Majority of teens hold negative views of news media, says report
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
The most common way I see it happen is like this: you have a situation some group says that some totally safe thing is actually super dangerous. There's a large body of scientific literature that really clearly shows its totally safe. the news reports on it as such: "While many within the scientific community state that there is no harm with X, anti-X proponents respond that the current studies are not substantial enough, and that they are simply asking questions." This framing, does not point out that the anti-X proponents are just a group of 10 people, nor does it describe how much evidence there exists in the scientific literature showing the thing is safe. Both sides are made to sound equally reasonable, which in my mind is practically a lie by omission. Because they aren't equally reasonable.
Edit: One additional thought. I still will read news articles if they get shared to me, and I try to evaluate based off of what the source is. but another reason I don't actively keep a news subscription is because news orgs love reporting on tragedy. Because its more noteworthy. I'm just not interested in reading yet another article about how crime is on the rise. Or about the most recent fatal car crash. Etc.
I stare into the void enough as it is. I don't want another.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647594/majority-credits-god-hum...
So it's a perfect example of, assuming they're not knowingly lying, focusing on random noise in the signal to generate misleading stories
The problem is that reported crime is a political number: those in power want the number to go down on their watch and they have control of the reporting mechanism. Pressure exists at every level, from patrolmen filling out incident reports to statisticians collating the numbers for the mayor, to move the numbers downward.
There is every reason to be skeptical of reported criminal statistical trends in USA cities today.
Police have every incentive to do the opposite of what you say. Why else fund them?
Pryzbylewski: I don't get it. All this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?
Sampson: Nothing. It assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.
Pryzbylewski: Juking the stats.
Sampson: Excuse me?
Pryzbylewski: Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels. I've been here before.
Sampson: Wherever you go, there you are.
It seems nuts to claim the year over year national drops in crime are all gaming stats comp. I’m positive there is some of this going on, but an effort like that to suppress crime statistics on a national level doesn’t pass the sniff test, you’re saying no cops retired and then blow the whistle? That everywhere in America is doing this and nobody notices(enough)?
Similarly some cops are actual criminals and totally corrupt. Like Taglione, or the Baltimore gun trace task force, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean everyone is.
Do you think police are systematically underreporting crime to the tune of like multiple decades lows?
You are displaying a bias here. Unless there is a “itbeho’s neighborhood gazette” reporting exclusively on what you see through your front window and THEY’RE saying there is no increase in crime then your complaint doesn’t hold.
My grandfather, in the US, was waylaid by actual bandits operating openly on a major US highway in the 1970s. In some cities you couldn’t take public transport without almost surely being victimized.
Crime is very much down and that’s especially true for large cities. Maybe you’ve become overly fixated on the topic or maybe your neighborhood is an outlier but that doesn’t make the statistics “wrong”.
Instead, it is well paid grifters for whom the issue with traditional media is that they do not lie enough.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzkyk7knzo
Frankly, I’d greatly refer media to leave the speeches unedited. Media does not need to be crafting narratives. Whatever Trump is, if you are selectively editing his words or pulling quotes out context intentionally to create the appearance that he said something that he didn’t…you are worse than he is.
The problem is, who do you trust instead? Twitter? Like that’s not biased. Actually I think it’s much worse. Not only is the editor of Twitter very biased, but it’s filled with bots and there is nobody providing any reliable fact checking. It’s very easy for motivated parties to portray a fringe idea as mainstream. It’s also easy to shout the truth out of the room. What one person tweet is just as valuable as another. Dunking on people (ratioing, etc) becomes your signal.
TikTok? Maybe less easy to influence, but now the editor is an adversarial nation state.
YouTube? If you thought msm wanted engagement, YouTube is much worse.
Substack? Respectfully, is full of people who are not trustworthy enough to be platformed anywhere meaningful, and for the few that are independent for legitimate reasons, don’t have the resources to do consistent factual reporting in anything more than a very narrow domain.
