Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

For that to be harmful, it doesn't even have to be all journalists, just enough of them that people come across that bias often enough to be familiar with it.

I'm certain that many journalists value the truth and fairness over party, but I'm also certain that too many journalists put party/ideology over truth and fairness (in many areas), and the news organizations have become more tolerant of bias.

Just try for basic literacy first.

  A Gallup analysis published in March 2020 looked at data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, 2014, and 2017. It found that 130 million adults in the country have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab.

I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?

Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization.

Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.

On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal).

Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative:

> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

> the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.

Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not if they are not specialized science reporters.

When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.

The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level.

Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.

Notably, the OP doesn't mention "cultivating sources" in their bullet points and that's a big source of corruption of individual journalists.

In more detail: one of the most valuable thing a given political reporter on either a local or national level can get is "scoop", the opportunity to break a story first. The valuable source of scoops is ... the very people in power at whatever level the reporter is operating on. So a reporter wants to have these powerful people like them. And that effort to be liked can easily result in the reporter spinning a story to the liking of these people.

This dynamic is discussed fairly often in analyses of the press I think.

It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...

> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.

[1] Public Opinion, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html

You are correct. Its a hardscrabble life.

There is no payoff, except for the duty of the profession.

This is unfortunately the one thing that society seems to be lacking dramatically these days. From policemen that don't rush in to rescue children in danger of being murdered by psychos, to administrators that feel that doctors should get time off to "reflect" on X person getting killed by a cop (cancer doesn't take days off... grandma's back pain doesn't take the day off). Duty is severely lacking across all layers of society.

The tone from the top seems to be encouraging this. Now, "its ok to be soft" instead of "power through, people depend on you"

We need more Taibbis and Intercepts, willing to do their duty.

Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.

Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"

Hasn't Trump been talking about the 'fake news media' for 5+ years? And don't half of Americans lap that stuff up?

Seriously though, within a city, they had morning and evening editions (12 hour lag) hundreds of years ago. For national stories, the lag was more like a week, then dropped to 12 hours when the telegraph was invented. Also, back then, there were orders of magnitude more newspapers (multiple in each big city, and at least one in small towns), so most modern censorship techniques simply would not work. Yeah, Elon Musk would have owned a paper, but (by law) only one, and multiple other wealthy tech people would own papers in the same market.

"Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"

This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.

HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either.

The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.

"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."

This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.

But propaganda is tricky, you need people to keep paying attention which means the most overt spin is to be avoided. Done well you shift the narrative over decades not just swap positions on day one. Fox News is the most well known US example, but you don’t want to just preach to people who already believe your message.

Thus you want to control the widest possible selection of media.

If you consider the decades of scolarship it takes to clarify extremely well doccumented events, like the outbreak of the first world war, it's clear that even with a mountain of evidence, and all the time in the world, the 'basic facts' can be stubornly elusive even with the best of intentions.

The idea that an accurate picture should be able to emerge before 9-o'clock, in a newsroom, in a haze of conflicting reports, seems pretty incredible to me: and historically, that's not what has happened. So 'accurate news' is neither something we should expect, nor something we have a great deal of evidence of.

> Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.

Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".

Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind of wooden interpretation of words and lazy disqualification is what leads someone to the "black and white" spin you're accusing the GP of. This falls in line with the type of _gotcha_ logic that insists: "Well you said x, and x means X regardless of rhetorical device usage." and "OP has expressed sentiment in Y, which leads me to believe he's actually Y and therefore not $CREDIBLE".

The point is, engaging like this deprives the dialogue of nuance, rhetorical freedom and grace. If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).

There is a difference between withholding information, selective emphasis, and outright lies. They are all bad, but they are equally bad. If you want to make things better you attempt to differentiate better from worse actors.

TLDR; all media, and all people, are biased, but they are not all equally biased. This bias can produce false beliefs. If you think false beliefs are a bad thing you promote the better actors and condemn the worse.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've just seen first hand (1) the real information on the battlefield (2) the public affair office's briefing to medias, which is factual although omits sensitive things and (3) the media's subsequent reporting which largely ignores what the PAO said and goes on with their made up interpretation. It's frankly sickening. They're writing fantasy.

Isn’t… isn’t that a pretty black and white spin on the idea of sociology? Do you have any studies to share that indicate “politically colored armchair philosophy”?

