I formerly worked as a news editor at a metro daily newspaper, and before that I worked at various other news outlets and magazines.
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 values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness
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.
Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization.
Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.
> - 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.
On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal).
Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative:
> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
I think your response represent a common trap that people fall into, where we treat "the media" as if it's one entity, whereas in fact it's many distinct entities with very different attributes.
When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.
The OP's point is a subtler one, which seeks to explore _why_ journalists do what they do in the first place. Sure, it's charitable: they are undoubtedly some who seek to go "straight to the top" by aping whatever bias their editors favor etc. But there's far more news out there to report than just the clickbaity subjects you seem to favor -- Russiagate, Bill Gates, COVID, climate change -- and the folks doing it deserve credit.
The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level.
Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.
People need better media literacy, but that's still a type of "victim blaming" and there's a reason why in law we tend to go after producers more than consumers of a thing, due to effects of scale.
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.
The issue whenever we discuss punishing journalists/news organizations for "not telling the truth" is that "the truth" is often hard to identify. We also have a classic "who watches the watchmen?" problem, where we have to decide who gets determine the "real" truth. That can get real dicey really quickly. I find the lesser of two evils is to lean towards "well they can publish what they want, by and large" (obviously we have libel and slander laws and such).
I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?
Much of the nihilistic cynicism towards news media is specifically because of half-baked media literacy. No media literacy means you blindly trust the consensus reality; fully-baked literacy recognizes that while all publications have some spin, some are more accurate than others AND that finding the common elements of stories with opposite spin is a decently reliable method to find truth; half-baked literacy says "they're all lying to me, so I'll pick the one I like most."
None of the reasons you mention cover what I observe every day in news (tv and printed) from all sides: stories not fitting the narrative being sinkholed, hit pieces on political opponents, puff pieces on friendly political figures, half of the truth always being presented (never both sides of an argument). The ideological bias is obvious and I don't believe this is honest journalists being coerced into this behaviour. In fact things like the various NYT drama spread over twitter when someone writes anything that deviates from the dogma shows this seems to be coming from the newsroom, not the editors or advertisers.
Journalists are welcome to burn their own reputation, it is theirs. But don't blame others.
The OP's bullet points are a real "softball" picture of the dynamics of the press and journalism (though the press is not necessarily more corrupt than a lot of institutions, it just claims more).
Notably, the OP doesn't mention "cultivating sources" in their bullet points and that's a big source of corruption of individual journalists.
In more detail: one of the most valuable thing a given political reporter on either a local or national level can get is "scoop", the opportunity to break a story first. The valuable source of scoops is ... the very people in power at whatever level the reporter is operating on. So a reporter wants to have these powerful people like them. And that effort to be liked can easily result in the reporter spinning a story to the liking of these people.
This dynamic is discussed fairly often in analyses of the press I think.
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.
A Gallup analysis published in March 2020 looked at data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, 2014, and 2017. It found that 130 million adults in the country have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab.
Is there a good list of resources for media literacy you could recommend? I had been thinking of tackling this problem and am curious on journalist's take.
This is exactly what it looks like to me as a layman—that editors/publishers are the real problem. They choose what stories to run and the edits to those stories, but also choose what type of journalists to hire and fire, which helps guide toward a certain narrative or bias. The latter point is basically what Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent if I recall.
> there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued
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.
> But what America really needs is more media literacy
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.
The question is, which change would be more practical and more realistic. Is there any plausible world where media literacy wouldn’t be an important skill?
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.
People should be more educated, but blaming misinformation on uninformed people is like blaming climate change on consumers for driving and not recycling. Why doesn't 'real' news get more views and better advertising money? Wouldn't a trustworthy brand be more valuable for advertizers? Why don't more media orgs have independent funding? Are there any reporter / user owned media?
I wouldn't say misinformation is caused by 'uninformed people,' it's just that people tend to click on garbage. It's a slide into tabloid-ness as media focuses on their marketing ROI.
> 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
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.
