Here's the reality: The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness. I worked with a bunch of really talented reporters and editors throughout my career, and almost without exception, they highly valued those things. Moreover, many have an anti-authoritarian bent, and that leads to a desire to expose corruption, rather than protect it.
But ...
* I've seen publishers kill stories because they thought it would make advertisers unhappy.
* I've seen senior execs put pressure on editors to downplay stories that painted the region in a bad light.
* I've seen a political campaign refuse to permit a certain reporter to attend their campaign events because they didn't like that the reporter wasn't acting like a PR tool.
* I've seen budgets for "watchdog journalism" become slowly starved, in favor of clickbait.
And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business (who are really trying to make money and exert influence).
Granted, there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued, and unfortunately that's where a lot of eyeballs end up these days, because so many people just want their existing biases to be re-inforced.
But what America really needs is more media literacy, so we can better distinguish the former from the latter. We, as a society, are SO BAD at this. Our B.S. detectors have lots of false positives and false negatives. We look to the wrong signals to determine whether a news report is trustworthy. We fail to evaluate information critically as long as it validates our pre-existing views. We have a hard time separating facts from opinions.
This lack of media literacy is worrisome enough, but now we've got political leaders capitalizing on the fact that we're bad at this and actively trying to delegitimize the media (as if it's a single thing) because it serves their own purposes.
The average journalist thinks they value the truth, accuracy and fairness. Observed behavior is very different to this flattering self portrait which is why they aren't trusted.
Actual behaviors of real journalists that create distrust which can't be blamed on advertisers or editors:
- Accepting large grants from billionaire foundations that are tied to pushing specific agendas and views. Example: look at how much money the Gates Foundation gives out in journalism grants tied to his personal agenda.
- Publishing stories that contain obvious "errors" (invariably convenient for their pre-existing agenda). Example: the NYT published a front page that consisted solely of the names of 1000 people who had supposedly died of COVID. It was meant to scare people and it took some rando on twitter about half an hour to notice that the 6th name on the list was of a person who had been murdered.
- Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory.
- Point blank refusal to challenge certain types of sources because they think it's immoral to do so. Example: the BBC decided some years ago that climate change was "settled science" and that it was morally wrong to report on anything that might reduce faith in the "consensus". This is the opposite of the classical conception of journalism (challenging authority, digging up scandals, get both sides of the story etc).
- Relying heavily on sources that are widely known to be discredited. Example: Fauci stated early on in COVID that he lied about masks in official statements to the press, specifically to manipulate people's behavior. This did not stop the press using him as a trusted authoritative source. Another example: the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.
There's way more.
What the (not all, and not all the time..) media does when they bait people into moral hazard could easily be categorized as a crime (harming the informational commons) in some cases. How do we know? Imagine if the news had to publish things the same way that you testify in a courtroom. Do you think they would be more or less truthful and due diligent than they currently are?
Non-commercial speech to the public needs to be taken as seriously as it is when it's commercial (companies etc) speech to the public, and the unqualified unwarrantyable claims scrutinized just as much.
Individual journalists can be great people but the net result of systemic malincentives is a problem that's being gamed. There's a reason why rich and powerful people buy up newspapers (and politicians for that matter) and it doesn't have to do solely with telling the truth. I am not "blaming" anyone for taking advantage of it, or complaining, but we can fix it.
Journalists are welcome to burn their own reputation, it is theirs. But don't blame others.
I have ranted to friends and family for decades about the lack of media literacy and the lack of understanding for the newsgathering and reporting processes.
I'm glad to see others continuing those rants because I gave up shortly after j school and transitioning careers.
Media literacy should be mandated in school.
After learning the Bayesian way of thinking I feel more and more certain that this whole “objective news” idea is just plain wrong. There simply is no objective description of reality at that level of abstraction.
Note though that this is not the usual postmodern viewpoint: reality is not a social construct, or at least that construct is heavily constrained. There is still untruths and outright lies.
You describe a mountain of problems _inside_ your own industry, and yet you walk away with the idea that it's the public that needs extraordinary change to account for this.
I appreciate your point of view, but I think your conclusion is horribly biased.
I appreciate you sharing your on the ground knowledge and insights, but if it was more than 20 years ago I would also cautiously imagine that the new generation of journalists may not behave the same.
At this point the news companies are all desperately concealing the fact that they barely have reporters, and are mostly getting news from a wire feed or parent company.
If someone thinks that's not true, ask yourself: do you really think that reporting on vaccine anomaly data, or Ukraine corruption will get you more or less upward mobility than reporting on shooting hot air baloons or whatever media orchestrated distraction is happening at the moment in the NYT?
That’s when things went from bad to worse and I abandoned the mainstream media entirely.
