First I'd like to adress there's very different kinds of journalism, different set of skills associated with it and of course, a company they work for. As a job, working for the New York Times, for a local journal, for a tech magazine or for travel channel is completely different. I don't think people realise how different the job actually is from one media to the other. You can't say 'journalists' the same way you can't say 'engineers' because there's people doing software, people doing tests, people building machines, people advising companies and many other people doing many other things and having no idea how to do some other engineer job because it is... entirely different. We're not interchangeable and we don't all do the same job at all.
All medias are also different. Which implies different owners, rules, and bosses. As a journalist, you're like everyone else : you're an employee. You can have ethics, you can have thoughts or a list of rules. At the end of the day, it's a job and if your boss asks you to do something completly stupid, you can either say no, loose that job and possibly die of hunger. Or you roll with it and hope very very hard it will not stay on the internet. (Spoiler alert : it will and you'll be ashamed of it all your life.) You do have rights in some countries; but first, like many rights, not everyone know them; and second, those rights don't necessarily protect you. Maybe the media can't fire you right away or because you refused working, but a few months later, when they're considering reconducting your contract, you'll just get cut. It's just sad math. Not everyone can afford to be a hero.
All those problems are not easy to solve. They beg many questions : is there just too many people in journalism ? Should companies shrink so they finally get profitable again and the remaining staff can do quality work - at the expense of thousands of people that would get without a job ? Should there only be subscription-based info ? But then does that mean no one without money would get the right to good information ? Should every company sort out a way to be both a newsroom (one that doesn't make much money or even none at all) and develop multiple activities on the side like an ad company, so that they can stay afloat (some have succeeded that way but it's not a valid point for everyone) ? I don't have an answer and mostly every media is trying to figure out their way out of all this. The thing is it's easy to criticize from outside that the managment is shit... but the ships are sinking and when you're sinking, you're not thinking ahead as to which direction you're going to take, or what part of the boat you're going to make better. First you try to figure out how to get all the water out and keep all the people inside alive. It's not an excuse, just the context we have to deal with.
Side note : there's also a problem of journalist schools. That's my own opinion, but I actually think they are very bad for the job - because you won't learn more than in a media, and it makes all the journalists come out very similar. Problem is, if you don't do them, you have no network and, at least in France, you actually can't intern in big medias. Twitter is a similar bubble to the bubbles school create. Twitter makes journalists feel like what they see or talk about has a bigger influence than it really has. But that's not a problem that's only with journalists. It's also with the platforms and it's been argued that it's all over the internet.
You can, and should, unionize. And then you can say no and keep your job.
The fact that you see the employment-at-will mentality as legitimate is a failing of professional journalistic ethos IMHO.
Of course, labor law violations theoretically are punished by regulators, but that doesn't happen quickly - if at all - and in the meanwhile you have no job.
There are more fantastic ones than ever before but the number of crappy ones and major players that have entered the market in the past 20 years have overshadowed them by orders of magnitudes.
I think this is pretty much happening everywhere as access to the middle class and knowledge worker/white collar jobs are becoming the norm.
A small cadre of experts still exist but the number of amateurs, scammers and grifters is aggressively growing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism
It's also worth referencing Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent which lays out the playbook for propaganda posing as journalism:
With social media, Twitter specifically, the journalist becomes the main focal point -- unfortunately the biases comes out as we are all human and you begin to get a closer look at how the sausage is made, how much "access journalism" corrodes coverage, and particularly how non-diverse these institutions are (everyone feels like they went to some Ivy or liberal arts college with somewhat wealthy or well connected in journalism relatives). A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent) from the big institutions but I've totally avoided political and most opinion columns since 2016.
Do we really need to know what is going on on the other side of the planet right now? Isn't it better to have correct information rather than fast information?
Journalists will have publishing control, choosing which platforms suit each piece the best. People will have a much harder time discrediting someone with a focused, proven track record vs a business with broad financial and political interests. It's the natural result of a societal emphasis on identity-focused decision-making. We look for other individuals to guide us through things we don't understand. Individuals are relatable. This is why podcasting has swamped radio.
As I've gotten older, and become more educated on these specific topics, I've had the exact opposite reaction. Reporting on International politics in particular seems to have deteriorated to the point of being propaganda at best or outright garbage at worst. This is just recognizing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect at scale, I suppose, but to your point what Twitter has done is expose how little these people actually know about the subjects they write about. That seems like a net-good thing to me, since I'd rather we know that the people who pretend to know about the subjects they write about actually don't have at least a baseline understanding of what they're talking about. "Explainers" are probably the worst development here, since this is just advocacy journalism pretending to be "just the facts, ma'am". These "data journalists" have an explicit twitter personae that advocates a specific narrative, and then we all pretend that, for some reason, this doesn't leak into the reporting from the institution they work for.