I mean, that's the whole argument of Chomsky's manufacturing consent. It's not that there are people at the top dictating what does and does not get published, rather that there is a system of incentives in mainstream news outlets that discourage dissent from mainstream politically favorable opinions. Sure, as an up and coming New York Times reporter, you can stick to your guns and want to report on controversial issues, but if it's really controversial and against the consensus of most of your liberal colleagues, then you might just not be up for that promotion.
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?
Did you work during the Trump era? Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth.
That’s when things went from bad to worse and I abandoned the mainstream media entirely.
I was not a fan of trump, at all, but even I noticed this. If trump scratched his butt in public, figuratively speaking, the media jumped on him for it, and would then decline to cover any story about whether butt scratching (figuratively speaking) was ever appropriate. The media also cast his supporters in an incredibly dark light, which was worrying because that was roughly half of voters who voted for a major candidate. Media coverage was hysterical at times (at other times, their concerns seemed appropriate and valuable).
> Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth.
For that to be harmful, it doesn't even have to be all journalists, just enough of them that people come across that bias often enough to be familiar with it.
I'm certain that many journalists value the truth and fairness over party, but I'm also certain that too many journalists put party/ideology over truth and fairness (in many areas), and the news organizations have become more tolerant of bias.
There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for decades, and how exactly this works. With a mountain of examples. So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through."
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.
Saying this is a "spin" seems like an attempt to undermine the comment.
> Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind of wooden interpretation of words and lazy disqualification is what leads someone to the "black and white" spin you're accusing the GP of. This falls in line with the type of _gotcha_ logic that insists: "Well you said x, and x means X regardless of rhetorical device usage." and "OP has expressed sentiment in Y, which leads me to believe he's actually Y and therefore not $CREDIBLE".
The point is, engaging like this deprives the dialogue of nuance, rhetorical freedom and grace. If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
They're lying though, that's the problem. Not 100% lying, but ignoring facts that contradict the narrative they have ongoing with their readership (so they don't look like they were wrong), and picking out those that contribute to their fantasy.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've just seen first hand (1) the real information on the battlefield (2) the public affair office's briefing to medias, which is factual although omits sensitive things and (3) the media's subsequent reporting which largely ignores what the PAO said and goes on with their made up interpretation. It's frankly sickening. They're writing fantasy.
I think there are two interlocking arguments: first, a historical argument: news organizations substanitally misleading the public is basically normal, in most countries and time periods. Second, the structural argument: why exactly should we think that a news organization should be capable of providing the basic facts?
If you consider the decades of scolarship it takes to clarify extremely well doccumented events, like the outbreak of the first world war, it's clear that even with a mountain of evidence, and all the time in the world, the 'basic facts' can be stubornly elusive even with the best of intentions.
The idea that an accurate picture should be able to emerge before 9-o'clock, in a newsroom, in a haze of conflicting reports, seems pretty incredible to me: and historically, that's not what has happened. So 'accurate news' is neither something we should expect, nor something we have a great deal of evidence of.
This comment is well intended, I'm sure. I always respect anyone trying to 'stick to the facts.' Unfortunately, it's just not history. Easy to google history. You are simply not familiar with how this all works.
The most valuable asset of a new organization is trust, and thus they are often bought as propaganda platforms.
But propaganda is tricky, you need people to keep paying attention which means the most overt spin is to be avoided. Done well you shift the narrative over decades not just swap positions on day one. Fox News is the most well known US example, but you don’t want to just preach to people who already believe your message.
Thus you want to control the widest possible selection of media.
Do you watch professional wrestling by any chance? They are in essence the same business model. Most people know both are largely fake, but some people actually believe. It’s the entertainment industry. Capital influences everything.
> there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
No, not for propaganda. If you want people to have a certain perception and position on a topic, selective reporting of topics and the presentation of them is far more relevant. This certainly does qualify as misleading.
Lies are even more ineffective since they often can be directly disproved, which biases people to believe the opposite. You want to present your spin in a certain blur.
Many prominent sociologist pretty much explain the mechanisms media and advertisers employ in detail. To say this is a fringe position is misleading too.