Long story short, maybe msm is imperfect, but imo it’s the best we got. And I’d rather have some source of truth that is at least attempting to fact check and get the truth right, even if biased, because when you don’t have any truth compass—when all information is equal regardless of how far from reality it is—it becomes very easy to be manipulated.
Now who would want that?
In reality I think the answer is much the same as it has always been, read the same thing from different sources and apply some critical thinking to it.
Unbiased media is simply not possible, you could 100% tell the entire story about whatever story you are telling and still be biased by the stories you don't run.
As for what we do about young people, education on media literacy in schools would help though whether already pressed schools end up been responsible for yet another thing is a good idea is going to vary from country to country but we should be preparing people for the society they are going to be living in better and that always comes back to education.
Paul Krugman has his own substack. You think he couldn't get his old job back at the Times in a second if he wanted to?
Though I think the real problem is if you are somewhat knowledgeable about any topic, the news will always get important details incorrect when they cover it. I believe there is a famous quote about that, but I definitely noticed it when I was a teenager in the 90s. I think this is the real reason Jon Stewart is the most trusted news figure for people of a certain age, and why social media/streamers/whatever are more trusted for younger people. That is, if you present things in a less authoritative manner, we're more likely to forgive factual errors.
LWT has great montage on this.
But this assumes that the kids have a stable honest reference point, and from there are calling out the bullshit.
That is almost certainly not the case. What is far more likely, is that kids are getting their news from random tiktoks that are farming views with credible bullshit, and from that totally deranged reference point, the kids are calling the news bullshit.
You will find few people more hostile towards contemporary journalism than me, and you will find no one more hostile towards "self proclaimed social media news producer" than me. I could write essays about the people in my life who left behind journalism produced news to go completely off the deep end getting "the truth" from tiktok.
I didnt predict that journalists seeing that they are all often wrong; that they'd double down on being even more wrong. Then AI came in and dropped the quality of journalism a significant amount more.
Journalists have only themselves to blame. It will be interesting to see how they improve the situation.
And there's no accreditation for journalists except in authoritarian states like Zimbabwe. Journalists use the same freedom of speech as everyone else.
That is just ridiculously false. Take for example the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which was recently forced to shut down due to losing its federal funding.
And I'm not talking about accreditation for individual journalists. I'm talking about funding reputable and honest publication groups.
With more funding to improve local coverage and access, we not only get better diversity of reporting, we also help cover local events and topics better for people.
I do think it's good that there's a well funded option tho. I'd love it if they also focused on non opinionated documentaries since private media gutted ones like NatGeo and such.
I remember the same sentiment when I was a teen and the sentiment was common among my peers.
The times have changes significantly, and what is available to teens is very different now than what it was even 5 years ago.
That said, the teen brain likely has not changed much in that time. (trying to assert independence, be different than their parents, do what they want, trust what they want, etc)
Even on YouTube, if I start playing a documentary and it's got dramatic background music and a stentorian voiceover, straight to YT jail.
Basically all digital news outlets, outside of just a few notable outliers, have no money to produce anything but low effort articles that are just a vehicle to show ads. And some of those are active propaganda outlets for basically nothing but evil interest groups.
What is there to have a positive view about...?
Society stopped paying for journalism and we got what we paid for.
Everything everybody around me watches is just talking opinion heads.
I remember being shocked when I found out that most Vietnamese young people were mostly unaware of the Vietnam war. But if nobody tells you, you don't know. The media was bad before 1996 (Ben Bagdikian would put out a book every year about how dangerously concentrated media was getting: only 51 owners owned 90% of the media lol), but at least we could go to the library and find out what actually happened. They'll just have continually-revised ebooks and AI.
What is so important about the Vietnam war for the day-to-day of the Vietnamese young?
It's the generation that have fallen prey to today's social media and garbage news outlets telling us that history is important -- why should the young be credulous to the gullible?