There's probably no going back from this state, and I doubt that there will be any major changes in hiring practices at e.g. the NYT since this kind of journalism drives a lot of traffic. Cat is out of the bag, so to speak.
This is the absolute reverse of true: twitter allows accountability of the journalists at outfits you mentioned.
> With social media, Twitter specifically, the journalist becomes the main focal point
If you put your name on reporting, you're accountable for its quality.
> and particularly how non-diverse these institutions are
Au contraire, the papers seem far more obsessed with idpol than twitter, preferring to focus on cults of personality and what their popularity (or non popularity) means than meat and potato issues.
> A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent)
I disagree, but I'll leave the question of why you consider this flavor of reporting high quality up to you to figure it out.
I subscribe to the new york times, the washington post, and the la times, RT, al jazeera, among many other smaller publications. I don't think I could make any sense of the election year, climate change, or international politics without twitter, full stop—you're only seeing half the conversation, or less. Frankly even hacker news has better "reporting" on climate change than any "journalistic outfit" I've read, mostly because it's a massive topic to cover that changes very rapidly and it doesn't sell attention nearly as well as problems that operate within our understood paradigm of how our world should work.
And, frankly, it's hard to imagine an outfit more driven to polarize and work up its base for no discernible reason than the New York Times Opinion section—I can't articulate it better than this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsWj7Q5iPus.
Finally, this entire dialogue neglects that twitter allows journalists to critique each other in public, a distinctly positive thing for journalism no matter what your opinions are about the unwashed masses.
But the phenomenon of reporters being able to personally convey their behind-the-scene thinking and experience? I think that’s been a huge boon of valuable, informative insights we previously could only get in memoirs and 10-year anniversary reflections. What you see published as articles is something that’s been trimmed and edited for largely pragmatic purposes and convention, not through some rigorous standard of epistemology.
The NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi is a great example of someone whose tweets greatly enrich her published work. Here is a thread of insights and reporting that became part of a next-day story on Iran and Sulemani:
https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213421769777909761
One of the best examples of all is David Farhenthoid, who tweeted the progress of what seemed like a very picayune (relatively speaking) factcheck of Trump's charity claims:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/david-fahr...
> I spent a day searching for Trump’s money on Twitter, asking vets’ organizations if they’d gotten any of it. I used Trump’s Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, because I wanted Trump to see me searching.
> Trump saw.
> The next night, he called me to say he had just then given away the $1 million, all in one swoop, to a nonprofit run by a friend. That meant when Lewandowski said Trump’s money was “fully spent,” it was actually still in Trump’s pocket.
Here's a more detailed breakdown of how Farenthold conveyed the progress of his reporting through Twitter, including screenshots of the legal pad he used as a checklist:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/5/13810210/h...
By "picayune", I mean that in late 2016 (e.g. September through November) Trump's charity claims were extremely small-time compared to the actual presidential race. Without a way to publicly convey and accumulate (i.e. snowball) his reporting, Fahrenthold may not have been given enough time (by his editors) to have the critical mass needed for a meaningful story. His work eventually resulted in a Pulitzer-winning investigation, and the impetus for the most damaging ongoing state-level investigations into Trump today:
Can you point to an example of any recent article in any US paper that even tries to be objective? Only the BBC pretends to strive for that nowadays.
This remark is hugely ironic if you followed the recent UK election, but they at least have an outside perspective in the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/health/chicago-coronaviru...
It clearly describes the spread of the disease in the US, including cited quotations from officials at the CDC and other health experts. It provides some useful additional facts about other similar diseases, and projections about how this disease could spread. Seems objective to me.
Alas, they are completely moot in today's ad-supported automated outrage machines. And I'm fresh out of goodwill.
Until we decide that discourse is more important than profits, forge a new consensus, we have to treat reporting like the replication crisis in science.
Just two rules apply:
Sign your work.
Share your data.
The corollaries are just as simple:
Unsigned, unsourced statements are gossip.
Unsupported data is propaganda.
The sad part is that concocting sensationalism is extremely profitable, especially politics. And when you can create the controversy and then charge outrageous amounts of money to the very people to whom you poke, you control the discourse and you make a lot of money, which in America is power.
Modern, mainstream "news" is just like fast food. If you care about your body and your health, you will not eat the stuff. But most people dont care, dont mind and dont even think about it. Its cheap, tasty and convenient.
The worst problem with journalism today, encapsulated in a single sentence.
> Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
A journalist should check whether there is another side that they missed. However, there sometimes isn't. Sometimes the other side is simply flat-out wrong. More often, the "other side" is maliciously wrong.