Yep. This is a cynical counsel of despair. "Don't try filtering truth from lies. Everyone does it. Just lie back and think of England."
There is a difference between withholding information, selective emphasis, and outright lies. They are all bad, but they are equally bad. If you want to make things better you attempt to differentiate better from worse actors.
TLDR; all media, and all people, are biased, but they are not all equally biased. This bias can produce false beliefs. If you think false beliefs are a bad thing you promote the better actors and condemn the worse.
I was living in the US but spending considerable time in Europe in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.
Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.
At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.
It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)
> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.
Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.
"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."
This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
> but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy.
Isn’t… isn’t that a pretty black and white spin on the idea of sociology? Do you have any studies to share that indicate “politically colored armchair philosophy”?
A curated set of facts or as you call it “incomplete, but not counter-factual” is not the truth. All facts are the truth and that’s what non opinion news should be reporting.
"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"
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.
Audience capture is probably the biggest driving point behind media bias, whether the media is commercial or independent. Walter Lippmann put it wall 100 years ago [1]:
> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
> 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.
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.
> Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation.
That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore.
The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.
> But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
I don't really believe that non profit news is any more objective if that is what you mean by independent. They are beholden to their donors who can afford it. This will often be large foundations set up by corporations and extremely rich people. There is even a tax incentive that a corporation or foundation/trust can use to get a tax break while ensuring that the non-profit publishes things that align with their own opinions. I actually think the "charity" sector that operates in journalism and politics is extremely corrupt and serves no public interest.
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.
Independent does not mean objective. Independent journalists are generally not dependent on corporations, states, or publishing organizations to fund their reporting. Independence is a gradient rather than black or white. If he does publish something through a MSM outlet, he is generally paid for the piece published. Substack is one of many examples where funding is direct from readers or patrons. Good independent journalists are transparent about their biases since everybody has them.
There are plenty of for profit podcasters & writers out there that make money and honest living with small paypal subscriptions (before patreon was even a thing), plus small one-time donors and the like.
Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1.
They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources.
So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.
Maybe some non profit news organizations are objective?
I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA.
Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.
Thanks for this. Nice to see it at the top of the conversation. Two words: Operation Mockingbird. The big news outlets get daily intelligence briefs. This isn't even controversial. But the real problem within that setting is self-censorship. You don't get the job unless you've proven than you know what not to say. Many credible books on that topic to read.
> There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for __millennia__, and how exactly this works.
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.
Saying "this has always happened" loses what's interesting and relevant about the mass media tranformations that began around the early 20th century and now dominant our media culture (see Manufacturing Consent).
I think it's interesting that this is a highly upvoted comment considering it leans on sociology as an academic study as a source of truth for its claim. The social sciences have long been harangued by HN for not being "real science", but I've seen exceptionally little pushback to the claim above. Why is this?
[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.]
> 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.
HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either.
The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.
At least to me, it seems people push back on sociology claims that focus on individuals or member groups, not so much on organizations like companies. Part of this I believe is due to the personal nature. Part is because it can be seen as stereotyping, or has poor study design.
This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.
Once people acept media bias the next jump they make that this is a partisan issue. It's easy to understand why, particularly now when there are major news outlets who deliberately lie.
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.
> I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence
Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.
> So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through."
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:
> 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.
> 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.
There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study.
> 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.
Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this.
> 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
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.
The culture war is also a media project of the powerful and journalists who are dedicated to fighting it are serving their interests as much as anyone is. He'll be fine.
There is no payoff, except for the duty of the profession.
This is unfortunately the one thing that society seems to be lacking dramatically these days. From policemen that don't rush in to rescue children in danger of being murdered by psychos, to administrators that feel that doctors should get time off to "reflect" on X person getting killed by a cop (cancer doesn't take days off... grandma's back pain doesn't take the day off). Duty is severely lacking across all layers of society.
The tone from the top seems to be encouraging this. Now, "its ok to be soft" instead of "power through, people depend on you"
We need more Taibbis and Intercepts, willing to do their duty.