No, not for propaganda. If you want people to have a certain perception and position on a topic, selective reporting of topics and the presentation of them is far more relevant. This certainly does qualify as misleading.

Lies are even more ineffective since they often can be directly disproved, which biases people to believe the opposite. You want to present your spin in a certain blur.

Many prominent sociologist pretty much explain the mechanisms media and advertisers employ in detail. To say this is a fringe position is misleading too.

Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.

Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.

At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.

It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)

> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.

It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.

Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.

Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.

> Many credible books on that topic to read.

Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!

What is your evidence such a system exists today?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ

One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.

That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore.

The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.

> But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.

Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.

I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA.

Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.

Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1.

They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources.

So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.

There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study.

> The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.

Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this.

[1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/d...

Same's happening to the physical product; mostly a thin wrapper around state/national news from Gannett corporate.

I almost wish they would pick up a template website though, because theirs is super buggy (I'd likely get the print version anyway).

Stations that did run an editorial with a given partisan viewpoint were even required, by law, to allow an opposing view to be aired in response.

> [...] the American press gave a completely distorted picture of what happened in Laos in the summer of 1950, with the Washington Post and the New York Times being among the worst offenders. [...]

> Press dispatches bore such news as "Viet-Minh troops advanced to within 13 miles of Samneus city" (UPI), and even the staid British agency Reuters headlined on September 3 that "the Royal Laotian Army was today preparing to defend the capital of Vientiane"; while on September 5, an editorial of the Washington Post, citing the "splendid examples of alert on-the-spot reporting" of its columnist Joseph Alsop spoke of "full-scale, artillery-backed invasion from Communist North Viet-Nam." All this was just so much nonsense. [...]

> Two weeks later, the letdown began. Even the New York Times report in Laos, who, until then, had swallowed whole every press release circulating in Vientiane, noted on September 13 that "briefings have noticeably played down the activities of North Viet-Nam in the conflict. This led some observers to believe that Laotian political tacticians were creating a background that would soften the blow if the [United Nations] observer report on intervention by North Viet-Nam was negative." Indeed, the Security Council report of November 5, 1959, did fail to substantiate the theory of a Communist outside invasion of Laos. [...]

> There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that certainly North Viet-Nam and perhaps even Red China, gave military and political support to the Laotian rebellion. But their aid was in no way as overt as originally suggested in the alarming reports spread around the world by American press media, some of which went so far in their affirmations as to accuse almost anyone who doubted their stories as being either a blind fool or "soft" on Communism. Joseph Alsop's "Open Letter" to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life (both of which refused to be stampeded by their less hard-headed colleagues) is a prime example of this attitude. [...]

> While the British and the French--whose sources of information in Laos already had proved more reliable the year before--awaited more hard facts to go on, Washington took up the cudgels in full, both officially and in the press. In a somber column, Mr. Joseph Alsop spoke of the "yawning drain" which Laos was likely to be engulfed in; compared the 1954 Geneva settlement to the Munich sell-out of 1938; and called our Canadian allies who had staunchly defended the Western viewpoint in the international cease-fire commission (the other members being India and Poland), "approximately neutral."

This was written in 1964, so over a decade before Bernstein's expose.

[1] Street Without Joy, pp. 331-337

https://www.quora.com/Did-CIA-Director-William-Casey-really-...

Sorry for the bluntness here.

There at least used to be a remaining vestigial substructure to society in things like churches and civic organizations. As we've slowly grown into a society of unbelievers, the churches have splintered into myriad heterodox sects, and we've supplanted much civic engagement with work and internet use, this substructure is failing.

Chapo Trap House touches on this frequently, but their recent episode called Arrival (ep 706) had a pretty poignant example. It was commentary on a series of NY Post and Times articles about the supposed drastic increase in crime, and how people, especially those who live in the burbs, are starkly disconnected from the reality of the world. And specifically because of some of these factors I outlined above.

I have slowly formed a trusted circle of programmers on Discord of various political stripes that are able to keep each other somewhat in check and connected to reality WRT the happenings in the world over the past 7 years or so. It has definitely helped keep me grounded in the past few years of covid and suburbia driven isolation and a drastic increase in media consumption.

But it shall not be confused with journalism.

