-moderated, topic-focused groups. HN, for example. But I will gladly stop reading (and downvote) a comment halfway through if it's nonsense.
I'm not living in "blissful ignorance". I'm not putting my "head in the sand." I know what's going on in the world. I just choose not to be consumed by it. And my daily mood and outlook-on-life has improved dramatically because of that.
This doesn’t really square with what the rest of your comment says. One would at least expect you to have mentioned regular reading of high-quality newspapers / magazines in order to justify this claim.
I’m thinking The Atlantic, Financial Times, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, etc. Each varies in their biases and you grow to recognize them as you read more but they’re generally reliable sources written by serious people.
There are of course also smaller, local papers worth reading. There are also papers I consider of lesser quality that still have some good journalists working for them —- but you have to actually read the byline and know who’s writing rather than focus on the brand. An unfortunate number of people don’t get past “NYT said X” and “National Review said Y”
At a certain level of sophistication one comes to realize the publications you listed are just as "garbage" as the pre-graduate level productions the parent avoids.
Journalists like to depict themselves as objective and rational guardians of democracy. But they’re just regular people, and their profession has adopted a mentality of righteousness. I roll my eyes every time I see “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on WaPo’s website.
Was it The Guardian that used to have a banner on the bottom listing scary things like "erosion of democracy" and asking for you to pay? Generally if something is trying to stir up fear while asking for money, I don't trust it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vkgROIINEs
At the beginning, the audience was evenly split on the motion (48/52). 82% said they were open to changing their minds over the course of the debate.
At the end, audience was 67/33 (!!) in favor of the motion, apparently one of the largest swings in Munk debate history.
The heart of it is a cabal who think they are "right", feeling no compunction about using whatever means necessary to make everyone else submit to their obviously correct worldview. The Twitter Files came out after this debate, but oh boy the rout would have been even sweeter had that been out at the time.
Murray and Taibbi were talking straight. Gladwell and Goldberg were dissembling and side-stepping and strawmanning. I think it was that intellectual dishonesty that the audience ultimately picked up on.
No wonder it's devolved into partisanship. Politics is a 21st century religion, and the media its gospel choir.
"That Clinton was somehow a criminal for doing what her predecessor Colin Powell had also done—conduct government business using a private server—was a staple of the Trump campaign"
How does an educated person, journalist or not, not know the difference between using a private email account, which is what Colin Powell confessed to, and having a private email server set up in your home? (rumored to be quite insecure in the first few months)
There are several such "mistakes" in this article. It indeed read like a parody.
Marginalize pseudo-events, don't make a story where there isn't any, don't re-report same stories (Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image)
"always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty" (Joseph Pulitzer, Retirement letter)
Lessons from last century, when people trusted the news
We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need, and they often get drowned out by entertainment news, which is really just seeking engagement for advertising - the reader is not the customer, they are the product being sold. In this sense, the lost faith is both warranted and correct.
---
As an aside - I think this is going to get much, much worse. We had a brief golden age where "seeing is believing" was a real thing, and a photograph or video carried substantial weight as evidence. That window seems to be closing. As image manipulation becomes easier and easier, I think media will become much more bitterly divided. "Truth" will once again become a subjective take based on the sources you trust - you will likely end up reading and trusting the same news sources your family/friends/acquaintances do. It will be harder to challenge your trust in those sources because the challenge will boil down to "he said/she said" fights between proclaimed experts with different motives and incentives, with no easy way for a layman to find believable evidence themselves (ex: A clear + trusted photo or video).
We're gonna go back to "who can shout the loudest" with the fun kink that this time money can literally buy robotic voices that shout all the time while pretending to be people from your community.
The ownership structure of most news organizations is qualitatively different now than it was in the mid-century heyday of the "independent press". Joseph Pulitzer, for example, was succeeded by generations of owner/editors with a legacy to uphold until the 90s, when JP III died and the family's media interests transferred around and eventually becoming public. By that point, of course, papers had been raising capital from Wall Street for decades already.
So they are funded differently now. The publicly held conglomerates and private equity firms that largely own news organizations today are constitutionally of managing, perhaps even understanding, the "public trust" they own. At best they're concerned with trust in the news.
The concept of public trust is a little subtle. Every news organization, in the US, is a sort of public news organization (in theory).
For about 250 years (in the US), newspapers have been mostly political rags. They rose to popularity as a way for a single person or group to spread propaganda. Around 1900 they shifted from political rags to scandal-themed yellow journalism, and later turned more "professional", but never lost their slant towards ideologies, social/economic classes, trades, etc. The powerful have always controlled, influenced, and suppressed them. They've never been objective.