Taibbi is making a great living by being a reactionary on podcasts and fringe outlets. Journalists are suckers. He hasn't done "journalism" in forever. Editorialism is where it's at.
"Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"
How most of the mainstream media, in the US at least, nauseatingly wrote about the WMD theory which was the main stated reason for the US to go to 2003 Iraq war. That region is still reeling with consequences of that war and not to speak about trillions of $$ spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and nuclear contamination and so on and on.
Whoa now, remember we’re not just talking a mountain of examples, but “literal” mountains of sociological studies. You should try asking for longitude, latitude and elevation!
> it took a few years or decades to be come publicized 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?
In news there's journalism and there's reporting. This story is reporting, it doesn't use many adjectives and doesn't have much of a point beyond the statistics represented. It allows people to form their own opinions based on their own experiences around the details of this story.
Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.
Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"
Ah, yes. I remember getting the annual morning news paper every April 1st.
Seriously though, within a city, they had morning and evening editions (12 hour lag) hundreds of years ago. For national stories, the lag was more like a week, then dropped to 12 hours when the telegraph was invented. Also, back then, there were orders of magnitude more newspapers (multiple in each big city, and at least one in small towns), so most modern censorship techniques simply would not work. Yeah, Elon Musk would have owned a paper, but (by law) only one, and multiple other wealthy tech people would own papers in the same market.
The problem is that the popular, "scandalized" understanding of "the media lie!!" doesn't have the nuance of sociological and political theories.
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).
That’s just cynical blah blah that ignores the pretty obvious cause.
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.
> Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment.
One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.
The issue, to me at least, is what people are choosing to trust/believe instead. I find they're not being critical and looking at multiple sources, they're just instead putting their faith in other untrustworthy groups (see: Alex Jones).
Objectivity is easy to access if you're not totally censored. Propaganda works by concealing alternative opinions - once you know the trick, it's easy to hack, even a weak effort can work.
Sounds weird, but one of the easiest paths to objectivity is not to seek objective sources. One can look at multiple sources with obvious opposing spins to form your own understanding. Even the sources labeled as most objective tend to miss the nuance behind the main few arguments.
We've just gotten to the point where views are not cross pollinated. Local news is not really local are much as it's controlled by a couple of companies with their own agenda so the same view is presented over and over and over again. In addition they've convinced the populace that the other side is evil so people have become tribal and only watch "their news" and that just feeds the loop. They don't have to conceal anything, it can be right there in front of them and it won't matter because they won't believe it because their tribe tells them it's a lie.
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'.
Using this thread to yet again pound the drum of local news. I don't work in media; I've just found my local newspaper subscription to be extremely valuable.
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.
My local newspaper is owned by USAToday and their site is some kind of white-labeled USAToday wordpress template that's shared by a bunch of other formerly-independent local newspapers which are apparently now part of the USAToday portfolio.
I don't have any interest in supporting USAToday, so I will never make it past my fifth article of the week.
Gannett is the parent company; they own USA Today and dozens of local papers. I worked at a Gannett paper for a few years, at the time, we had a corporate-managed templating system but were able to make fairly significant modifications to it. That eventually transitioned to the one-size-fits-all approach you see today.
Same's happening to the physical product; mostly a thin wrapper around state/national news from Gannett corporate.
Well that's upsetting. My local paper has been owned by Advance Publications since the 40s, but it doesn't seem to suffer the same quality issues. It's even won several major awards, both for individual journalism and for the publication as a whole :)
I almost wish they would pick up a template website though, because theirs is super buggy (I'd likely get the print version anyway).
I agree with the sentiment, but local papers are dying. My hometown paper is still locally owned, but I suspect it will be bought up by Gannett or some other national outlet soon. As it is, the paper is ~90% AP Wire stories anyway.
I can remember seeing Walter Cronkite on a PBS panel discussion warning America that this would be the end result of the deregulation of media ownership.
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.