Though of course this is the wrong reaction; it has always trickled through. Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols.
Every piece of information is produced with interests for audiences; objectivity is a pink unicorn Santa Claus, something you really shouldn't believe exists after you're, like, 8. But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims, and who are not organizations whose literal existence depends on state licensing as a corporation. Not to say that there is no structural pressure in the independent realm; ideology still exists, years of socialization in the country of origin with their (often folly) "self-evidence" myths exist, the need to eat and make money somehow still exists. But the pressures are much, MUCH fewer than in the case of corporate and state news.
First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements.
Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.
In the years before the internet we had newsletters and amateur radio. https://media.tenor.com/9k_DNT8tBA4AAAAd/simpsons-i-wish-to-...
Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. Even among the non-postal "decentralized" distribution protocols. The old saying that people become leery of media reporting when they see how their own specialty is botched applies to even the credentialed bloggers when they step out of their lane just a bit.
I've personally noticed fact reporting biases when, for instance, reading a story on the same event from Fox News and CNN. But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
I actually don't think it's possible to solve the problem of funding being able to influence journalism. Although there are independent journalists like on substack (which could be what you mean) I am not convinced that is much different from corporate media except the journalist is more like an LLC or sole proprietorship.
Fixed it. There are historical evidence that this has gone on in some form or fashion in ancient empires (e.g., Roman, Egyptian, Chinese), be it written or the town crier.
There have always been people who knew this was going on, spoke up, but were considered crackpot, conspiracy theorist, or simply beheaded.
[To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of what forces influence media that influence people. I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.]
But the problem is way more insidious and pervasive than performative partisan issues, which are generally manufactured culture wars. Those issues serve two purposes:
1. To make people angry and keep them angry. Angry people are "engaged"; and
2. To sow division and prevent class solidarity.
One of the most wildly successful examples of propaganda is the idea of the middle class. This serves to demonize the so-called "lower classes", typically labeling them as lazy, criminal, morally bankrupt and drains on the state.
There are only two classes: labor and capital owners.
Yet propaganda has been so successful that labor will defend the interests of billionaires to the detriment of their own interests. The number of people who would die on the hill of opposing Musk and Bezos paying slightly more taxes is depressing.
Media is a key tool in this endeavour. It's why you see wall-to-wall coverage of the China balloon (which literally does not matter at all) and a virtual media blackout of the environmental catastrophe and massive corporate failings that underpin the East Palestine train derailment.
Media represents and advocates for corporate interests and systemic interests.
What a naïveté. Independent journalists are even more beholden to their audiences, if they start talking up something those audiences don’t like, their incomes dwindle. I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence.
But most sociologists are totally in on the game. It used to be that the mainstream media narrative was opposite of what the sociologists preferred people to believe, and at the time you had academics talk about Manufactured Consent, and False Consciousness etc. These days, the press is more aligned with academics, so they prefer to keep it shush.
Here is an explicit example, published just a few weeks ago:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X2211509...
> The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents
From the abstract:
> Low-income Black fathers have been portrayed in the media and in research as uninvolved and disengaged from their children. The current study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 2578) to examine adolescents’ reports of relationships and interaction with their biological fathers. The results showed there were no significant differences among Black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, and Other fathers for adolescents’ perceptions of closeness or interaction with fathers.
Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.
The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.
Imagine reading a paper which “debunks” a “myth” of lack of involvement of women in corporate boards or C-level position, which simply excludes companies that have zero women on boards or as C-level officers from consideration. It would be hard to view it as anything other than deliberate deception. This sort of ignoring of obvious factors is, however, extremely common in published sociology research, and the academic community is extremely good at pretending to not notice deliberately lousy scholarship, when it aligns well with political opinions of 90% sociologists, and attacks anyone who tries to bring attention to it.
Trickle through to HALF the population. Frankly it's shocking that 50% don't think information they receive is a component of some narrative.
If Matt Taibi get Keshloggied it would not amaze me if his former colleagues bury the story or even spin it as a good thing. I don't predict he will actually get killed but ask yourself, would you be surprised if he was or does a part of you half expect it at this point?
He certainly won't be working a corporate gig anytime soon. Where will his income come from in the future? Nevermind what is he going to do to make ends meet, how will he afford going places to interview people and perform research? You can't realistically be a journalist sitting around at home in your underwear (unless you work for the NYT writing provoking social criticisms about something you just watched on Netflix).
And this is a very famous award winning guy with published books to his name from a time when people still used to read and pay for books. What is going to enable more people like this going forward? Seems like a pretty stressful life actually.
It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.
It's not one uniform block, it's thousands of people with different intensions and knowledge.
So that makes me wonder how this is getting out. Is it a news organization such as an opposing organization, or outspoken journalists? Is it democratized news reporting via forums and social media?