We've thought about the news as entertainment for the last 50 years. The movie Network came out in 1976, and predicted the abandonment of "balanced" journalism and information in favor of entertainment and profit. We've also known that the news may be staged, selectively covered, biased, and have a leading agenda in the stories they cover and how they cover them. And I mean, come on: Editorials? Literally just a biased person shouting their biased opinions, as if they have the right to speak for every reader?
The news has always been bullshit. Useful bullshit, but still bullshit. Anyone who thinks what they read is "true" doesn't understand the concept of truth.
Great deal/Quite a lot Confidence in Newspapers went from about 35-40% in the 80s to about 22% today (COVID likely a major influence on 2022's 16% number). Very Little number also notable.
Polls can be manipulated, misconstrued, and simply poorly executed. Leading questions, doublebarreled questions, double negatives, question order, margin of error, misread data, "random" sampling, focus groups saying what you want to hear, flukes like a surge due to novelty, and more, all skew polls in ways that don't reflect reality. Polls are more shamanism than science.
So why did the numbers change? The media has been telling us we shouldn't trust them for years, and people are reporting back what they've been told. It's also possible that when people say they "don't trust the news", what they really mean is they don't trust what's being reported - as in, if they're reading about politics, they don't trust the politics. You might suspect the newspaper is lying, or you might suspect Trump is lying - but either way, it's "the news" you don't trust, so you start to doubt the institution that's bringing you the lies.
FiveThirtyEight.com uses polling data, but also looks at the electoral college, and accurately predicted that Trump could beat Hillary and that Biden could beat Trump, although the odds that Trump would beat Hillary were low, they did predict it was possible.
Who wants to see 5 adults discuss someone shitposting on Twitter as "breaking news".
"Britney Spears slams Alyssa Milano for old tweet that questioned her well-being: 'This definitely feels like a form of bullying!'"
This was in Taiwan in the early-2000s. I remember one story was about a school in a rural/poor area that flooded so it was shut down temporarily. The parents were upset because they wanted their kids in school. The reporters talked about the situation, interviewed a few people, then that was it. I thought to myself, "Where's the talk about racism/classism? Where's the video of parents shouting at school board officials? So, no one's gonna shove a microphone in a local politician's face and ask misleading questions?" Like I said, it felt weird, like something was missing. I didn't know the news could be like that.
Don't let them trick you!
I think that was the big turning point.
Yes, Dan was a sucker for some crudely-forged documents from a really dodgy source. But journalists skimping on fact-checking when they liked the story was SOP a century or few earlier. For instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Check
I still read The New York Times, but I do so knowing they have an American establishment bias and will make themselves uncritical puppets of the government whenever they feel so inclined. Probably most of what they publish is usually more true than false, but you've always got to read it with a grain of salt. The newspaper is best as a bellwether for what the American establishment wants the American public to believe. Having "faith" is precisely the wrong way to read a newspaper.
No WMDs in Iraq for me was the one that turned me. A Republican administration seeding the New York Times that lie and they published it with basically no research. The former CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, who oversaw the acquisition of KBR for fuck sake (the largest private contractor in the Iraq war with $10s? of billions of contract dollars per year)[1]) was the de-facto president of the US at the time.
The Hunter Biden laptop story being suppressed as Russian misinformation right before the election when it was legitimate is another big one.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBR_(company) "In the 2000s, KBR employed more American private contractors and had a larger contract with the U.S. government than any other firm in Iraq. The company's roughly 14,000 U.S. employees in Iraq provide logistical support to the U.S. military.[38] Some U.S. Marines revived the Vietnam-era nickname 'Burn & Loot' as a name for the company during the Iraq War.[39]"
It used to be that you knew, and cared, what was news reporting and what was opinion.
I wonder whether this is cyclical though. It's not as if partisanship is new in newspapers. They used to be very blatant about it, having "Republican" and "Democrat" in their actual names.
Facts might appear in some, not in others, because of relatives sides, but false fact appearing on some will be normally demolished by those of another side. Some facts will be depicted in positive or negative way, the same fact, depending of the side, but the reader still elicit the fact and distinguish if he/she want the reading part from the factual part. In that case we can "trust the press", simply because having most parts of the spectrum covered, we can read facts and opinion and form OUR personal opinion.
When the press is a pravda, essentially al journals tell the same story, omit or cite the same facts, with the same side etc than we can't trust the press. NO MATTER if those who write are honest or not. Even when they tell the truth they will be considered mendacious.