Of course the news has always been partisan. They were just honest about it in the past. Look how many newspapers have Democrat or some variation of Republican in their masthead. The real scandal is the recent fiction that journalists are unbiased.
the public interest is dead, look at the sentiment here on HN. everyone has taken red pills from either Peter Thiel, Joe Rogan, or some influencer at the listener's socio-economic level, who propagandizes them about the Individual and how you cant trust anyone but other bros who also dont trust anyone.
Edward L. Bernays published his book "Propaganda" in 1928. Even that only came after his earlier works in on a similar theme in the early 20s.
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.'"”
I am not in journalism per say however as I've spent a decade in advertising I work with media companies a lot.
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).
"Global cabal" might be a stretch, but it is a fact that there are large-scale government projects underway to deceive, mislead, and control the narrative via journalism.
I recently came across an amusing connection [1] to Bernstein's piece and its highlighting of Joseph Alsop. The author of the following is Bernard Fall, who certainly is otherwise pro-West and anti-communist, later KIA while on patrol with American troops in Vietnam.
> [...] the American press gave a completely distorted picture of what happened in Laos in the summer of 1950, with the Washington Post and the New York Times being among the worst offenders. [...]
> Press dispatches bore such news as "Viet-Minh troops advanced to within 13 miles of Samneus city" (UPI), and even the staid British agency Reuters headlined on September 3 that "the Royal Laotian Army was today preparing to defend the capital of Vientiane"; while on September 5, an editorial of the Washington Post, citing the "splendid examples of alert on-the-spot reporting" of its columnist Joseph Alsop spoke of "full-scale, artillery-backed invasion from Communist North Viet-Nam." All this was just so much nonsense. [...]
> Two weeks later, the letdown began. Even the New York Times report in Laos, who, until then, had swallowed whole every press release circulating in Vientiane, noted on September 13 that "briefings have noticeably played down the activities of North Viet-Nam in the conflict. This led some observers to believe that Laotian political tacticians were creating a background that would soften the blow if the [United Nations] observer report on intervention by North Viet-Nam was negative." Indeed, the Security Council report of November 5, 1959, did fail to substantiate the theory of a Communist outside invasion of Laos. [...]
> There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that certainly North Viet-Nam and perhaps even Red China, gave military and political support to the Laotian rebellion. But their aid was in no way as overt as originally suggested in the alarming reports spread around the world by American press media, some of which went so far in their affirmations as to accuse almost anyone who doubted their stories as being either a blind fool or "soft" on Communism. Joseph Alsop's "Open Letter" to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life (both of which refused to be stampeded by their less hard-headed colleagues) is a prime example of this attitude. [...]
> While the British and the French--whose sources of information in Laos already had proved more reliable the year before--awaited more hard facts to go on, Washington took up the cudgels in full, both officially and in the press. In a somber column, Mr. Joseph Alsop spoke of the "yawning drain" which Laos was likely to be engulfed in; compared the 1954 Geneva settlement to the Munich sell-out of 1938; and called our Canadian allies who had staunchly defended the Western viewpoint in the international cease-fire commission (the other members being India and Poland), "approximately neutral."
This was written in 1964, so over a decade before Bernstein's expose.
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.
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".
Why do you say diversity of opinion and experience are not the answer conservative folks want to hear? It strikes me as strange, given that the vast majority of media outlets in the US are left-leaning.
Optimistic news - elevated degree of skepticism of any 'produced information' is fully justified, seeing as news organisations are driven certainly by commercial agenda, and frequently also by political agenda which they are - as a rule - far from being transparent with. We need citizen and independent journalism, and better yet, trust in our own direct lived experience, to balance out of 'information diet'
My lived experience is I sit safely in my suburban home with my children, comfortably collecting a salary to argue points of planning for software development. I work from home and very rarely leave the house. I am unwilling to go down to the local protests or whatever to “see what’s up” because I’m essentially willing to accept zero risk to my person while my children are growing up.
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.
This is pretty much the end result of capitalism - the atomization of the individual and alienation of workers from one another. All interactions and interpersonal relations are now mediated through our relations to the means of production and the capital markets.
