I don't think it takes much rational thought to realize that the news are incompetent at worst and intentionally misleading at best.

Even without validating beliefs, there are so many cases of news organizations publishing incorrect or misleading information in a rush to cover a story, only to then issue a silent correction weeks later when the damage has been done.

This weakens trust in two ways, first is just people who pay enough attention to notice the correction and gradually lose trust as they see how often that happens. The other is the more damaging, more common way, where someone has read the incorrect/misleading article and internalized the information only to find out much later that the information they internalized was incorrect (without ever seeing the original correction).

One example that comes to mind is regarding the supposed sudden Starlink outages in Ukraine back in October around when Musk was tweeting dumb stuff about appeasing Russia. CNN was quick to report the outage implying that it was unexpected by Ukraine and they were shutdown to blackmail the West into paying. This article was all over the news.

Then weeks later they put out an article stating that it was just 1300 terminals which were being provided by the UK which were shut-off due to the UK deciding not to pay for the subscription anymore, with Ukraine having been fully aware and having swapped them out beforehand with the other ~18000 still operating terminals. But this one got nowhere near the same traction and was still misleadingly headlined.

I've had the same experience where it seems people who "don't trust the media" get all their news from some random facebook page or a website along the lines of realtruth-nolies-chronicle.blogspot.com.

> validating their own beliefs

There can be a huge discrepancy between what your experience is and what is being reported. Most people will tend believe what they see and know.

In the US we used to feel like the news was more trustworthy even if it didn’t support our views because it maintained some pretense of neutrality and objectivity; however, that broke down as the media became increasingly politicized and sensationalized—a lot of people felt that if the media isn’t going to tell THE truth, they would find a media that would tell THEIR truth (hence your bit about “validating their own beliefs”). So we get fragmented and relative epistemology, in large part because the traditional media decided to be activist even if it meant overtly and obviously lying about things that were trivially verifiable. This is why we need to roll back to a media that aspired toward neutrality and objectivity rather than an a la carte model.

I would say its hard to do any rational thinking about come to the conclusion that the 24/h news orgs are meant to inform you.

The easy angle is product placement [1]. Literally fork over a small sum of money and you get the news org to rave about your product without doing any verification.

There's also how a headline is not written by the author so it won't always reflect the contents of the article.

> And a lot of the times is just because news are not validating their own beliefs

IMO, the news orgs have a symbiotic relation with their viewers. The viewers want their viewpoint reinforced and the news org wants views. So the news org put out a biased product so that their viewers will selectively watch that news org. However, this still means that news org aren't actually trying to inform.

My biggest gripe is how often they'll refuse to link to actual legal documents when talking about filed lawsuits and the like and in general I don't find some of their claims in the article to be as supported by the actual filings.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM

It doesn’t require coordination any more than a flock of birds requires some “master bird” to tell it which way to turn. When all your friends are journalists, and all your Twitter friends are journalists, and you have to think about what your journalist friends will think about what you’ve written if you want to stay gainfully employed, or when you’re looking for a job in a few years, no dictatorial Illuminati is required.

That’s the old Chomsky quote from Manufacturing Consent: "[the mass communication media of the U.S.] are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion".

There is no need for a conspiracy for the media to be misleading.

I feel like newsrooms mislead, but more of in a Manufacturing Consent/Hate Inc sense. It feels obvious after reading articles about stuff I know about, and has lead me over time to generally not trust the media as an institution. Organized conspiracies make no sense, but perverse institutional incentives at scale has a lot of explaining power.

It doesn't have to be a conspiracy, its just natural for big news corporations to promote news that benefits big news corporations, and to stay quiet about the news that doesn't benefit them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Conspire, no, but the emergent behavior is like stochastic terrorism; if everyone in the chain of production places their finger slightly on the same side of the scale, you can very easily end up with a very misleading result. You can produce misleading news by who you don't cover as much as who you do.

A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.

You give them too much credit, I am afraid.

I was in 2 tv interviews so far and both of them have released footage that totally and entirelly distorted the message to an infuriating degree. This was in a top tier European country, once state tv , once a major private station.

Do not trust them blindly is all I can say.

Complete red herring. The question as asked does not require a conspiracy. It doesn't even require all news organizations to be pulling in the same direction.

This line assumes that each person exists in the world as an ideal individual, subject only to their own independent logic, biases, and whims. In reality, we all have concrete material interests which are determined by concrete economic relations. Our logic, biases, and whims—the very nature of our consciousness—all flow from our material and social reality.

These material interests are not entirely individual and distinct; they fall within broad strata based on the overall structure of the economy (e.g., the class of people with the capacity to own a major media organization and the class of people who make a living by serving them). Thus, there is no need for a conscious conspiracy coordinating every aspect of the media machine since the basic character of the consciousness of those involved flows from a more fundamental material reality. At the same time, there’s no reason one can’t become consciously aware of the stratum of shared material interests that one exists within, and I think it would be foolish to assume that the people at the highest levels of power and wealth in the world have failed to do so.