The sociologist notes will note that the media serves the interests of the powerful while still reporting some number of facts. The most extreme of the scandalized public will say "the media lies - they say X so Y must be true and X must be a plot". This produces a whole of truly bizarre thinking (often on the right but no doubt on the left as well).
It’s pretty easy why trust in media has eroded in my lifetime (I’m a 40 something). We deregulated and allowed for consolidation of ownership of print, broadcast and eventually online media.
That changed the dynamic. People will always correctly call out right wing talk radio as an example but the problems with media are more subtle as well. Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. If you were around in the 90s, you’ll remember how the OJ Simpson drama was a transformational event - which would not have happened in 1982. Serious journalism gave way to circus.
Our wiser predecessors learned in the 1920s and 1930s of the danger of mass media. Right wing nutcases like Father Coughlin, demagogues like Huey Long, America First, and more extreme left wing labor activists bear a strong resemblance to the characters in modern media.
Which ones prove systemic, deliberate deception?
The 'powers that be' bias is a bit different and takes mant forms.
Aka institutional powers (aka Dem/GOP), individual institutional powers (aka stop a story from embarrassing a colleague Executive), Natoinal bias (aka stories during wartime are not quite the same), 'Civil/Public' bias (aka stories about vaccines during a pandemic), Corporate Institutions (aka advertisers, don't want to upset them).
Funny enought those tend not to be the one's we get the most in a huff for, rather, we fixate more in the ideological narrative stuff because it's more visible.
You don't really see the 'national bias' at all unless you're outside of the country. You don't see the 'corporate bias' bedcause it tends to be displayed in terms of 'stories that don't exist'.
All of that said we should strive to be better.
Your local news organizations will be biased in some ways, yes, but it's easier to keep track of the writers who lean one way or another (smaller journalist teams). Since they're regional they can't skew too far on either end of the political spectrum or they'll anger the residents and lose subscribers. Their accountability is higher, because people in the community generally know what's going on around them and will call the bluff in op-eds or the paper's social media group. And, of course, the reporting is actually relevant to you! They don't need to rage-bait you for clicks because most of the reporting has tangible bearing on your life.
Subscribing to my local paper has kept me both informed and grounded, so I'm very nervous about the prospect of the medium being abandoned for declining profitability. I've yet to find a more valuable source of news.
I don't have any interest in supporting USAToday, so I will never make it past my fifth article of the week.
If a small number of people are allowed to own the vast majority of media outlets, those media outlets are no longer going to represent the interests of the public at large.
Back when all television/radio was broadcast over the air, there used to be this quaint concept of broadcasters having to prove that they serve "the public interest" to receive and retain an FCC license to use the public airwaves.
https://www.benton.org/public_interest_obligations_of_dtv_br...
I clearly remember questioning my father at the breakfast table (where newspapers were read) about the veracity of some story I barely grasped at age 5. He explained to me that not everything you read in the papers was true, and some of it was made up from whole cloth. My 5 year-old-self was stunned, why would someone go to the effort of producing a newspaper only to make up what was in it? What I'm amazed at now is that only about half of an educated, first-world nation have figured this out.
“[George] Creel urged [Woodrow] Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate "not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'"”
Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways. Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional to pull something like that off even if they wanted to.
There are however many internal and external pressures on organizations that shape narratives in a specific ways and journalists are human beings (they're biased based on their own experiences) so reporting always has a slant. That is worthy of critique and is healthy.
The debate on media generally has jumped the shark. IMHO it's not the answer that many folks (that tend to be conservative) want to hear, but meaningful diversity of opinion and experience would help balance this out. You want news with a working class, middle America viewpoint? Then you need to help some % of those people get into media. (This is just one such example of course).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
https://web.archive.org/web/20131025035711/http://www.carlbe...
Agreed, the problem is that there is also palpable, verifiable distortion of facts and "imposition of narrative" within a substantial portion of mainstream and "alternative" news.
We face the problem that many people can't go from "journalism is objective" to "journalism is a mixture of multiple agenda-serving narratives mixed with facts that still isn't a 'grand conspiracy'". Moreover, a substantial portion of media one step from the mainstream really like the "grand conspiracy" narrative because it binds people to them as "truthers".
A moment's research shows this to be false -- eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_prog...
I need accurate news to know what’s going on in the wider world because my day to day is so insular, and I’d hazard I’m not an anomaly here. It’s annoying because I feel like half of my friends are crazy but I’m not sure which half it is. My wife is glitching out and believes all sorts of crazy stuff but heck, maybe it’s true. Maybe the world has always been like this, and I’m just old enough to realize that the news media is bullshit. But it just felt like the older journalists that have retired now were less desperately and smugly trying to convince me that they’re correct than the ones working now. I wish I felt like I could trust literally anyone beyond my immediate family.