Nowadays the trust debt the press have gained, the self-inflicted reputational damage is big enough to be irrecoverable. A new press must then emerge, a press who represent various different opinions people do recognize, not just mocked actors like wrestlers. Until this happen the level of trust will be the same of any dictatorship press by their people. Below zero.
BTW similar reputational damage have happened to "international" institutions, local governments and corporations. That's why we are near to the point of a civil war OR the rise of classic local dictatorships with their classic parabola.
> My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work. This combination adds to people’s distrust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
The press versus the president, by Jeff Gerth in the Columbia Journalism Review
Every person, business, organization, and government lies. What matters is the frequency, how serious the lies are, and what is done about them.
If someone says they don't trust some news network because they lied or have an agenda where are they getting their information from? A person on Facebook who could also lie and have an agenda.
Making trust a binary value is the greatest manipulation tactic ever. More importantly if your news network is mostly opinions then you're less likely to run afoul of that low threshold of trust.
Donald Trump did not say that the news media is the enemy of the people. He said that the fake news is the enemy of the people.
Those are almost identical phrases, but that slight difference has a completely different meaning: media is good, but lying media is bad.
Can you wonder why Americans have lost trust in the news? Even an article purporting to clear things up for us starts out being misleading.
April 5th 2019:
"The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"
Or how how about singling out individual news organisations he doesn't like as "enemies of the people"?
Feb 20th 2019:
"The New York Times reporting is false. They are a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"
The difference between calling all the media "enemies of the people" or just the ones he dislikes doesn't seem to be that big a distinction for the purposes of the argument.
EDIT: removed unnecessary emotion
Yeah, I thought he said something like this, thanks for confirming. They should have just quoted him.
That "a large percentage" bit, along with how he fairly-commonly used "fake news media" to mean all non-explicitly-conservative news sources explains why people felt he was attacking the press in general, I think...
[1]: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/10251151556324556...
> They asked my daughter Ivanka whether or not the media is the enemy of the people. She correctly said no. It is the FAKE NEWS, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people!
I think he left things like this generally vague, so that his fans could fill in whatever details they personally found the most compelling. The very "make America great again" catchphrase is a perfect example of this; what exactly constitutes "great" and what era is he talking about when he says "again"? Discontent millennials could think he was talking about the 90s while boomers who thought the 90s were shit could conclude he was talking about the 50s.
tl;dr classic demagoguery
The first few times he explicitly listed news organizations he said were fake, including NYT, WP, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN.
By mid 2018 it had grown to mainstream media is fake [1].
In the last year or so he'd also been slamming Fox. It's pretty clear that his definition of "fake news" is functionally equivalent to "anything that isn't positive about me, no matter how true".
[1] https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/10414416769491845...
One of the main things Assange revealed, which has not been disputed, is how Clinton intervened in the 2016 Democratic primary election, to damage the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, using any means possible to stop the grassroots pressure from below felt in both major parties. Strange how the revelation of the inside truth of this election intervention is itself called election intervention.
There it is right in the first paragraph. Does The Post keep the number of Biden's lies?
At least CNN listed them: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/20/politics/fact-check-biden-fal...
*This very sentence, if uttered by Trump, would be entered in their database: a joke is an amusing action or story with a punchline; our database is an objective list of lies.
Trump: "We just got seventy five million votes. And that's a record in the history of in the history of sitting presidents."
WaPo: "When the counting was finished, Trump had received 74 million votes, not 75 million as he often claims" and then a bunch of irrelevant crap about how Biden got more, and how a record number of people voted in 2020.
Discounting 75 vs 74 million, Trump did get more votes than any sitting President in history. That is a fact, not a lie.
Trump claim: “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90% of which floods across from our southern border.”
WaPo's own "factcheck", ironically, confirms what he said was true.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/live-updates/tr...
Most of the entries in the database are things like "we have the greatest economy in history" and other such vague puffery. And if Trump repeats it 100 times, it counts as 100 lies.
Something substantive and fairly verifiable as false, along the lines of Biden's claim that he earned three degrees, or that he got arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela, or that he marched in the civil rights movement, or that his son died in Iraq, or that he finished the top half of his law school class.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
my moto these days is never trust anything/anyone.
I hoped to find a more conciliatory tone in this piece, for some greater level of introspection on their field, but immediately it invokes Trump and how victimized major media companies have been. There are plenty of non-traditional, but non-'Trumpified' news sources that are beating the incumbents on merit. It doesn't need to mean it's the end of democracy.
