Journalism has become ground zero for the vocation crisis
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
It argues that journalism has a problem--just like everybody else.
Journalism specifically has a crisis because, as an industry, they have spent far too much of their credibility in service to narrative. A tainted product sheds customers, and here you are.
The closest comparison would be like how a brand known for its high quality products might "cash-in" it's reputation for quick profits by reducing the quality and cost to produce said products (ex: Boeing, Craftsman). The key difference here is that rather than exchanging reputation for short term cash, Journalists burn their reputation for short term influence, usually to shepherd people into a common false narrative.
The irony in all this is that journalists obviously read the news too, so this shepherding has a kind of reinforcing snowball effect. Because of this, I suspect that individual journalists might underestimate how disconnected they are from reality compared to the average person, but this part is ultimately just speculation on my end.
Like I’m not making any statement about whether or not news organizations are reliable purveyors of “truth” I don’t think they are, but I think the argument is the opposite of yours, that the attempt to unbiased is pushing people away.
In the COVID narrative, people are drawn to news organizations that take a strong stand in one direction or another, not the ones that try and thread the needle towards “truth” and that legacy media like the New York Times. Is too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals.
While a conservative looks at the New York Times and sees a liberal rag that occasionally panders to conservatives with an occasional below the fold op-ed that is intentionally de-prioritized to spin a narrative. Liberals in fact see those same below the fold op-Ed’s as evidence the the paper is unwilling to tell the “true narrative” because of fear of alienating conservative support.
Whereas the NY Times is the most popular, according to Statista.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/381569/leading-news-and-...
Now let's imagine 5 News Orgs: ABC, AC, A, B, C. These News Orgs are each aligned with the population letters reflected in their name. News Org: "A" for example will report on reality only through a lens that population "A" would find agreeable. While News Org "ABC" will report on reality through the combined lens of populations A, B and C, in essence looking at the issue from all angles.
News Org "ABC" would be considered "unbiased" despite the fact that it's still interpreting reality through a lens. This is fine though because the desire for "unbiased" news comes from a desire to understand an issue from all perspectives. Population B might look at the reports of News Org "ABC" so it can gain understanding on how Populations "A" and "C" are perceiving an event.
Suddenly population "A" says News Org "ABC" is harmful. It asserts Population A's lens is actually objective reality and that anything the contradicts it is false. It asserts "unbiased" news is actually a bad thing since it promotes things that disagree with "objective reality". News Org "ABC", buys this argument and becomes "Abc", still acting like it is "unbiased" but now inaccurately represents the positions of populations "B" and "C".
Gradually the media landscape shifts, it becomes just 4 News Orgs: "AA", "Ac", "A", "BB". Population "A" is now overrepresented across the media landscape, population "C" is represented but incorrectly and B is only represented by outlets that exaggerate its position on everything, over-correcting the issue.
Population C is aware there is an issue here but can extract some value by consuming content from multiple outlets and comparing things. Population A is no longer aware C exists and believes B is evil. Population B is also now unaware C exists and thinks A is evil.
Gradually the media landscape changes again, now the News Orgs are just "$ZZ", "AZ$", "A$" and "BBB$$".
- Population C is completely unrepresented and just looks at social media, it has no trust in any of the remaining News Orgs.
- Population B's exclusive outlet has become completely hysterical, and influenced by corporate interests taking advantage of the fact that Population B has limited options. Many in this population are enamored with it, many others have abandoned it entirely like with population C, but being less technically savvy, are now relying exclusively on local Facebook groups for their news.
- Population A, still believes it's lens is objective reality and has become accustomed to trusting all News Orgs other than "BBB$$". However, these organizations having long lost any sense of integrity, and have begun taking advantage of this blind trust by selectively reporting on things that align with the political interests of Party Z, believing that doing so will serve the greater good. Additionally, to make up for the fact that their audiences are now in decline, the remaining News Orgs are all selling their influence for extra cash. Some in Population A see the corporate influence in the remaining News Orgs but believe they can filter it out, however most trust them completely and fail to even filter out the corporate interest. Few if any are even aware of party Z's influence despite it being reported on "BBB$$".
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So I'll be upfront and say the above giant-wall-of-text-metapor is imperfect and something I just threw together and maybe got a little carried away with. To keep it terse I had to strip away some nuance.
Ultimately my goal here was to help highlight the difference between lies and a simple difference in worldview. The moment the dollar signs and Zs started getting into the mix of things was also the moment these orgs started burning the trust Population A had in them in exchange for influence over population A. I also think this results in a situation where someone in Population A, can no longer accurately assess what others in Population A actually believe.
I'd additionally argue that a proper "unbiased" News Org that attempts to represent the positions of all populations is less likely to end up in the situations described above, even if they are less popular. That multiple perspectives help keep bad actors in check like a natural pesticide, and the overly-partisan nature of contemporary news outlets doomed them into becoming what they now are since they have essentially abandoned their immune response.
And maybe counterintuitively, I think a real ABC would be the least trusted source of all.
The only alternative I think would be to go back to a time where there was only an ABC(haha).