If the old adage "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is to be acted upon, it is without a doubt not to study history and try to remember the past because clearly we're always repeating it.
So what is important and constant across time? Those that have empathy (or fake empathy) for the masses and can galvanize them have the power to drive society. Perception is reality more than facts are reality in all but the sciences. If the world were to reset and humans were stripped of all tools, they would re-invent math, science, biology, physics. I doubt that our laws, traditions and zeitgeist would be replicated.
> A little less than half (45%) of teens said journalists do more to harm democracy than to protect it.
These kids? Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite. People have been trained to distrust institutions because that makes them manipulable by even worse actors.
The kids just don’t have any interest in big news organizations which is understandable even if it’s going to make things worse.
I can only imagine how the younger kids see things. They're bombarded by public knowledge of nasty things institutions did in the bigoted/ignorant past, underhanded things they're definitely doing now, an anger/fear inducing news cycle and endless social media conspiracy theories (some of which end up being true) engineered for clicks. Extreme cynicism is a logical conclusion.
How do you square this with the fact that in the US the same profit-minded insurance company is limited to a fixed profit margin based on the amount of claims paid? By law, they need to set their rates such that they pay out at least 80% (or 85% for some markets) of the premiums they collect. Practically the only way for them to make more money in the long term is to pay out more in the short term.
Personally, I'm not sure how to answer this question. Over time, insurance companies benefit more when medical costs for their customers are higher, not when they are lower. Maybe it's that they actually think that keeping you alive and paying premiums longer is better for their bottom line than having you die quickly? But I don't think it's as simple as thinking that they benefit more if you don't get sick.
Link about allowable Medical Loss Ratios: https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...
If people demanded truth, we might see a different story, but it is clear that enough people want other things more, often enough.
Which means that the institutions should do a lot better, which they don't. The demos is always right, that's why we live in a democracy (or at least we strive to) and not in a technocracy (where, presumably, the institutions are right by default).
I laugh when I occasionally listen to NPR and within a few minutes hear an absurdly framed commentary that clearly hasn’t steel manned alternative viewpoints.
Journalism runs on the same "expensive degree -> unpaid intern -> low pay jobs -> stick it out long enough you'll do alright selling your influence" model as Hollywood and DC. Hence it has the same people problems.
Bullshit. The demos is so goddamn stupid it can't be helped, it must be led. Explaining things to them does nothing. People will sacrifice freedom for convenience and short term profit every single time. They vote with emotions. They make decisions that impact entire nations without even trying to gain even a superficial understanding of things. The demos is completely responsible for the horrible status quo. Their ignorance and passivity is exactly what leads to their oppression. Trying to help them leads to nothing but pointless martyrdom. Nothing changes because change depends on them and they are unwilling.
> not in a technocracy
We're literally in the technofeudalist era. We have trillion dollar corporations running digital fiefdoms with users as the serfs tilling the artificially scarce fields. They have so much money it's unreal, and they have woken up to the wonders of lobbying.
No there isn't. There are individual sources that are better, but there isn't any group that's better. There are individual podcasters that are better than mainstream media as a group, but popular podcasters as a group are far more manipulative than mainstream media. And you could say the same for any social site, or any other group such as politicians or religious figures or ...
You immediately contradict yourself here. My impression is that anyone intelligent and informed under, say, about 40 or so only trusts particular individuals, whether they are podcasters, bloggers, substackers, or particular journalists active on e.g. Twitter or whatever other social media platform.
> but popular podcasters as a group are far more manipulative than mainstream media
This is false logic, because no one follows the entire group, they only follow individuals. It remains to be seen whether this is more pernicious than mainstream media, but I heavily suspect it will not be, as it is easier for mainstream media to be controlled than it is to control every single individual that can say something without the support of some controlled mega-conglomerate. (Though obviously de-platforming could easily render this the same, eventually).
I was very upset when I found out how the NYT was manipulated to shill for the Iraq war.