This journalistic assumption that there are always multiple sides that are on equal footing needs to DIE.
I don't think anyone on the right or left would say that the present problem with Journalists is that they present both sides too well.
That's not to say that there's never a correct position. Assuming there is another version is different from assuming all versions are on multiple footing.
For instance, they keep reporting the results of dodgy scientific studies as if it's the unquestionable truth. Their evaluation of "is it true" is nothing fancier than "does the person telling me this have a PhD from a university I've heard of". Then more studies that come out and contradict the first set, and they get reported in the same way. Pretty soon people figure out that these stories can't all be right.
If journalists insist on interpreting the news to try and give context, which they don't have to do, then they should be far more skeptical than they really are, and give far more time to people who disagree with any given idea of view. That would pretty quickly put a stop to things like this:
http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/
NB: this site tries to make the Daily Mail look stupid because some objects are classified as both cures and causes cancer. But if you check the stories, they're all reporting on actual scientific results. The problem is the underlying medical science isn't reliable enough to determine truth.
Not lying is not at all the same as telling the truth.
Modern journalism, at best (very rarely seen), tells you something that is, narrowly taken, true. Even this version of journalism does not attempt to tell you what the actual truth of the matter is.
Narrowly true statement: "Republican Senator Blarg said today on the floor of the Senate "these charges are nonsense, fake news, totally made up"."
That's a true statement! It was said! But it's also misleading about the whole matter to convey it to your readers.
Telling your viewers the real truth of the situation: "The charges levied in the Senate are obviously accurate and serious, but Republican Senators are lying about them in an attempt to obfuscate and downplay the situation."
They act out this status-dance of pretending to loathe every second of life in the toxic digital hellscape that, in the talk tracks and visibility it gives them is actually very beneficial for their careers.
They couldn’t actually admit it’s been good for them though, as that would mean admitting profiting from the algorithmic, privacy problem-invested landscape that they barely understand but have made their careers criticizing.
But of course, everyone’s at it! So the only way to get ahead is more paranoia, more angst, more toxicity. Once you’re bought in, you can’t go back to tacking to the middle. So we get an arms race of performative angst and hyperbolic statements.
Before you know it, you’re claiming that Slack notifications give you PTSD symptoms: https://twitter.com/pfpicardi/status/1220738739514814467?s=2...
The problem is that that is antithetical to the real work of journalism - which should be about seeking truth without fear or favour.
Who cares about paying for a staff of $60-80k/year well-seasoned investigative reporters that take weeks-months to produce vivid, informative pieces only for them to be forgotten about for another thing in the 24hr news cycle? Why not just pay a bunch of young people $18/hr to "rehash" 8 articles/day with a bunch of fluff and opinion to pump out more stuff to get more dollars? Why even bother going out into the world to gather information when I could just copy-paste the first story to come out, add a few pictures and edits, then release it to catch the demand-wave for content monetization while it's riding high, and call it a day?
The proliferation of 'fake news' is basically just "full-throttle" digital journalism that said, "Fuck it, why even wait around for real-life happenings to report on when I could just create my own and make money?"
Journalism is not anymore some "sacred art" or "esteemed profession", like a doctor or lawyer or scientist, it's just another avenue to make dollars from society through supply-demand.
How do we fix this?
That's an open question. But I think we need to change the game and the incentives. We probably need a new business model and/or for this kind of news to become widely understood as the junk food entertainment it is. Maybe put a nutrition label or cancer-like warning on them, heh...
Most of what they post is utter clickbait and not really informative. They also do amazing pieces of investigation because this model brought them money and they wanted to use it to do better work.
See this article from 2018 that was nominated for a Pullitzer Prize. https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...
Does that mean you rate Buzzfeed as cancer - including the great reporting they sometimes do ? Or each article independently ? But then who does it ?
Open questions here as well ^^
Maybe one day actual journalists will come to the conclusion that tweeting is antithetical to journalism and may only use it as a tool of discovery rather than engagement.
The upside though is that it's easier to tell they're activists / non-objective on Twitter - compared to supposedly 'serious' outlets pushing all kinds of agendas as "objective" journalism.
They've always been activists. Twitter just makes it visible to the public while in the past, their biases were shielded behind the fake PR-driven reputation of an institution.
The first newspapers in america were created to lie and spread political ideology. And that has been the case ever since.
"As for what is not true you will always find abundance in the newspapers." – Thomas Jefferson
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle." – Thomas Jefferson
I wish everyone was taught about the history of the news industry. Also, I wish every media company was forced to notify/warn their audience on who founded the company and why. Like how cigarette and tobacco companies have to put warning labels to notify their customers of the dangers of the product they are selling.
It's like they've said: Alright, truth is impossible to reach, so let's throw everything out window.