I do think it’s interesting that the only solution people come up to these problems is something authoritarian, this isn’t a criticism of you actually, I don’t know your politics but it’s something I’ve been wrestling with lately. Is the only way to have a free/informed/unified society to have total control of the information flow? Or total control of the culture?
Or maybe asked another way, how do you create the ABC that people want to watch when there’s so much other media out there customized to your exact perspective.
There’s also the fact that ABC is inherently conservative(small c) because what about D! And E! and L!
We had a period where the FCC only offered a limited amount of airspace so News Orgs has certain obligations to keep the public at large informed. This required a more diverse set of perspectives and I really do believe these perspectives helped keep each other in check. However with these obligations gone, and the collapse of the integrity fostered during this period, legacy Journalists have grown into smug elitest who, drunk over the reputation they gained while they had this integrity, now think of the public as a group to be guided rather than informed.
Looking forward I believe the proper solution to all this will emerge naturally as legacy media's decline continues to glide downwards. Personally speaking I simply get my news from the front page of Wikipedia, maybe more options like this will come about as the priorities of society at large continues to evolve as it gets comfortable with the internet? I don't think we will get anywhere though so long as "unbiased" is treated as a taboo word, something I believe legacy media has grandly succeeded in spinning the public on in recent years, atleast in my eyes...
Large papers still have decently sized editorial staff but those are the shrinking minimum. Most publications have simply given up, chasing emotional driven headlines, increasing “engagement”. Others simply vanished.
Of course it is a breeding ground for activism and extremism.
HBO had a hit show based off that premise (The newsroom)
Or rather: Of course it could be successful, but I doubt it would be economically viable.
This is unlike the entertainment industry, where Amazon and Netflix have become content producers to some extent. They did this because they realized they could get more money by creating entertainment content.
I agree with the authors that the economics of journalism alone cannot kill it. It will persist so long as there is a belief in its social purpose. Maybe so-called "tech" companies that insidiously intermediate peoples' web use are the world's greatest profiteers from ineffective advertising spend. But journalism is more than selling ads. People want to be journalists for a variety of reasons other than money.
Generally, no one pays for what so-called "tech" companies produce, whatever that is; software perhaps. If they pay to use one of these middlemen, and they are not advertisers, it's not much. The companies give away their employees' output for free. But people still pay for books and newspapers, the stuff that journalists produce. "AI" appears to be aimed stealing that business, too. It might succeed. But even if that happens, people still want to do work and produce stuff that is socially useful, like journalism, using their own energy and brains.
Did customers lose trust because of activism?
Or did customers just switch to untrustable (but free) online papers, leaving activism as the only way to earn a living for former upright journalists?
What are the signs and effects of this activist media? Who are its players? Are there sides? What are they?
In general I have trouble believing it’s the medias fault though, not that they’re without sin, I just think the forces that make something like this are bigger than the media.
It certainly was re: journalism.
When we only had the big three TV networks vying for our eyeballs, they each used news as a way to attract the broadest set of Americans. The nightly news was a loss leader, in the hopes that we'd watch the rest of the evening's programming/ads on that network.
The "unbiased" business didn't really exist until someone could be in all of our homes building rapport with our families every night. And cable, then more so the web, completely disrupted that.
There used to be many, many more newspapers, with room for distinction as the paper of record for any given demographic. Radio, then more so TV, put an end to most of those.
It was always a mystery if the activism was top-down mandated, i.e., journalists were forced to be activists by their management or not.
So it would be interesting to see who was fired. Mainstream has gotten saner in the U.S., with many heretical articles in the NYT and WaPo at least on the war topics.
This is not the case in the U.K. or Germany, where only one public opinion is allowed.
It is mistaken to think that the choices are only Fox News or CNN(or equivalent), the other (seemingly growing) choice is no news at all.
I go the no news at all route these days. We live in an age of cheap, effective, easy to create misinformation.
Journalists were always activists in some sense. You need to have a strong moral sense to uncover truths that power wants to keep under wraps, you need to have a strong inner motivation to seek out information that can get you or loved ones harassed or even harmed.
Trust has eroded because the business model for journalism has eroded, with a lack of money the news had to look into tapping other sources of income like pay-per-click ads, to increase that you need to have clickbait, ragebait, all kinds of manipulation to make someone choose to visit your news site instead of the 100s of others that popped up on the internet. With that you start losing trust.
Also I believe your view of journalism is very likely an American one, with your 24/7 "News" channels that are more a drama-generating machine than actual reporting, or investigative journalism.
There's still a lot of good journalism being done, and nowadays a lot outside of the usual institutions of news where investigations could be done before but got eroded because they got poorer.
Journalism necessarily requires some level of engagement and activism, I just don't think what you mean by "activist" is the actual meaning of the word but a catch-all umbrella for stuff you don't like. Would love to be proved wrong though.
The worst is the opposite people with an agenda who extract the one counterpoint to a 500 page research paper and write an article about how the whole papaer validate their assumptions
But somewhere in the middle is the boring boilerplate overview that takes no real stance at all.