I don't think it's a good idea for journalists to proclaim that they are abandoning objectivity. https://reason.com/2020/06/24/journalists-abandoning-objecti...
There's news podcast I listen to ("Raport about state of the world" - Polish only sadly), and host always tries to advocate for both sides when asking questions and often there are guests from the both sides, that present their point in calm, collected manner.
Then there's our state TV, which will tell you that EU is devil, opposition is devil, basically everyone is devil apart from ruling party, which is presented as (quote) "National Champions".
We must expect and educate next generation to expect truth-seeking in journalism, because otherwise we have no future.
Works best when you get news from sources that are not tightly connected.
For example: NYT (American) + NPR (American) + DW (German) + Aljazeera (ME) + Reddit (people "on the ground").
Different financing/revenue models, different ownership, different continents, different cultural biases and norms, different perspectives.
Nothing is perfect and free from influence, but the broader one's consumption, the more angles one can work with on a particular topic.
Yes, but not really the issue... thats why there is an editing process. If an org has a proper editing process then a lot of that gets accounted for.
Most of the skewed stories come from organizations that don't employ trained editors, don't have a clear editorial workflow, don't have a corrections policy, and don't have fact-checkers.
I would argue that medium to large orgs like CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, Bloomberg, WSJ, FT, Guardian, USA Today, Texas Tribune, LA Times, SF Chronicle, New Yorker, Vox, NPR, Houston Chronicle all have these processes in play and are reliable.
(Yes, there are always stories with issues that get though out of thousands and thousands of otherwise solidly reported pieces. No system is perfect.)
I personally am quite certain that some news orgs are deliberately misleading and pushing agendas. Some are doing absolutely heroic work investigating and reporting. And there's a huge spectrum in between. Are "most" being dishonest? Idk how to even measure what "most" means.
This is more about the rising belief that there is a massive conspiracy by them (the liberals, the Jews, the military industrial complex, the star chamber, take your pick) to systematically distort news in a coordinated way so as to realize their plans for world domination / genocide / fascism / destroying the family (circle one).
So it is approximately false, they don't deliberately mislead.
My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't.
Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news sites that are deliberately misleading? If this propaganda is so rampant then where is it? (Note: I'm opinion articles excluded because they are uh opinions).
https://www.nytimes.com/section/world https://www.nytimes.com/section/us
Here is one!
On a story about Joe Rogan and his covid treatment - the NYT said "he was treated with a series of medications including ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210901220929/https://www.nytim...
Later this was changed to "as well as ivermectin, a drug primarily used as a veterinary deworming agent."
https://web.archive.org/web/20221203221548/https://www.nytim...
The first version of the article, calling ivermectin a "deworming veterinary drug" is intentionally misleading as it is WIDELY used internationally in humans for all sorts of issues.
It is on the WHOs list of essential medications for HUMANS, it is the 420th most commonly described medication in the US for HUMANS, the inventor won the Nobel prize for how it helps HUMANS.
Luckily, the NYT changed it to be less misleading - but the point stands. They intentionally misled their readers.
Herman and Chomsky have written about this phenomenon:
Pretty much all of the followup stories re: the Abbot formula factory in the NYT and WaPo say that the factory was closed "in response to the FDA investigation" instead of the reality, which is it was closed "because the FDA needed to investigate."
The difference? The factory wasn't closed due to an FDA finding, it was closed so the FDA could find something. Big difference.
Those two are pretty simple.
Another trend is calling pretty much everything "voter suppression." Is asking for an ID voter suppression? Apparently it is. What about not allowing random people to collect and deliver ballots? Yes. What about making rules and regulations about ballot drop-off sites? Yes, voter suppression. The guardian is notorious for doing this.
Russiagate is a recent example:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/03/reveal...
Misleading can also be what the NY Times doesn't cover. For example, the Columbia Journalism Review published a scathing report on how the media misled on Russiagate and NY Times and other MSM just tries to ignore it:
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
Watch this 10 minute video by Glenn Greenwald that goes over in detail how the NY Times misleads and lies:
So a better example for your search might be to go back to the Internet Archive, and grab the NYTimes from a year ago. And start reading the articles, and see if things ended up logically leading where the articles imply they would. Beyond this I also don't think you can, in good faith, disentangle opinion from fact. Yes we SHOULD, but it's not like people carefully scrutinize a headline or article to assess whether it was categorized as opinion, and then largely disregard it if so. People treat opinion and factual reporting, more or less, the same. And sites intentionally interweave them in order to drive clicks. So you can't have your cake and eat it. Generate clicks by publishing junk, and people are just going to remember you publishing junk.