What of public relations, think tanks, and campaigns? Those legions of people paid to push a point of view?
It's amusing (tragicomically) that your sole criticism is for the people with least power in a corrupt media ecosystem.
The article is about a journalist so we're thinking about how other journalists compare.
This is just one recent example that comes to mind. See why Harvard Professor is suing the NYT [1] for completely twisting his post about MIT and Jeffrey Epstein [0]
I found this so outrageous how NYT would completely twist words and not make the appropriate corrections when given the evidence.
If you see the egregious defamation there, then you're a more nuanced reader than I am.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/13/21063873/jeffrey-epstein-...
You can 'yea but' anything. For example, for rule #2: "Do not distort, lie, slant, or hype." ... yeah, but what if the subject is evil.
(Also, I have yet to see one mainstream news report on Flat Earth, much less a favourable one ... is that actually a problem you're worried about?)
Due to social media, we know more of the unfiltered thoughts of Trump and his supporters that any other president and political movement ever.
My opinion of both has been formed by direct exposure to their utterances.
1. do not care about creating panics or damaging society
2. are incentivized to provide click-baity to-the-minute reporting.
How to fix this?
Maybe regulation, even though dangerous in this freedom of speech territory.
One thing I was thinking (inspired by one of Andrew Yang's point) is to have a press tax to fund a delayed international news outlet.
It changes the incentives: the media has no funding issue and is not incentivized to attract more readers; and it changes the impact: delaying each piece of news to wait until more information is available is good.
Perhaps the public broadcasting service could have a nightly program that dedicates an entire hour of primetime to this type of reporting. And we could even name it in Lehrer's name! Of course in that case we should also give MacNeil credit as well. So perhaps the show could be called something like the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour"!
;-)
Stop clicking.
What you want to know is the facts that go against the narrative that aren't mentioned.
Then take a holistic view.
Something that gathers all of the known facts in one place for review. That used to be what journalists did, not so much any longer.
Political coverage is a nightmare though. Just yesterday George Stephanopoulos was caught on camera acting in an extremely partisan manner [1]. This happens on both sides of the isle regularly at this point (the White House itself is hardly faultless). It's only ratcheted up since 2016 where it seems the press took it up themselves to "save" us, where the definition of save seems to be: push their own political opinions.
1. https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1220758756071497728
I'm sorry, but even as political talking points go this makes no sense. He made a "cut" gesture during a live feed, but live news broadcasts cut from one feed to another dozens of times per hour, and the feed he was motioning to cut wasn't of any particular importance to either party (it was a Trump lawyer listening to someone off-camera asking a question). That's hardly "extremely partisan".
To be fair, Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative for years before transitioning to media. Why would you expect him to not be partisan?
Stephanopoulos was giving directing clues for his own talk program. There is positively nothing "partisan" about that, however partisan he may be. The White House, on the other hand...well let's not even go there.
This is the entire internet.
It kind of explains why we live in the fact light environment of quotes and spin. Presumably, if a hard fact proves unpopular with a large enough group, then those facts, even when backed by hard evidence, can likely land you in a lot of trouble.
A bit understandable I suppose? I mean, if talking bad about Trump or Obama increases the number of shooters in your Walmarts and churches, then yeah, probably should be careful about doing that. At the same time, if you have to walk on egg shells around people so emotionally invested in a person, or place, or subject that they're going to shoot up anyone who disagrees with them, then your journalism on that issue is not likely to be very "good" in any case.
Facts are not enough because in order for 'facts' to be useful they have to be embedded in a larger structure - like a theory, or ideology, or narrative, or whatever.
Here's a fact: "Sun rises in the East, and sets in the West". This fact is compatible with heliocentric and geocentric models. The fact on its own doesn't tell you which is which. It doesn't tell you the context, nor the other facts that may have been omitted or superfluously included when reported, and proponents of both theories can use it to justify their position. This is why there can never be such a thing as "journalism that just reports the facts".
But the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun does tell you which "model" is actually a fact. That's the point.
You're making an argument about which facts should be reported? The sun rising in the east? Or the phases of Venus? Or both? Or both and more?
But stating that you need an ideology or narrative to support your facts is a bit nonsensical in my own opinion. There really is only one conclusion that can be drawn from the totality of the facts. To state only a single fact, and then say, "here is an ideology or narrative so you can understand the fact I just gave you." Really is just stating an ideology or narrative.
Think of it this way, if you still need a narrative, then you didn't give anyone all the facts.
There are infinitely many facts. They don't select themselves. Humans do that, for reasons of their own, and sometimes their reasons don't match the intended use of this website, which is curious conversation. So while facts are a nice-to-have, they're not sufficient to make for a good HN post. Other things are needed also.