There at least used to be a remaining vestigial substructure to society in things like churches and civic organizations. As we've slowly grown into a society of unbelievers, the churches have splintered into myriad heterodox sects, and we've supplanted much civic engagement with work and internet use, this substructure is failing.
Chapo Trap House touches on this frequently, but their recent episode called Arrival (ep 706) had a pretty poignant example. It was commentary on a series of NY Post and Times articles about the supposed drastic increase in crime, and how people, especially those who live in the burbs, are starkly disconnected from the reality of the world. And specifically because of some of these factors I outlined above.
I have slowly formed a trusted circle of programmers on Discord of various political stripes that are able to keep each other somewhat in check and connected to reality WRT the happenings in the world over the past 7 years or so. It has definitely helped keep me grounded in the past few years of covid and suburbia driven isolation and a drastic increase in media consumption.
I am not weighing in on the article or any commentary with this statement…You don’t sound healthy and might want to do a little self evaluation. Never leaving the house, not trusting anyone, thinking your wife is glitching, all sound outside the norm, even if what you are observing is true. You should still be able to do basic risk analysis and leave the house.
Because, to first approximation, this is true. Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda. I'm not sure why Americans believe that objectivity in news reporting is even possible. Other countries don't seem to have as much of an issue with this, since you typically have news sources that are either owned directly by the government or are published by political parties.
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.
I don't speak Polish so I may be making unwarranted assumptions here, but "showing both sides" isn't always so great either. It's better than the opinionated state news you describe, but "both sides" doing their little talk is the exact reason climate change deniers have so much fuel.
Sometimes, something just isn't true and the other side doesn't get equal attention to defend their points. You can calmy explain how lizard people inside hollow earth run Hollywood to turn our children into gay frogs, but these people shouldn't get any air time, not even to be made fun of.
Interpreting "objective" to mean "fairly representing both sides" is a large part of what got american media so fucked in the first place.
If one side says cook at home as much as possible for your family to be healthy, and the other side says go down to the ditch and drink the pond scum, what are you doing by representing both sides there? One of the important duties of journalism is making editorial decisions that drinking pond scum isn't a balanced opposition to cooking dinner.
Journalist practice for decades has been going incredibly far out of its way to find an alternative "side" for any perspective that's presented. They then do a lot of work for them making it seem as reasonable and mainstream as possible.
This is exactly how you get fringe reactionary political views elevated to the level of national concern.
I like google news because I can see both right and left takes on stories, and which stories are only covered by one side. It also has international coverage, which is nice for instance where Israeli media had by far the most accurate reporting on the nature of Covid-19.
I use media to find out what America believes, and where it is headed. Your list of sources is going to leave you surprised fairly often. My goal is to not be surprised.
Beware "people on the ground". They are a terrible source of fact checked verifiable info.
Personal opinion is not news. It's merely one person's unfiltered view of the world. And because it's uncurated by a trustworthy filter, it's impossible to know whether it's worth your attention, much less serious consideration.
Where two liars are speaking, you cannot split the difference and synthesize truth. I also like to check with various sources with differing agendas. However, I view this as a way to stay abreast of the the various agendas.
This is still very much an issue in many countries with government owned "nonprofit" media. Even in countries with low amount of corruption and high freedom of press.
>> Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda
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.)
> 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.
Because... Editors couldn't possibly have motives that similarly contain bias, corruption, out other such common frailties of the human condition?
These kind of broad questions about "the media" seem to be almost useless. It's like asking a Philadelphia Eagles fans if they have a positive opinion of most football teams.
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.
Just because it's impossible to be 100% objective all the time doesn't mean it's impossible to be somewhat objective with the goal of being as objective as possible. The alternative is just go full ideological, and then you no longer care about the truth, only pushing a narrative to confirm the biases of your paying customers. Or sensationalist just to drive clicks and views.
Nobody believes in perfectly objectively reporting.
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).