I don't put those 2 channels in different categories at all. And certainly they don't divide from each other along lines of objectivity. They are both in the News Entertainment industry. Neither cares in the least about objectivity.

The only split I see between them is their mutually exclusive audiences.

Fox News is actually in a better place because they don't seem to be hiding the fact that they are there for entertainment and audience-building. They both care about their ratings first and foremost, but CNN is still trying to keep some veneer of serious journalism.

As a test: I haven't watched it recently, but how has CNN mea culpa'd over the news that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? A "serious news organization" should have had a real period of soul-searching over that. I bet it was barely a blip on their radar.

Because... Editors couldn't possibly have motives that similarly contain bias, corruption, out other such common frailties of the human condition?

https://cal.streetsblog.org/2021/07/26/l-a-times-needs-to-st...

and usually these days when you find an LA city councilmember with an FBI indictment for corruption, they had an LA times editorial board endorsement.

Eg keeping people bickering about racial issues instead of agreeing on the aspects of policing which need reform, or from focusing on class issues.

Sometimes, something just isn't true and the other side doesn't get equal attention to defend their points. You can calmy explain how lizard people inside hollow earth run Hollywood to turn our children into gay frogs, but these people shouldn't get any air time, not even to be made fun of.

If one side says cook at home as much as possible for your family to be healthy, and the other side says go down to the ditch and drink the pond scum, what are you doing by representing both sides there? One of the important duties of journalism is making editorial decisions that drinking pond scum isn't a balanced opposition to cooking dinner.

Journalist practice for decades has been going incredibly far out of its way to find an alternative "side" for any perspective that's presented. They then do a lot of work for them making it seem as reasonable and mainstream as possible.

This is exactly how you get fringe reactionary political views elevated to the level of national concern.

Personal opinion is not news. It's merely one person's unfiltered view of the world. And because it's uncurated by a trustworthy filter, it's impossible to know whether it's worth your attention, much less serious consideration.

I use media to find out what America believes, and where it is headed. Your list of sources is going to leave you surprised fairly often. My goal is to not be surprised.

It's telling that even when they issue a correction, the corrected language is always quite clearly still misleading.

They did the same thing with the 1619 project. One of the original articles stated:

>"...one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."

Many prominent historians evicerated them for this fabrication.[0] The NYT responded in a manner scarcely discernable from lying[0 again], after which they were subject to a second eviceration[1], and only then did they issue a (weaselly) correction[2], which was presumably the smallest change they could manage.

>"...one of the primary reasons *some of* the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."

Which, of course, is clearly intended to suggest the very same lie.

[0]https://archive.is/OC7xu [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-proje... [2]https://archive.is/oHWLR

you’re on HN. surely you have the imagination.

edit: apparently not

To be clear I also think its a bit ridiculous to have Disney operate as a local goverment of a town. But I'd say that if Disney was a feed supply company and not a media/theme park outfit just the same while your (and Ron D's) concern seems to be that "Woke Disney" specifically had that jurisdiction.

I've also thought of a structure where there's a news organization that's just openly biased, the prime directive is listed on the front page, and each news article is explicitly edited to explain how the article is presented to support the main mission of the organization. Maybe could link to refutations to keep the appearance of honesty.

This of course falls into a funny counterfactual scenario that I don't have a clever term for. "In the world where this solution is possible to deploy, the problem doesn't exist". If you could staff an entire news organization that was so dedicated to exposing its own bias, it would mean you had a critical mass of adults in society that were actually concerned about the truth, and you could just do news the regular way.

Also, I'd state it more starkly: 1) 1/3 don't know or care about the suffering of people in general. 2) 1/3 wish harm on others or care so little about others that they'll seek even small personal gains at others' great expense. 3) 1/3 at least feel compassion for others, but might not have the ability or resolve to make substantial change.

Why do you think that group 1 is the one that needs to be controlled? Why not the ones seeking harm? I encourage apathetic people to become more politically-conscious, but I don't blame people for wanting to live their own lives.

I do agree that a lot of institutions are just toys: certain religions which talk about peace but whose followers openly and proudly support policies which harm others, political parties which offer team identities but no real change, etc.

Please don't take anything here as a blanket statement against any particular group.

