It's a really good book, I wish more people were aware of it and read it.
In the end if a journalist can get their story out faster by leaning on a few 'trusted sources' and then move onto the next article, most of them will and their managers will encourage it. Maybe you'll get a more in depth story if it makes it to On The Media a week or two later but that's basically all we have at this point which is very sad.
No, they know what they are doing and you can tell they know what they are doing by the careful way language is used differently for similar facts when the police or other favored entities are involved vs. other entities in similar factual circumstances (particularly, the use of constructions which separates responsibility for an adverse result from the actor, which is overwhelmingly used in US media when police are the actors—and also, when organs of the Israeli state are—but not for most other violent actors.) This is frequently described as “the exonerative mood” (or, sometimes, “the exonerative tense”, though it is not really a verb tense.)
Carefully calibrated, highly-selective use of (often, quite awkward) linguistic constructs does not happen unconsciously, it is a deliberate, knowing choice.
The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith. The way you are framing this is that nearly all journalists are acting in bad faith, which makes me believe the arguments of the parent ("The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative") more so than the argument you're making here.
Maybe, maybe not. It is also true that the incredible vast majority of people in the world aren’t corporate journalists, also.
> The way you are framing this is that nearly all journalists are acting in bad faith
Nearly all American corporate media has a conscious, top-down policy starting with the owners and editorial board to favor certain institutions, which is enforced by hiring, firing, promotions, and assignments of staff. The specific beneficiaries of this vary somewhat between outlet and outlet and over time, but both American police broadly and State of Israel are common beneficiaries across most outlets.
Journalists either comply are they aren’t journalists in the corporate media covering the issues to which these biases are relevant for long. Corporate media journalists aren’t independent actors.
The term 'past exonerative tense' is dated to 1991.'"Mistakes were made" was popularized by Nixon.
To continue pulling this nonsense is wilful ignorance on the journalists' part, and effectively equivalent to bad faith.
this a very westerner perspective on society. Ask an Eastern European (like myself) how the vast majority of people are really acting.
We have fundamentally different priors.
- politicians of both parties (eg, speaking disingenously on issues of relevance to their corporate sponsors)
- corporations
- judges, including in the Supreme Court, who abandon espoused judicial philosophies the moment they conflict with political expediency
- government administrators, much more so with Trump's appointments
- media organizations (The self-censorship of coverage around Gaza has been eye-opening.)
"...I'm sure you believe everything you're saying, but ... if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
I absolutely believe that a journalist can present two analogous sets of facts in two completely different ways without even consciously realizing it. These assumptions and biases are baked in deep, especially when you are writing day-in and day-out on short deadlines.
when Barbara Walters was interviewing Fidel Castro , what do you think was going on from the perspective of the United States?
They're not all such prestigious examples, but the point stands.