How about their "reporting" on the jews and certain activities with them in a European country before the US entered WWII? Just do a modicum of research and if you are not thoroughly repulsed by the character of the NYT...
NYT quoted a Russian asset at the FBI claiming Trump's campaign had no clear links to Russia. Then Trump's own kid released the "later in the summer" thread. Newspapers quoted MPD about George Floyd's "medical emergency".
https://AstralCodexTen.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
I don't think it's true (why would it be), and even it is true, it is stupid to assume that it is true. It only can cause harm, but no benefits at all.
>CNN settles $275million suit from MAGA hat-wearing Covington Catholic student after stand-off vid
I'll always remember this moment as a statement of fact that news organizations deliberately mislead us.
There is another set of media that sells access to the "less well off" in America. Here's looking at you fox. It is hard to call them media because what they do is foster outrage and sell that. This audience is targeted by those with political agendas.
Who pays for your media determines how you see the world and what you see of the world. Period.
American Corporations have undergone idealogical capture. There is no other reason Disney risked and lost their self governance by going up against Desantis.
This maybe changing though. My firm is actively beginning to re-evaluate its social activism after 15% layoffs (more layoffs incoming too). The next big phase is regaining our market in the "heartland". I'm in strategic meetings with a lot of executives, that are becoming screaming matches over the direction of the firm.
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers"
Makes you wonder who remains to be trusted, the governments are not reliable at all times either in most parts of the world.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/jefferson-s-preference-for...
I sometimes daydream about a "grey news" organization. No hosts, just text articles with confidence intervals next to claims, all sources listed, no editorials, and all interviews and videos reported on have full transcripts next to the full unedited video.
Org A is the one you want to promote. Only show clips that make org A look good. Org B is the one you want to demote. Only show clips that make org B look bad. If org A does something bad pad it with 'org B' doing the same thing or never show it. If org B does something good never show it.
What is shown to you, and order matters. The talking heads bits most orgs go for along with it just adds color to it. But it is the same editorial process. You only have X amount of time and Y amount to show X < Y. Something has to go. You can pick sides even with that method.
Human societies can be broadly categorized into three groups:
1) The largest group (typically more than half) don't know what's going on.
2) The second group sees what's going on but doesn't do anything about it.
3) The third group (which is really tiny, like 1-in-10000) sees what's going on and does things, or they try to.
The open secret among groups 2 and 3 is that group 1 has to be managed (otherwise they go off the rails and crash civilization pretty quickly. It's happened before.)
So you get things like Religion, Sports, War, etc. all more-or-less to keep "the masses" on the tracks. The invention of the TV was a huge advance for this purpose. Suddenly people are staying inside and not causing trouble! You can even sort of program them: en mass people behave with statistical predictability. (E.g. you can get women to start smoking cigarettes. True example.)
Anyway, from this POV (I read "Manufacturing Consent" at a tender age) the masses have no agency. Democracy is a side-show, part of the management API for the masses.
What we're seeing now (from my POV) is the Internet ripping the lid off of the propaganda control system. "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
The poll is extremely ambiguous of whether it's talking about some or all or *most", etc. And even commenters here saying "duh" are also ambiguous about that.
> How can such people make educated choices?
Answering in a way that stays in context: by listening to trustworthy news sources. (I don't think this contradicts the poll.)
"Look, you had a choice between two candidates whom are identical other than social issues both sides have agreed to never actually do anything about, so stop rebelling and protesting in the streets, you got to vote so now its your turn to mindlessly obey your leaders and stop complaining"
Perhaps smaller polities would be less controversial. Perhaps mass democracy or democracy generally is disfunctional.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Media-of-propaga...
I don’t think the news from major media organizations deliberately misleads people. I think people often mistake News-based entertainment shows for news as well as things like opinion and editorial for news. There is bias but that’s not necessarily the same as being misleading.
If you dig a little deeper, how many people realize there are different formats like opinion, commentary, and analysis? Opinions can't be WRONG, but they sure can be BAD.
You can only fact check facts. You can't fact check analysis. You have to apply critique (aka critical thinking skills, or a critical framework).
I suspect when most people reference "protecting from misinformation," they actually mean protecting you from misinformation, not themselves. After all, anyone sophisticated enough to recognize the problem is surely capable of filtering their own information stream, right?
Like, how often is there a viewer who actively watches both/switches between the two?
It's very polarizing.
I can't think of any way to fix it culturally. One party thinks the other is deranged and lying.
Will it get worse? Will it get better? Where does this lead us?
This trust in "local" news is often misplaced given how many local news outlets - television stations or newspapers - have been subsumed by larger interests.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Deadspin video of dozens of local news anchors reading the same editorial content handed down by Sinclair Broadcast Group is striking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
https://deadspin.com/how-i-made-a-dumb-video-making-fun-of-s...
