Modern media is often wrong, vapid, and easy to manipulate
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
The reason I am horrified is not because I'm offended that they don't understand computers, but because I realize that the articles that they write in fields I'm not intimately familiar with are almost certainly equally stupid sounding to people who are, and thus I'm likely woefully misinformed on a great many things.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
Nowadays I only follow the conventional media to know what they think is important, since that drives a lot of important things.
The worst/laziest literally copy and paste from their "trusted sources" instead of writing it on their own.. which is even worse when that source is a press release or otherwise manicured statement.
The big red warning sign is the lack of corrections. This shows how little the media actually cares.
It's like a web service being hacked and having their plain-text passwords exposed, and openly and blatantly refusing to improve their security practices.
And unlike most other industries, there's no force to correct them. Democracies are understandably reluctant to regulate media strongly, and exposing this problem is traditionally the role of... the media.
Other than the business model falling apart because people are no longer willing to pay for media, they are untouchable.
The flip side of the coin is that if I release some FOIA data and then the reporter goes to the government entity for a comment, the government representative will often times make things up or just lie about the facts. The local reporter just takes that person at his or her word, despite the fact that I have produced documentation directly from that government agency which contradicts its talking head.
It's become clear that local reporters (for the most part) don't do any independent research. They regurgitate AP reports or whatever they're told. Most reporters have no expertise or clue about what they're reporting on.
One sign of this degradation in local (and national) media quality to watch out for: online articles that are composed entirely of paragraphs that are one or two sentences each. Here's one randomly chosen example: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/11/justice/texas-explosion-probe/...
What turns a profit? High-brow commentary written by proper journalists, that only a small subset of your readership will fully understand and appreciate, or photos of the latest Hollywood B-list celebrity doing something embarrassing, churned out en masse by pseudo-journalists whose only qualification is being able to plagiarise content without being detected, generating far more page views and ad revenue?
What metric has about the lowest correlation to quality, accuracy or significance? Pageviews.
And: "For this reason there is an increasing tendency to concentrate the functions of propaganda in the hands of the propaganda specialist. This specialist is more and more assuming a distinct place and function in our national life."
Does awareness immunize you? "Undoubtedly the public is becoming aware of the methods which are being used to mold its opinions and habits. If the public is better informed about the processes of its own life, it will be so much the more receptive to reasonable appeals to its own interests. No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership.
"If the public becomes more intelligent in its commercial demands, commercial firms will meet the new standards. If it becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it to accept a given idea or commodity, its leaders will present their appeals more intelligently."
A terribly amusing read, from a pre-computing programmer of people. (http://www.whale.to/b/bernays.pdf) When guys like Ryan Holiday talk about the "modern media", they're stirring nostalgia for lost days of yore — which didn't exist. At least not in the timeframe they seem to imply.
[Disclaimer: I'm only halfway through the video before writing this. I'll be embarrassed if he delves into the 20th century history in the latter half. And keep in mind that "Propaganda" had a more neutral connotation then. Later, it got associated with the Nazis, who were actually inspired by the success of US propaganda.]
One thing he argued is that before professional journalism, the media was much like today's blogs; everyone knew their content reflected the owner's biases. Then with the consolidation of newspapers (due to economic reasons), to the point where a city might have only a couple dailies, overt bias "stank like old fish", so professional journalism arose. (And journalism schools along with it.) With it came a neutral-sounding objective tone, which hid a number of biases (like what's covered — and what's not, reliance on "official sources" who are elites, and so on). But of course, the content reflects the owners and advertisers' general interests, as we'd expect from media corporations which like staying in business.
Given that, I'd wonder if good, carefully-researched professional journalism is more insidous than yellow journalism. I'll look more closely at your (and Sinclair's) work.
(But to address your other point, it may be. Chomsky's media criticism focusing heavily on this)
Some context: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0D0E42AA4I&t=16m30s)
The whole interview is worth listening to if one can tolerate the (at times considerable) douchiness of the interviewer.
1913 Bernays was hired by the actor Richard Bennett to protect a play that supported sex education against police interference. Bernays set up a front group called the "Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund" (officially concerned with fighting venereal disease) for the purpose of endorsing the play.[21]
Which reminds me of Tom Lantos ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lantos )working with the PR firm to stage the testimonies on capital hill to get US into the first Iraq War, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_Nayirah
In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيره الصباح) and that she was the daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign which was run by Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah's testimony has largely come to be regarded as wartime propaganda.
Or was it a black propaganda exercise by his political enemies Swift Boating Athenian style if you will.
Press coverage tends toward the sensational, visual, beautiful, controversial, current, language-specific, and easily explained. If a topic doesn't meet those criteria, it probably won't be covered by the press -- unless the topic in question has some well-connected PR firm or publicist pushing for it.
Almost every public figure has seen some inaccuracy from their Wikipedia page come up in a news story or an interview at one time or another.
And of course the headline "modern media is often wrong, vapid, and easy to manipulate" is a little more sensational (and click generating) than, say, "Ryan Holiday claims some media outlets have biased incentives"
Which leads me to the amusing possibility that Ryan Holiday did not actually do those things, but is manipulating the media into thinking he did, which of course would prove his point.