The newspaper industry will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes.
It's basically all fearmongering, tribalism, and recreational outrage.
I still try to remain aware of local and national and international events; I just don't want the "spin". I don't want to be told what's important or what to think or how to feel.
Maybe the hard drinking and smoking got to them.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me...
In the US Chamber Of Commerce memo of 1971, Lewis Powell said that the elite that own the corporations should start using them to push their own interests instead of allowing 'anti-American' (anticapitalist and antiwar) activities. It called for the consolidation of press sector and the use of press sector to push 'American' values and fighting against anti-war crowd. It advocated the private universities reject or expel students that were a risk to the system.
In the following years, especially starting with Reagan, the establishment literally implemented all of the advice in that document, and Powell went on to become a supreme court judge who helped that process of privatizing the entire US, including the press.
My local news [hi, Global BC!] can't do much better nowadays than to scrape up ambulance chasers, loan sharks, MLM, and dodgy pharma as advertisers.
Looks like a systemic problem.
The echo chamber and perverse cultural incentives in this profession are truly unimaginable. Now all the safeties have been removed, and as the journo-activism became so widespread it got normalized, like how at Enron everyone just thought fraud was normal because it’s all they saw every day. There’s no going back, the culture rot has metastasized.
Related, it always astounded me that newspapers had opinion desks. There is no more certain way to let political bias overtake the newsroom than having an entire opinion team to define the ideals of the company.
They didn't even make it a paragraph in before making a partisan attack.
This is rich.
If journalists want people to have faith in the news then they need to start being credible and reputable. Very few are, and none of them write for the New Yorker.
Bagdikian and many futurists around 1970 expected online communications to develop more quickly than it did and in this report for the RAND corporation he expected most people to be getting their news from something like CNN.com in the early 1980s and expecting personalization, filter bubbles and all of that.
There is a part in that book where he talks about the process by which the editor of a small town newspaper selects articles from the AP newswire and how that person has 6 seconds to decide if something is "fit to print". Thus the very process of selecting "news" from a wide range of events does damage to the fabric of reality: what appears in a newspaper is by no means a legitimate sample of "what is going on".
Worse yet, real events get crowded out by psuedo-events as pointed out in this classic book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e...
the author of which expected television stars to outcompete traditional politicians in 1962 and (like Bagdikian) might have been surprised about how it long it took.
Real events get crowded out by pseudo-events because in many ways pseudo-events are more "real" (see Baurdillard's concept of the "hyper-real") and meaningful than real events. One category is the press release about the report that describes some situation for the purpose of advocacy. People might find it really satisfying to read about some theory about, say, black people being beat up by the police, either from a left or right perspective. As a particular article fits into a particular ideology people find these meaningful. In the real world there are numerous events and releases of factual information which are only partially consistent with people's world views and people tend to reject these in favor of processed opinions.
The most embarrassing thing about The New York Times is that articles on the opinion page are the most popular. Mostly these are ignorant people mouthing off, not better than the best discussions on HN. Other reporters for the Times work really hard to do original reporting and get the facts right but readers are indifferent. It is the (really worthless) opinion page that drives subscriptions and revenue.
This is just as true about CNBC (Jim Cramer doesn't know what he is talking about but he makes up acronyms like FAANG that stick) or Fox News (which is only comfortable when people are sitting around the studio talking about the way things are spozed to be... whenever the camera goes to the outside world it scrolls ALERT ALERT ALERT)
Some of what bothers me about people who spam anti-vax and Twitter Files stuff to HN is that if they were successful they would be displacing other content from the site. Maybe I am misrepresenting them but I can't help but perceive their goal is displace other kinds of conversations with their BS.
At the time, the New York Times was held up as the gleaming standard of the fourth estate. Sure, TV news was still television, but it did have some aspect of "trust". The anchors were "real (white) men with experience" in suits. With GRAVITAS.
These were my formative experiences of the decline of the fourth estate:
1) The New York Times shilling for the second Iraq war shamelessly, with no criticism of that Colin Powell con job. The NYT has never regained any credibility as an independent news source since then.
2) the rise of FoxNews, and eventually, MSNBC and all other crap.
3) Watching private equity buyouts of newspapers and consolidation of media empires with no pushback from regulatory agencies, and watching them collapse into insipid entertainment shows (Natalee Holloway). I remember some kinda-embarrassing news coming about that was immediately preempted by 24 hour coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's overdose. It seemed very suspicious how each and every news source blared constant coverage of that for days after:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/02/anna-nicole-smi...