There is an awful lot of really, really good stuff put out by local newspapers and TV stations but people ought to be thoughtful about their use of any media.
Either way its always been a factor, and was likely worse before the age of information.
The big problem now is there are multiple competing false narratives, instead of just the one in the paper.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/564013066...
Every "news" article (an election, a shooting, an earthquake, a new science study) is wrapped in spin - why this is bad or good for America, why it's racist or a sign of moral decay, how you should feel, what these other people think about it, who agrees with it.
I gave up and just use primary sources - reading the actual ArXiv paper or gov website or watching the eyewitness video is a better use of my time.
But I contend that:
1. News organizations today are less biased than they have ever been.
2. They are better than every other alternative.
3. They are better than nothing.
1. People imagine we had a golden age of news reporting. Never happened. For example, the media sat on the juiciest of juicy stories (JFK's affairs) so that they wouldn't lose access to the White House. What other more subtle ways were they influenced?
2. Where else are you going to get your news from? Facebook, TikTok? People claim that independent sources on SubStack are better, but then they list examples that have obvious and massive biases...
3. Informed voting is a crucial aspect of democracy. If you don't explicitly seek out the news you're going to get it anyway, and those sources are things like ads or political parties that are very much trying to influence you.
I think we have to throw in "news organizations" with "democracy" and "market economy" in the category of "awful things with obvious massive drawbacks, but better than any other alternative".
Like democracy and capitalism, we should concentrate on making news organizations incrementally better rather than discarding them for a worse alternative.
Gurri spent years surveying the global information landscape. Around the turn of the century, he noticed a trend: As the internet gave rise to an explosion of information, there was a concurrent spike in political instability. The reason, he surmised, was that governments lost their monopoly on information and with it their ability to control the public conversation.
One of the many consequences of this is what Gurri calls a “crisis of authority.” As people were exposed to more information, their trust in major institutions — like the government or newspapers — began to collapse.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the...
Blog: https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/
Book: The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium: https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public
I think it is undeniable that new organizations are deliberately misleading the public in many cases, not necessarily part of the conspiracy but simply acting as the agent of the government. There are many cases when is became obvious.
It is also easy to find sources that are free from government collusion usually classified either far left or far right whatever those mean.
> Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.
The headline defines "mislead" as including "leading via truthful reporting" aka "present opinion".
> If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas, killing some. Congress enacts mandatory quarantine measures. The president orders the National Guard to throw prophylactic cordons around unsafe neighborhoods. Mayors resist. Urban gangs battle suburban militias. Calls mount for the president to declare martial law.
Civic virtue tends to get lost in the daily news cycles during the climax of a crisis, but it is frequently regained. Moral and cultural standards are increasing and thus the news will have to adapt to it as it always has. People are slowly returning to classic virtues.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...
They want to be able to set agendas but also want to be known as authoritative and uhhh unbiased. Both cannot be true simultaneously. Cry me a river!
[This is also a way for me to discern news I should be listening to!]
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
That might actually be correct though. I have friends who are republicans who just think that MSNBC are elite-class shills; and democrats who just think that Fox News are elite-class shills. Only some people I know have reached understanding that any corporate news media has serious propaganda agendas.
"This is Extremely Dangerous to our Democracy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
I was a student in high school and did interviews for both a local newspaper and television station.
In both instances they misrepresented what I said, editing or rearranging my words to construct a different narrative, or in the case of the newspaper they just made up things.
The stories weren't even about anything serious, just local hometown feel-good filler stories and the actual, literal, lies that the journalists willfully constructed were inconsequential and actually made me look good.
But I figured if are willing to lie about something so trivial as what they lied about, then it was highly likely the entire system is a sham.
There’s been many times when news articles have been easily discredited by simply looking at the original source(video, image, research papers).
To make things worse, the mechanisms and new types of media (YT, social media, etc...) make it so that you essentially cannot escape the media grasp any more. So we're thinking 24/7 on how the left or right is going to ruin the country.
All of it is profit motivated.
I understand that it's probably impossible to simply report the news ; that the very act of picking what you're reporting is an editorial act. That said, I also think that most of the people who go to work in news do that because they have an agenda they want to flog; the only distinction is that some of them admit it to themselves and the rest don't even understand that they're trying to do just that.
Thanks.
What's frustrating is that almost all news sources I come across have agendas. I used to watch a lot of the Daily Show in the 2000s, but when it was a slow news day, just make fun of Bush.
Later I used to watch the Nightly show with Colbert, but a year into the Trump presidency they got so hyper-focused on Trump that they didn't talk about anything else. I stopped watching.
