Would be nice if you kepy ypur career and created some magazine / journal that focuses on checks and pointing out flaws.
That cheaters would dread being included there (would probably be a thick journal too)
That cheaters would dread being included there (would probably be a thick journal too)
Dan Ariely in particular has faced convincing fraud accusations for years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Controversies_and_c...
Nothing ever happens. Universities do not care.
Universities will start caring of enrolment goes down.
Journalism is an interesting case study. Their revenues went into sharp decline around the start of the century, dropping by more than 50% in some cases. Concurrently polls showed trust in journalism was plummeting, that people were tuning out because they felt that what they read wasn't reliable.
Journalism didn't solve this problem by rebuilding trust and their audience. Instead they started reforming as non-profit institutions and taking huge payments from philanthropists to push specific agendas, without alerting readers to that fact.
https://apnews.com/article/science-business-arts-and-enterta...
These grants aren't tied to readership but rather to the content of what's published, so they can produce lots of articles even if nobody reads them. Those articles are then used as "reliable sources" to control Wikipedia, and from there what search engines and LLMs say.
If students start checking out at scale (already happening), or if governments cut funding (already happening in the USA), their most likely move is to just replace the revenue with money from the Gates Foundation et al, and keep going just as they are. Their primary role will switch from education or research to the propagation of approved narratives.
I'm sure non-profit sponsorship has it's own issues, but I don't think those issues are particularly new or unique or transformative.
The demand side is arguably the more intractable issue with journalism, since loads of people don't select for truth or importance in their news - or at least not very carefully. The institutions that seem to hold up the best are the ones with the broadest audiences.
On the issue of public trust in journalism, I don't think it's actually a function of the quality or trustworthiness of journalism. I think it has more to do with the rise of radical right-wing propaganda infotainment, a core pillar of which was (and is) delegitimizing mainstream media (and academic) institutions. The mistrust was created and cultivated. Consequently, there's not much they can do to regain trust, except to work harder at discrediting the radical right-wing propaganda that has been flooding all the zones for the past several decades.
The problem with the "philanthropic" funding is not only is there no firewall, but it's explicitly pay-to-play agenda pushing. So that culture of keeping revenue and news separated has vanished without the public being made aware of it.
The right wing are saying things like, journalism is fake because they're just pushing a left wing agenda for money. That's the claim that delegitimizes journalism. But it turns out that the rightists are correct and that's exactly what journalists are doing, so it's hardly their fault that mistrust was created and cultivated. You should mistrust people who mislead you about their agenda, and if you go to the AP website today and look at some random article paid for by these grants there's no mention of where the funding comes from. Actually you get a popup begging for donations, saying that because the AP is a non-profit it's extra trustworthy.
If they want to regain trust, a good start would be by refusing to accept money for stories, relabelling all the stories where they did that, and then pay for journalism purely out of subscription revenues or ads brokered through exchanges (i.e. where the advertiser doesn't have any contact with the publishers).
1) People don't like having their beliefs challenged. This will slant all news organizations towards the biases of their readers. We see this at all levels. The shorter and more personalized the feedback loop the faster it happens. This makes the news with things like ChatGPT, the feedback is very quick and personalized so it's very easy for people to tumble down the rabbit hole. Same thing, slower, with social media recommendation engines. And online hate communities--they lead people to extremes. But it also happens with traditional media, just much more diffuse. Everybody moves away from the center.
2) News organizations care very much about being able to get images and video of events. This means they are readily manipulated by restricting access to those who report the locally-approved version of the "facts". We used to understand that "news" from Russia was the state-sponsored version, we don't pay attention to the fact that "news" from areas with Islamist control are just about as bad.
And news is always slanted towards the side of controversy. No controversy, people aren't going to care.
However, this does not remotely mean that the right wing news is better. The reality is that it's even worse. All the same forces are at work and then there's an ideological bias on top of that. With news having become a la carte I doubt there's any way to remain in business as an honest news source anymore.
WSJ and Fox News have the same owners but WSJ still has one of the best and most credible newsrooms in the business (their opinion section is another matter).
Meanwhile Fox News is a lie factory that only tells it's large (but niche) audience what it wants to hear. And now they have rival networks eating away at the pie by being more sensational and even more shamelessly obsequies. They're stuck in a radicalization doom loop.
> The problem with the "philanthropic" funding is not only is there no firewall, but it's explicitly pay-to-play agenda pushing
> if you go to the AP website today and look at some random article paid for by these grants
Why do you say there is no firewall? Is that really true? The AP has their guidelines here and I don't see it as substantially different than what a publication might do for advertisers and other stakeholders who may be tempted to exert editorial control:
- https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/how...
If you have specific instances where these arrangements have clearly compromised their journalism, that would be good to see.
In the meantime, I think we can do two things at the same time here: resist overdosing on maximal cynicism, but also be clear eyed about the ways money can tempt institutions to throw integrity out the window.
> The right wing are saying things like, journalism is fake because they're just pushing a left wing agenda for money.
> But it turns out that the rightists are correct and that's exactly what journalists are doing, so it's hardly their fault that mistrust was created and cultivated.
Generally speaking, no they are not correct, and most of them are just outright cynically lying, while engaging in the very behaviors of which they accuse others.
https://apnews.com/article/science-business-arts-and-enterta...
Some key paragraphs are:
> The Associated Press said Tuesday that it is assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues, in the news organization’s largest single expansion paid for through philanthropic grants.
> The grant is for more than $8 million over three years, and about 20 of the climate journalists will be new hires. The AP has appointed Peter Prengaman as its climate and environment news director to lead the team.
> For many years, Journalists and philanthropists were more wary of each other. News organizations were concerned about maintaining independence and, until the past two decades, financially secure enough not to need help. Philanthropists didn’t see the need, or how journalists could help them achieve their goals.
> Nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica and Texas Tribune led the way in changing minds. The Salt Lake Tribune, which in 2019 became a nonprofit to attract more donors, and The Seattle Times are other pioneers.
> “As far as we’re concerned, it has been really seamless,” said Monica Drake, assistant managing editor at the Times. “It has allowed us to focus on things we want to cover and to do it independently.”
> Both sides had things to learn. For Carovillano, it was getting used to the idea that funders weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve. “This is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” he said.
> “I feel like our language has gone from people talking about local news dying to there being a renaissance of local news,” she said. “If you can provide good, high-quality journalism, people are willing to pay for that, people are willing to support it. I think there’s a lot of room for optimism. The trick is, can we move quickly enough?”
The article leads with climate grants but is really about the phenomenon in general, which covers many topics.
The quoted journalists are duplicitous, trying to reassure themselves. The text says that what they're doing used to be taboo because rich guys had "goals to achieve", but now it's considered "pioneering" and "mutually beneficial". Their justification is they didn't have any money and felt sad, but now they've got lots of money and are happy. They say the transition has been "seamless", i.e. readers aren't aware of it. And hilariously, at the end Carivillano claims there's room for optimism because people are willing to pay for high quality news - except "people" aren't paying, that's the reason they need to take money from a handful of donors.
It's obvious this compromises their journalism, especially in the stories they don't publish. These news orgs have basically been bought by the donors, large chunks of their staff only exist because of these grants. Thinking it doesn't compromise their news would be like saying Facebook simply buying all the news teams that cover the internet wouldn't have any effect.
In this case, it reads like their way of stroking their benefactors egos a bit, but without promising them anything real in return.
FTA: "AP often needs to educate funders upon first approach, explaining the company’s worldwide reach and mission to report independently. AP accepts money to cover certain areas but without strings attached; the funders have no influence on the stories that are done, Carovillano said."