Oh, I agree it's all (or at least mostly) emergent behavior. I also believe that a lot of reporters are misleading me, either because they have their own agenda (which often but not always lines up with the overall bias of the organization they work for) or because they're just overworked and it's easier to parrot someone's simplified narrative then do the real research.

Google "manufacturing consent." Chomsky's entire point is that it is emergent behavior from a system with certain incentives.

Not directly related, but I've come to really appreciate the idea that a drug cartel is the ultimate example of a conspiracy, because not does it fit the definition really well, but it demonstrates what one actually looks like. There's no shadowy boardroom of hooded figures meeting in some underground bunker, but rather playboys loudly broadcasting their wealth & power with only the barest minimum of deniability maintained at the legal perspective, with the general populace fully aware but powerless to really do anything about it. And yet, it still is a multi-national network of coordinated logistics and execution for multiple tons of product that both the official powers & general public would really prefer to not to be there.

The scary part is that they don't conspire to mislead. They actually believe their own bullshit. It's enforced ideological conformity in hiring and groupthink. If they were organized Machiavellian propagandists, I could at least respect the skills.

Sure, it's emergent behaviour, and it emerges from having an intuitive feel for how to avoid upsetting the wrong people. If you lack finely tuned antennas on such matters, you don't get ahead.

Most of all, you understand the risk of breaking rank. If you look at a story, and think "hey, why aren't others covering this story? Why aren't more people upset at this? Shouldn't this be a big deal?", you either learn to think "No. Everything is all right in the media world." or you have a bad, bad time.

Articles like this probably don't help https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

> I’ve worked in a newsroom.

So have I

> The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity

It’s not controlling, but there is little doubt that reporter’s and politicians partipate in quid pro quo

It doesn't require central coordination, a distributed norm enforcement network causing self-censorship is fine. In this case, it's done by Twitter: all journalists are on Twitter, all journalists are petrified of saying something that will upset the other journalists on Twitter, and so they all self-censor to not do that. No master plan needed.

> Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.

But they are not well co-ordinated or executed, that is the reason many people are catching on to the manufactured narratives.

This isn't done by some Matrix-type entity or does it need to be run by something as perfect as an AGI. All it takes is to have the top editors deciding which stories to run and with what narrative. Of course this break down as the rank and file journalist are the ones in charge of writing the stories and presenting them.

And the people at the top of this aren't by any matter a cohesive group or a big brother type entity rather just people with money and power doing what they think will help them keep money and power.

I think the main argument here is not that they're conspiring to mislead. It's that they wouldn't be mainstream media if they weren't willing to publish propaganda.

There’s misleading snd there’s misleading. I’ve never worked in a newsroom. However it seem natural to me that changed incentivises (i.e. clicks / engagement) would change how content is written.

I’m fairly distrusting in even my preferred primary news source, not because I suspect that there’s some grand conspiracy, but because the system under which modern journalists (seem to) operate encourages very subtly but very consistently stretching the truth. The KPIs are the puppet master.

America believes in in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities because they've done those themselves multiple times. - nuclear bombs - the man on the moon - darpa's internet

Superhuman coordination and execution abilities along with extreme secrecy as needed.

That same line of reasoning was used to dismiss the Tuskegee experiments, MKULTRA and a host of other things that later turned out to be true.

The most reliable major news source in my view (and no, we're not on cable, cordcutters for years now), is Fox News.

> There is no master plan

This.

I have problem organizing 2 intelligent people to place dirty laundry in the laundry box or to do their homework on time or to place dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

But there's a mastermind somewhere who can organize something so complex, with so many variables where each depends on a human being of varying intellect and skillset and the plan is so intricate that out of 100,000 possibilities - all of them play in the hand of the mastermind. And the plan includes the two from above, who can barely get a cup of water when they're thirsty!

If such mastermind existed, I wouldn't even be angry for being manipulated - in fact, I would like to continue to be manipulated because if such a person (or group) existed - please, continue! Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.

That's why I only get my news from 4chan and Tumblr I figure then I'll get coverage of every possible issue from every possible side.

I believe Fox has the biggest viewership, and are in a huge lawsuit right now about how much they misled people about the last presidential election. Is that who you meant?

The field you're griping doesn't exist does in fact exist and exists as watchdog journalism and media studies:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchdog_Journalism>

Organisations and institutions include:

- On the Media, WNYC Studios -- center-left: <https://onthemedia.org>

- Poynter Institute <https://www.poynter.org/>

- Columbia Journalism Review <https://www.cjr.org/>

- FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) -- left/progressive: <https://fair.org/>

- Center for Media and Democracy -- conservative: <https://www.exposedbycmd.org/>

Amongst many others.

You'll also find journalism beats at various outlets, though those tend to focus more strongly on business side (often dismal for old-school print).

And I'll add that in being large multi-billion dollar publicly traded businesses, they are mostly driven by profit motive and not political motives.

I said it farther down but I'll say it again. What possible justification could there have been for 2 weeks of continuous news coverage on covefe?