Now that I commute occasionally, I sometimes listen to NPR. Sometimes they offer news, but most of the time their point of view is just promoting a narrative that I either find uninteresting, or irrelevant. I lean pretty left, but I don't need to listen to a story about a fringe group every time I sit in the car.
IMO, they simply mislead when it works in their favor. That makes it a minefield though and the best way to handle it I've found is to simply turn it off. If something is important, somehow that information will filter up to you.
Obvoiusly they do.
They are clickbait and narrative drive, almost all of them.
Even those with high journalistic standards can be heavily misleading.
MSNBC has high journalistic standards (and some brilliant minds, with great researchers) and some of their taalking heads have pretty heavy bias and FYI I'm not 'taking sides' here.
The most interesting thing about the 'news' is trying to determine where the bias comes from.
Title is editorialised however, its mislead or adopt a particular view.
But making readers adopt a particular view is basically their purpose.
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, >>private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education)<<. It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." [0]
Feels very demoralizing.
We are currently building it and will be rolling it out to our 10 million users around the world in a few months.
If anyone wants to be involved, you can contact me by filling out the form on the bottom.
Still, to cite a recent example, the reporting from most news outlets on things like the Kenosha shootings and trials were outrageously bad.
We never discussed it in the context of new media but it feels quite relevant.
Gee, I wonder why ppl don't trust the news. I would say ppl don't trust anything anymore, because most businesses are about scamming and gaslighting their customers these days.
Is that "deliberately mislead"? It depends on what exactly you mean by that. Don't agree and shift the meaning.
I grew up in the UK and 70s-80s BBC seemed a lot more neutral, but of course every news organization has their own implicit world view, relative to which they report the news. There is no such thing as an unbiased news source, although there are those that try to brainwash you and those that at least try to keep it factual.
Something happened here at date involving these people. Done. No opinion, no analysis, no conjectures or sarcasm, no calling people with words that either accurately describe them or inaccurately, only official titles and names.
It might just be possible when the rest of the field have clearly departed from objectivity, competition seems low enough.
The days of subjectivity are over.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for Large corporations to have self interest and to highlight stories that benefit them and minimize/ignore things that would negatively effect them.
Who the hell doesn't understand profit motive, advertising sponsors? You don't have to be Noam Chomsky to have a hunch that something is off.
Also:
>“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.”
― Michael Crichton
3 or 4 conglomerates are often 85%+ of the news sources.
As soon as the fairness doctrine died, real journalism was crushed by corporate greed.
Hard to tell which did more damage, since they came so close together. Possibly one would have been fine if the other hadn't happened.
An organization who has incentives aligned with providing journalism for the people?
It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled. -Mark Twain
Yes.
So really, the news is that it isn't 100% of Americans.
For example, the lack of coverage of the train derailment in Ohio. And zero articles since the government said the UFOs they shot down were benign asking "Hey, government, that's it? No explanation as to why you wasted millions of dollars shooting down benign objects? With all your capabilities you really can't find the debris?"
News, while not a direct wing of the government (usually), is an important core to the social and political well being of a nation, yet in the US it seems there is no counter balance to this trend.
I can't even say I blame people either, its not just "right wing nut jobs" or "out of touch leftists" that feel news organizations are untrustworthy or mislead the public. Its starting to become more common among moderate to slightly left leaning political normals. IE, the average population (in aggregate).
That should really bother people more I feel like. This is a pretty serious problem in the modern age and there's no good answer on how to move forward to get real trust back. Having a government sponsored non partisan news source will immediately get rejected by pretty significant portion of the US citizenry, and private corporations and non profit foundations have their own issues, namely around how they get funded.
Seems there is honestly scant little we can do here, I honestly don't see how you roll this back
To me, anything problematic or anti-problematic is a synthetic conflict generated from underlying pre-problematizations. One doesn't have to agree with this assessment to understand it, but pretending to be mystified as to why a majority of Americans don't agree with them only makes the divide irreconcilable, imo.
Spreading disinformation from politically aligned media sources is a fundamental authoritarian strategy. Politicized news is used to generate outrage which excites the electorate into participating in elections.
There was a good episode of Freakonomics on NPR concerning negative bias in the media and why people respond to it. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-u-s-media-so-negativ...
You can't fix negativity, but you can better regulate media to be accountable without infringing on free speech. There has been a very sharp downturn in factual quality and impartiality of information provided by news organizations over the past two decades in the US and we are overdue for a course correction.
"Joe Biden fell off his bicycle", we can believe that much. The other 99% of the content is partisan posturing. Maybe if I were there, I could have further insights, "His aides should have given him platform pedals instead of cages". Thankfully I wasn't there. Even if I had been there, my observation would have still been subjective.