I could elaborate but the short version for me is: If we could decouple editorial direction from funding sources I think we'd end up much better off.

Yes cnn is a newsertainement org like fox, but it’s not the anti-fox. For starters, No one actually cares about cnn except fox watchers.

In the U.S., we didn't make war with eachother, but we hardly "mended" our political misaligmnets from the 1920s and 30s either. In the post war years we simply made talking about communism in the media illegal, blacklisted progressive voices, and ran witchhunts under mccarthyism to root it out of office. Then after mccarthyism, we used the civil rights era and drugs to further alienate political groups from what is legal, proper, and ordained as bonafide american by the ruling class, versus unifying many of these new progressive ideas into our national culture. In later years we divided the labor class into irreconcilable factions, neither of which often thinks critically of the facts of their situation but rather believes the words of their chosen political party leaders as gospel, and never looking back or forward either unless told by said leaders.

If we consider history and our current status, we are at the moment where divisions are being made, and once divided into a group people don't tend to switch groups, they usually die believing that ideology they latch themselves on to. What is next is probably either two things: a period of instability as different groups vie for power (unlikely as the ruling class is unified in its position in the class war above all, and much political commentary is just fodder to distract from the class war), or, radicals will get the hippy treatment, and be pacified by both the conveniences of modern American capitalistic life, as well as the fact that their radical ideology receives no honest voice at all in mass media or wider politics.

There's certain words that have subjective connotation which they also use, and it's near impossible to write anything coherent for an audience if you decide any words with subjective connotation are forbidden.

Wouldn't work. There are too many facts and it is possible to build a narrative just by choosing which facts to show or not show.

Easy example, pick some demographic. Now report just the facts about all violent crime that demographic is involved in. Add in the most news worthy violent crimes of other demographics (the ones other news channels are carrying) to help create the image of impartial coverage, but always ensure an abundance of violent crime reports from the targeted demographic.

Thanks to the size of the total US population, you'll always have a new story to cover even without having to add in any opinion. The US, with 300,000,000+ people, will have a few new leads every single day. The disproportionate coverage, even while sticking to just facts, will be feeding a false narrative just as much as any opinionated coverage would.

Whereas if Watergate happened today they'd just say it's justified against Russian spies or something.

Done. Bellingcat exists as a parallel construction for US and British intelligence agencies and its only other purpose is to smear non-state controlled journalistic outlets. There was a leaked email from another source that indicates that even internally, US intelligence agencies don't think that Bellingcat is still a good way to spread information because normal people don't believe it any more.

On the other side, Hersh is a journalist with a long track record who wrote a story that is likely true, although we won't know until if and until comes out. Won't stop nationalists from pretending that they know something that they don't. They love a traitor.

If you have no evidence of this, you're spreading misinformation.

From the tone of the article it seems like the author simply detests Julian Assange and Weiss puts forward no standard for who can rightly be called 'a journalist'.

A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

There is no need for a conspiracy for the media to be misleading.

Most of all, you understand the risk of breaking rank. If you look at a story, and think "hey, why aren't others covering this story? Why aren't more people upset at this? Shouldn't this be a big deal?", you either learn to think "No. Everything is all right in the media world." or you have a bad, bad time.

I was in 2 tv interviews so far and both of them have released footage that totally and entirelly distorted the message to an infuriating degree. This was in a top tier European country, once state tv , once a major private station.

Do not trust them blindly is all I can say.

This.

I have problem organizing 2 intelligent people to place dirty laundry in the laundry box or to do their homework on time or to place dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

But there's a mastermind somewhere who can organize something so complex, with so many variables where each depends on a human being of varying intellect and skillset and the plan is so intricate that out of 100,000 possibilities - all of them play in the hand of the mastermind. And the plan includes the two from above, who can barely get a cup of water when they're thirsty!

If such mastermind existed, I wouldn't even be angry for being manipulated - in fact, I would like to continue to be manipulated because if such a person (or group) existed - please, continue! Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.

So have I

> The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity

It’s not controlling, but there is little doubt that reporter’s and politicians partipate in quid pro quo

I’m fairly distrusting in even my preferred primary news source, not because I suspect that there’s some grand conspiracy, but because the system under which modern journalists (seem to) operate encourages very subtly but very consistently stretching the truth. The KPIs are the puppet master.