I was also very upset when one of the bloggers I followed went crazy slowly and it took too long for me to notice. I also had another I trusted who turned out to be a biased corporate shill.
I don't trust the NYT, but I trust the process of their checks and balances in their organization and the presence of inside whistle blowers more than I do any individual blogger.
I don't think this is right at all.
A corporation (or organization) I know must necessarily put profit (or funding) first, before truth, if it wishes to survive for any duration. Ultimately, I know there is no real possibility for them to ever care about truth first. I can't vet a corporation, because the people controlling it are individuals who remain mysterious and inaccessible, or it is controlled by complex financial ties which are generally inscrutable. However, with how intermeshed things are, I can generally have faith that the financial and political pressures on large organizations will be more homogeneous than those on a collection of individuals not under the thumb of such an organization. Corporations and groups often don't even have a clear "personality" which one can make judgements on. You can notice a blogger going slowly crazy more easily than you can notice a large group being slowly corrupted by hidden influences.
By contrast, weird autists that seem to actually care about the truth can in fact be found blogging or on other forms of social media. They too have their biases, but, collectively, their biases seem to me to be far more diverse than the biases of large groups, and, in many cases, you do have reason to believe these people actually care about the truth.
It is, in my opinion, far, far better to follow a small number of weird autists than to trust a few large news corporations. Also, the wierd autists will tend to talk about what the news corporations are saying often anyway, whereas the reverse is not true.
I think that since a key part of your trust of the NYT involves whistle blowers, that this contradicts your basic position as well.
EDIT: To be clear though, I do think there is still a lot of value in news organizations. This whole dichotomy of "which should I trust more" is silly, since both have their advantages. I do hope news media sticks around and remains something that is somewhat trusted sometimes, and that people do like what I presume you and I do, relying on a mix of news media and particular individuals. Insofar as now that news media is no longer the only game in town, some decline in trust is warranted as the trust re-distributes somewhat, but I definitely hope that trust of the news media doesn't go to zero.
The former is a very private affair totally hidden. The latter is something happening between a large group of people, many of whom are very inclined to quit the anonymity of the large organization, write a book about it to become individually famous.
A significant number of those autists you espouse can be bribed by surprisingly small amounts. Politicians are far more vetted than bloggers, and yet a significant number of them have been caught changing their votes for $2000 or similar amounts.
You might be able to sway a NYT reporter for a similar amount, but they have processes to catch that.
My bet is that news media organizations are easier to control than it is to control a bunch of unpredictable, independently operating individuals (though it is far easier to control a single individual, no doubt).
I am worried about things like deciding on a narrative at the corporate level. E.g. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/1643786/new-york-..., or, say, CDC and news outlets flip-flopping on things like mask mandates / COVID lab leak and the like. Whenever large-scale incentives are involved, I do not trust news media, and especially think that what individual bloggers and other people are saying will give you a better perspective on things. Whereas when there aren't clear incentives in any direction, or when one requires a reporter "on the ground", there can be good reason to trust news media over individuals.
News media are also broadly incompetent when it comes to reporting on areas where expertise is required (e.g. tech, science), and there, specific individuals again are far, far more trustworthy. Heck, most news media is too lazy to even cite much of anything they say. As I said, this isn't an either/or thing, but for sure trust in news media should decline as people recognize the areas where other sources are more trustworthy.
If anything people are not radicalized enough.
Is this a data point? I have no idea, but he's cool and so is The Onion.
It was first mostly sold off to the head of Strong Capital Management, moving to NY, then moved to Chicago under the editorship of "Cole Bolton - a Brown University graduate of business economics, former associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and research associate at Harvard Business School." During that last move, 85% of the staff resigned. From there it was sold to Univision (the tv channel) and merged with Gizmodo. Then it was sold to private equity group Great Hill Partners, then sold off again to the founder of Twilio under whom Ben Collins was put in charge, former NBC "disinformation expert"/twitter troll and worst person on the planet.
