Better headline: half of Americans don't know that (many) news organizations deliberately mislead them.
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.
Think about it: broadcasting information costs something. Nobody is going to pay that cost unless they're getting a return for it. Nobody is going out of their way to provide you with information out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it so that you buy what they're selling (e.g. pharmaceuticals, gold) or vote for their party, etc.
A lot of times that information will be technically not wrong, but that's not the goal.
Unless I am asking the taxi driver about traffic problem in their work area, or rider behavior, or...
We have become citizen journalists. We have to research our own news. I think that is not a bad thing.
I write journalist because if an establishment journalist can get away with single-sourcing something, why can't I?
YouTube is a cesspool of hot garbage, but there is also plenty of good information.
The key part in my opinion is to have the ability to collect, sift, confirm, and then make deduction.
Alas, we no longer teach fundamental thinking skills in schools.
Control this and you can control the world.
I think for the most part, people who take their news from youtube and random taxi drivers fall into the former category, whereas people who vote against the party/candidate recommended (overtly or covertly) by their local paper fall into the latter category. It's quite possible that a lot of people in the latter category would say they don't trust the news as part of a national opinion survey, but they wouldn't ever outright say to a stranger "oh, don't read the stuff printed in the City Courier, it's all lies". Particularly as the news is more and more national, but the political parties continue to attract around 50% of the vote each, I'd generally expect about 50% of the population to have at least this much distrust for at least some of the news.
You’ll quickly learn not to trust the news. Not because it’s wrong – it’s pretty factual for the most part – but because it keeps trying to make you care about the wrong things. Whipping up an emotional reaction to matters that don’t affect you. Ignoring large elephants in small rooms. Talking juuuust slightly past the core issue hoping you won’t notice.
Much of news, especially daily news, is like discussing the color of a bike shed instead of the core design problems of the reactor it sits behind. Because talking about the big stuff isn’t sexy and doesn’t get the clicks.
And even when you do find a source of boring news, you’ll find that most of it affects your life not one bit. It’s just entertainment to keep you busy. In the words of a quote I once heard and can never find again: ”The news doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about”.
This is part of the reason I don't trust the news, because they all are focusing on the same things for a few weeks and then it drops never to be heard from again. Some examples
When Trump met with Kim Jong Un everything in the news media was about North Korea for weeks, it was painted as the vital question of our times that was a clear and present danger to democracy. 3 years into Biden I have barely heard anything about NK.
Another exmaple is oil prices, does anyone else remember during the Bush years how the oil prices dominated everything in the news and the Middle East was the most important region in the world, to the point that we supposedly went to war in Iraq over oil? Yet when it was hitting $5-6 a barrel I wasn't hearing anything about it. Or how many of us have heard anything on Iraq or Syria since ISIS?
You can look for countless examples but even if it isn't outright lying by choosing what to focus on the media already sets an agenda.
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.
I’ve worked in a newsroom. The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity.
Yes, Rupert Murdoch, etc. But it’s all emergent behavior. There is no master plan. These organizations are not well run enough to deliberately get stories out in time, let alone conspire to mislead.
You'd also likely want to implement standards around language use that would create a consistent product with broad appeal, limit an editor's ability to go off the rails and do something that would harm the brand image, and that limits legal liability.
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.
That is a demand from a trans advocacy group. They don't want criticism of the movement they are promoting because it brings up uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's rights, and the medical abuse of children. Rather than addressing these questions, they attempt to shut down any coverage. Much of social media has been censored this way already, and they are attempting complete ideological capture of traditional media too.
The only right alleged is a right to exclude trans women, and consequentially a right to screen all women suspected of being trans.
> and the medical abuse of children
The children in question want to transition, and their parents or the state want to prevent them; defining this as "abuse" without actually listening to the allegedly abused is the problem.
Which is basically what the NYT said in their response:
"We received the letter from GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD sees our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and The Times's journalistic mission are different.
"As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
"The very news stories criticized by GLAAD in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society - to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we're proud of it."
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.
The story you're portraying doesn't need any kind of imagination, Hanlon's razor works perfectly well there and doesn't require any kind of special ability granted by smoking weed while doing nothing besides looking for conspiracies.
Religion shaping culture, and thus the decisions of countless people to go out and actually kill each other is a thing. Divine? I think so.
Culture is programming for the masses. Is culture a conspiracy? Our intel agencies have caught onto this, color revolutions are a conspiracies, but the victims of such revolutions would hardly consider their own deeply held beliefs and subsequent actions to be conspiratorial.
Culture shaping happens now at an insane speed with everything from the search engines we use, to the radio, tv, music, advertisements, and so on. If you can pull those levers, people will act accordingly. Pfizer has advertising dollars everywhere. Is it a conspiracy that people will literally stake their professions on defending Pfizer vaccines?
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.
Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I
This is a good thing. For too long the media was trusted as a believable source of acceptable impartiality and truth.
The audience has matured and no longer believe in the fairy truth teller.
Aka cable news (one site specifically with the largest reach) is constantly engaging in deception and the viewership doesn't know. Other orgs are also engaged in deception but not with the same level of flagrant abuse.
All media critique comes form comedians these days. Which is kind of grim because sometimes things actually matter and aren't just jokes. Yet Journalist A gets to carry water for criminal X, and Journalist B doesn't say anything about it. Then some comedian makes a joke and everyone moves on. The journalists still get to be journalists. The comedian's are making jokes and were all out here seeing no consequences for anything.
The post truth world of journalism isn't fun.
There's checks and balances in government, but the 4th estate just seems to be a wild lands of bullshit and can't check itself. And those same Journalists seem to think this is a good system.
Anyway rant over. I use patreon to support indie media and news I like. But even that has downsides, filter bubbles etc.
<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).
My view is that serious news organizations clearly don't deliberately mislead but they have some amount of bias and contain inaccuracies as a result of low-quality reporting.
And I think the perception of "MSM" which is common among the group of people which includes Elon / libertarians / MAGA fanatics / alt-right is obviously wrong and stupid.
(Assuming you're right that there was non-stop coverage, I don't know.)
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated, "I think the President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."[4]
Because admitting to a typo in an unfinished, now deleted tweet was apparently impossible for the man in charge of nuclear weapons. That's worth a bit of coverage.