These material interests are not entirely individual and distinct; they fall within broad strata based on the overall structure of the economy (e.g., the class of people with the capacity to own a major media organization and the class of people who make a living by serving them). Thus, there is no need for a conscious conspiracy coordinating every aspect of the media machine since the basic character of the consciousness of those involved flows from a more fundamental material reality. At the same time, there’s no reason one can’t become consciously aware of the stratum of shared material interests that one exists within, and I think it would be foolish to assume that the people at the highest levels of power and wealth in the world have failed to do so.

Superhuman coordination and execution abilities along with extreme secrecy as needed.

But they are not well co-ordinated or executed, that is the reason many people are catching on to the manufactured narratives.

This isn't done by some Matrix-type entity or does it need to be run by something as perfect as an AGI. All it takes is to have the top editors deciding which stories to run and with what narrative. Of course this break down as the rank and file journalist are the ones in charge of writing the stories and presenting them.

And the people at the top of this aren't by any matter a cohesive group or a big brother type entity rather just people with money and power doing what they think will help them keep money and power.

Even without validating beliefs, there are so many cases of news organizations publishing incorrect or misleading information in a rush to cover a story, only to then issue a silent correction weeks later when the damage has been done.

This weakens trust in two ways, first is just people who pay enough attention to notice the correction and gradually lose trust as they see how often that happens. The other is the more damaging, more common way, where someone has read the incorrect/misleading article and internalized the information only to find out much later that the information they internalized was incorrect (without ever seeing the original correction).

One example that comes to mind is regarding the supposed sudden Starlink outages in Ukraine back in October around when Musk was tweeting dumb stuff about appeasing Russia. CNN was quick to report the outage implying that it was unexpected by Ukraine and they were shutdown to blackmail the West into paying. This article was all over the news.

Then weeks later they put out an article stating that it was just 1300 terminals which were being provided by the UK which were shut-off due to the UK deciding not to pay for the subscription anymore, with Ukraine having been fully aware and having swapped them out beforehand with the other ~18000 still operating terminals. But this one got nowhere near the same traction and was still misleadingly headlined.

There can be a huge discrepancy between what your experience is and what is being reported. Most people will tend believe what they see and know.

The easy angle is product placement [1]. Literally fork over a small sum of money and you get the news org to rave about your product without doing any verification.

There's also how a headline is not written by the author so it won't always reflect the contents of the article.

> And a lot of the times is just because news are not validating their own beliefs

IMO, the news orgs have a symbiotic relation with their viewers. The viewers want their viewpoint reinforced and the news org wants views. So the news org put out a biased product so that their viewers will selectively watch that news org. However, this still means that news org aren't actually trying to inform.

My biggest gripe is how often they'll refuse to link to actual legal documents when talking about filed lawsuits and the like and in general I don't find some of their claims in the article to be as supported by the actual filings.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchdog_Journalism>

Organisations and institutions include:

- On the Media, WNYC Studios -- center-left: <https://onthemedia.org>

- Poynter Institute <https://www.poynter.org/>

- Columbia Journalism Review <https://www.cjr.org/>

- FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) -- left/progressive: <https://fair.org/>

- Center for Media and Democracy -- conservative: <https://www.exposedbycmd.org/>

Amongst many others.

You'll also find journalism beats at various outlets, though those tend to focus more strongly on business side (often dismal for old-school print).

You cannot have politicians and media telling people day in and day out that people who don't look like you or believe like you are the enemy and not have people try and hurt their "enemy". You can't.

Seymour Hersh, Jeff Gerth and the CJR, Wemple at the WaPo, Chris Hedges (ex-NYT Middle East bureau chief, ex-NYT Balkans bureau chief during the Yugoslav wars.)

Not to mention recent nonpersons like Taibbi or Greenwald.

You were required to read and believe what these people wrote in order to get your liberal card in the very recent past, but for having the wrong opinions on rising nationalism they get demoted to "random guys."

Untangling that sentence gets us the much clearer, and I think more accurate, “new organizations chase clicks without any interest in whether their headlines are true or false”.

Skepticism is not conspiratorial thinking, of course. I meant it in the most narrow way — many people in this thread believe, without evidence, that some group of people is consciously coordinating massive distortions of news to further specific ends.