That's just a quick summary of the 4K words offered by Wikipedia about the ownership history of this brand. Brands aren't actually things anymore, their purpose is to conceal things.
That's dying quickly. The NYT has more subscribers than CNN has viewers. Once you add the number of people who read NYT articles for free, the difference is massive.
Yes, they are just doing their job, but here's the thing: Hardly any of it is relevant to me. Everyday its TRUMP this, that. Please tell me why should I care? Why are you putting this shit into my mind, how is this my problem?
It's getting harder and harder to disconnect from all that garbage. Unsolicited attention grabbing is what it is. Like a dumb movie everyone has to watch.
It wasn't always like this. People didn't care much about politics, sometimes you caught the news of a plane crash or something tragic, but for the most part they had their own life's to live. Now everyone is hopelessly addicted to the spectacle.
And social media isn't making it any better. I don't know if I'm seeing too grim, but please tell me you feel it as well, when you see people just regurgitating the latest dumb shit wherever you go.
Then you visit a poor country for holiday, outside the western/anglosphere, and see all those people just living their lives, not fully consumed in some narrative.
Ironically this is something I see in media a lot and dislike. Things like "80% of people think country going in the wrong direction".
Well while you're polling them, ask which direction is correct. Because 40% wanting less Trump bullshit and 40% wanting more Trump bullshit is totally different than letting your average reader assume 80% agree with their own assesment of what's wrong.
I want people to have strongly negative views on Fox News and the even worse variants of that kind of propaganda.
My favorite type of solution is something along the lines of taxing organizations whose viewers are more disconnected from statistics on the ground (by a bipartisan independent board choosing the types of knowledge sets that a well informed population should have). We could also subsidize organizations that are doing well informing people.
This is a way of dealing with the externalities brought about by people having so much misinformation in their day-to-day decision-making.
If misinformation exists, enemies of a state will spread it.
It’s a reasonable solution to consider taxing pollution and using funds to clean up the externalities.
Centrally planned information environments!
It's sure to work great.
- "I'm from the government and I'm here to tell you what's Good and True."
- "Do you have a loicense for that opinion?"
Red tape spilling into society kan be more damaging than oil spilling into the ocean.
Eg schools where most students leave believing political violence is acceptable should probably receive less funds than those that emit students who are trained in the art of argument.
But there’s a lot of daylight between that and fining newspapers with extra taxes because the regime considers their opinions verboten.
As the US finishes transitioning to a low trust society, it’s worth considering how one would introduce changes that would return us to a high trust society in 100 years or so.
One department of the social sciences has resisted capture by Leftists, at least in the US, at least the last time I looked, namely economics. One could argue that that is because it was captured first by liberal or libertarian ideologues.
This comment is restricted to the US and Britain because those are the only 2 societies I know well enough for my observations to have any value. Also, the OP is about American teenagers specifically.
If you look at media in the US, they will actually bend over backwards to explain away what Trump is saying or doing. They will present "both sides" on equal footing when one side is legitimately insane. And, when they refer to his speeches and policy, they actually make it sounds much MORE reasonable than it is.
Like, when they play clips of trump speeches, they always leave out the 30+ minutes of rambling. And when Trump says something obviously racist, they, I'm sure in an effort to give the benefit of the doubt, explain it in a way that is not racist. Oh, maybe he said that they're eating the dogs and cats because he's misinformed...
The problem is normal people get only neutral benefits from the benefit of the doubt. But bad actors can, and do, abuse the benefit of the doubt and get much more out of it.
It's so bad that even when Trump does something fucking stupid and doesn't offer any coherent explanation, the media will actually make up potential explanations FOR him and talk about those. They're so biased in his favor he doesn't even need to make arguments any more - they will make arguments for him that are reasonable sounding.
And, keep in mind, I'm not referring to Fox here. This is CNN and MSNBC.
Seriously, go listen to what they say trump said or did and then listen or read what Trump ACTUALLY did. It's always much, much worse.