However, there are some narratives and editorial positions which are trivially self-refuting. We can evaluate them from first principles. "A misinformation czar is required to protect democracy" or "We need censorship to preserve a free and open society" If we trust people to vote, then we must trust people to consume and evaluate information independent of state institutions.
Ultimately these discussions revolve around our premises. Our first principles inform us. The specific event can be almost irrelevant in many cases.
There are other crank ideas like those advanced by David Icke. I cannot prove that world leaders are not lizard people, but I'm naturally skeptical. Even if I watched Biden fall, I couldn't prove it. Crank theories don't threaten me, they amuse. Hopefully this is something which isn't controversial for partisans on this site. We could substitute other news items and theories.
I'm more troubled by the users shouting down these delightful absurdities. "My truth is bigger than yours"
From my side they have my deepest sympathy for wherever the disagreement injured them. However, moving forward perhaps it would be best if they didn't identify so closely with editorialized content or specific news outlets? "9 out of 10 HN users chose Brand-X Truth and here's why..."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
Rare to be able to factcheck an article without leaving the page and disprove it from its own content, but the lies are not rare.
https://www.newsweek.com/video-mike-rogers-held-back-he-lung...
With that said, is it any wonder, with certain politicians demonizing media at every opportunity, and certain outlets actively seeking to misinform, that confidence has fallen?
I wish I knew the answer. We’re at a dangerous point in the US and also the world where we need to be able to discern the truth and act to pull back from what feels like a precipice.
“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.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
-Thomas Jefferson
Arguably the best place to help you pick better media outlets.
Part 1: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Amer... Part 2: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Amer...
Some thoughts:
The first part of the survey focuses on the question: who pays for news? An executive overview of the opinions is: most (3 in 4) say that news organizations are first and foremost motivated by their own financial interests. However... well over half of people say that they will never pay for news (although this summary obscures a lot of details in the PDF).
So, there's a bit of a contradiction here. News is usually a business first and foremost (government sponsored news organizations being the main exception), and one would postulate that the less reader subscriptions are necessary, the more news will tilt towards satisfying commercial interests (or other sources of income) above all.
As far as trust is concerned, online news and US cable news fairs poorly. The former despite a growing amount of people preferring to get their news online; the later despite being the most used news source currently. "Big 3" network news and (surprisingly for me considering the network decay of local news towards low-quality national-generated junk I've seen over time) local news TV fares better.
Low trust in national news is linked to a negative outlook in democracy and other aspects of the political process.
One aspect of these types of reports that I always wonder about is how much of these actually reflect issues in interpreting news in its core. The current digital era generates tons of articles, much of which is useless noise. So sometimes, I feel that some complaints about media in reality are an inability to sort out critical information from the noise in media (both in news and everything else).
So, an interesting tidbit of this survey to me is this finding: "Americans with low emotional trust in national news are much more likely to find it difficult to sort out the facts in today’s information environment."
Is information overload a huge part of the trust problem? I suspect this is the case. A conclusion I postulate is that (as per the above) too much of the "news" is (to equivalate with food) low-nutrition "junk food" designed merely to stimulate clicks and maybe some base emotional response, but offering nothing insightful or valuable for the long term.
Even Seymour Hersh has been smeared to discredit him now he dared speak against the establishment.
It is not journalists' role to be a mouthpiece for the government, but to challenge it.
The China balloon thing is a good example. It was an embarrassing mistake that was a result of disintegrating leadership structure in the cpp. It accomplished literally nothing and never could have. But these huge obvious questions were ignored by the media. Questions like “what did they stand to gain?” Nothing. “Was this deliberate?” Not on the part of ping. “What does this say about China?” That they are a joke of a country.
Look at mike baker on joe rogan. That’s how the CIA answered the rogan question, what are we going to do about this pesky guy who has a larger audience than cnn but isn’t a slimy media executive who would be receptive to our requests to shape the narrative around certain topics? They send in mike baker who handily fools rogan into thinking he’s just a good dude who used to be a spook. And they chit chat and once in a while, when the conversation turns to something geopolitical, mike sprinkles in some CIA narrative. Never believe anything a spook says.
The CIA and FBI are behind this thrust against disinformation. Where was this disinformation frenzy at when it comes to people believing in even more wild shit like the idea that the universe keeps track of your good and bad deeds and punishes you or rewards you accordingly? Or the belief that the position of the stars and planets determines what personality your baby will have or whether or not you’ll be given a promotion? If disinformation mattered as a principle then wouldn’t these things make liberals foam at the mouth too?
It’s so ironic that the liberal camp has become the exact opposite of what it used to be. It is the vassal of the CIA and FBI.
https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1589606899569377282?s=46&...
Democracy is dying and "both sides" believe the other is the "enemy".
It's going to get bloody, folks.