And it worked, I don't even remember what I thought was REALLY going on that disappeared from the headlines when she OD'd. I can't even find out to this day what conspiratorial undercurrent it covered up.
4) Al Gore getting mocked and grilled by the press in the 2000 election, while George Bush skated by with the aw shucks frat boy act. I'm not saying Al Gore was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but he was a global warming advocate at a time that we really needed a global warming advocate in power, even if the deadlock would have done nothing. Instead, we got George Bush. After the fact the media self-excused themselves because they were "angry that Billy Boy Clinton lied", even if true, is a shocking indictment of the US fourth estate.
IMO global warming is the long running litmus test of the failure of US media, especially compared to the EU media in my politically aware lifetime. Willfully ignored, downplayed, or mocked for 25 years, while the EU media would mention it constantly. This could kill hundreds of millions of people in the next century.
Next would be shameful oversight of the Iraq/Afghanistan forever war. Which killed possibly millions of people.
Then would be the unquestioning support of the forever war on drugs (imprisonment, racist enforcement, police empowerment, no treatment for addicts, and destroying of functioning Latin American governments as a result). Millions of lives ruined.
Finally, a complete lack of support for universal healthcare (which kills... millions of people).
Regardless, as information began to flow more freely from the internet, the fourth estate has responded by abandoning its morals and values. I'll say this for the Randolph Hearst era, as I read it there were lots of small muckraking newspapers that helped push the agenda of workers rights and workplace safety around the turn of the century.
I don't see anything like that coming out of the formally trained "fourth estate". They all just want big jobs and money from the zombie news conglomerates that control the oligarchical propaganda money.
In the end, the internet served mainly as a fine grained means for the shadow powers to test and determine how much they could get away with. In the "golden days" there was paranoia and fear of the truth. In the late 90s / aughts, they discovered how much lack of shame they could get away with. Now in the 2010s+, they have the tools of social media and mass fine-grained propaganda.
If you can't tell, I think the "fourth estate" is a mockery. Where once it may have served what they hold themselves up as, gleaming guardians of truth and light in the darkness, now they are the darkness. Journalists that work for any large media conglomerate are total sellouts. I suppose some of them tell themselves they "sneak in" the truth, maybe they can sleep at night with that.
Somehow my education involved a lot of "question authority" and "critical thinking". It was all public education (except college), and I had similar parents / adult figures, but I have heard that historically such education, even in America, was reserved for the rich or privileged. I did go to "rich" suburb public high school, so college prep was the emphasis, and that probably came along with it.
I would suspect if such education is more universal than my experience, it is actively under assault. I can't think of a better side effect of "teach to the test" than "we don't have time for critical thinking". Critical thinking is all that keeps one's head above water in the sea of manipulated "news".
If one takes the view that the destruction of the fourth estate is a brilliant means by the dark cabal of oligarchs to destroy the light of truth (and profit in the process, genius bastards), and that they've won, the next front is education and academia. Thus for-profit universities, funding manipulation, no child left behind, vouchers/charters, dropping funding of humanities, pricing it to oblivion, inflitrating an MBA management class to all universities, etc.
In reality, the smoke filled room of bellowing men isn't all that complicated. The US and World are seeing reduced competition and cartel/monopoly conditions is practically every "market". "Free Market Capitalism" iterative game theory results in local maxima stabilizations in cartels, once some market advantage is obtained and there is no protection from regulatory capture, dumping, cheap credit leverage, etc except another company of sufficient size.
The evil hooded cabal is winning.
It seems that as years go by that editorial boards (leaning in both directions) are having much more impact on what you and I read. Those editorial boards are influenced by owners and investors. Those people have bias as well.
There still does not seem to be a journalism source that is bias-free. I read yesterday that "Chat GPT is a panacea for bias in reporting". I nearly gagged!
In 2001 when the twin towers fell, I was encouraged by how suddenly everyone put down their party ties and went to talk about how we would rebuild and retaliate. In present day, the war in Ukraine has done nothing but further split our nation. So what changed? We didn't act like this during Bosnia.
Is it the effect of journalism bias, or is it our nature as humans still working through the shock of Covid that we can't let things go. Are we now looking to argue just one more time to make sure "the other side" knows we think they're wrong?
We are sick as the human race, and nobody is admitting that. We've gone from intent to divide instead of intent to unite.
For one, we now have the hindsight of knowing how the post 9/11 mentality you speak of turned out. 20 years of fruitless wars based on lies.