I don't think those conspiracies are what are driving this kind of distrust. In my experience, the most common belief on that end is simply that the reporting is meant to keep people too busy bickering over meaningless issues (in the sense that the bickering itself won't accomplish anything of substance) to prevent them from actually organizing and acting against real problems which would be inconvenient for those who benefit from those problems.
Eg keeping people bickering about racial issues instead of agreeing on the aspects of policing which need reform, or from focusing on class issues.
The first approximation is: a typical journalist working at a serious news organization has some amount of bias but at the same time tries to be objective.
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.
I stopped reading CNN due to their terrible headlines, but I just went at the top headline is "Animals are reportedly dying after toxic train wreck. What it means". Well CNN has reporters, why is there hearsay in the title? Could you just look through some records or conduct a quick survey to figure out the truth of those reports.
> My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't.
I don't put those 2 channels in different categories at all. And certainly they don't divide from each other along lines of objectivity. They are both in the News Entertainment industry. Neither cares in the least about objectivity.
The only split I see between them is their mutually exclusive audiences.
Fox News is actually in a better place because they don't seem to be hiding the fact that they are there for entertainment and audience-building. They both care about their ratings first and foremost, but CNN is still trying to keep some veneer of serious journalism.
As a test: I haven't watched it recently, but how has CNN mea culpa'd over the news that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? A "serious news organization" should have had a real period of soul-searching over that. I bet it was barely a blip on their radar.
Readit News
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.
Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization.
Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.
On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal).
Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative:
> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.
The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level.
Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.
> the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.
Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not if they are not specialized science reporters.
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.
I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?
Journalists are welcome to burn their own reputation, it is theirs. But don't blame others.
Notably, the OP doesn't mention "cultivating sources" in their bullet points and that's a big source of corruption of individual journalists.
In more detail: one of the most valuable thing a given political reporter on either a local or national level can get is "scoop", the opportunity to break a story first. The valuable source of scoops is ... the very people in power at whatever level the reporter is operating on. So a reporter wants to have these powerful people like them. And that effort to be liked can easily result in the reporter spinning a story to the liking of these people.
This dynamic is discussed fairly often in analyses of the press I think.
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.
Just try for basic literacy first.
https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...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.
For that to be harmful, it doesn't even have to be all journalists, just enough of them that people come across that bias often enough to be familiar with it.
I'm certain that many journalists value the truth and fairness over party, but I'm also certain that too many journalists put party/ideology over truth and fairness (in many areas), and the news organizations have become more tolerant of bias.
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.
> Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind of wooden interpretation of words and lazy disqualification is what leads someone to the "black and white" spin you're accusing the GP of. This falls in line with the type of _gotcha_ logic that insists: "Well you said x, and x means X regardless of rhetorical device usage." and "OP has expressed sentiment in Y, which leads me to believe he's actually Y and therefore not $CREDIBLE".
The point is, engaging like this deprives the dialogue of nuance, rhetorical freedom and grace. If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've just seen first hand (1) the real information on the battlefield (2) the public affair office's briefing to medias, which is factual although omits sensitive things and (3) the media's subsequent reporting which largely ignores what the PAO said and goes on with their made up interpretation. It's frankly sickening. They're writing fantasy.
If you consider the decades of scolarship it takes to clarify extremely well doccumented events, like the outbreak of the first world war, it's clear that even with a mountain of evidence, and all the time in the world, the 'basic facts' can be stubornly elusive even with the best of intentions.
The idea that an accurate picture should be able to emerge before 9-o'clock, in a newsroom, in a haze of conflicting reports, seems pretty incredible to me: and historically, that's not what has happened. So 'accurate news' is neither something we should expect, nor something we have a great deal of evidence of.
But propaganda is tricky, you need people to keep paying attention which means the most overt spin is to be avoided. Done well you shift the narrative over decades not just swap positions on day one. Fox News is the most well known US example, but you don’t want to just preach to people who already believe your message.
Thus you want to control the widest possible selection of media.
No, not for propaganda. If you want people to have a certain perception and position on a topic, selective reporting of topics and the presentation of them is far more relevant. This certainly does qualify as misleading.
Lies are even more ineffective since they often can be directly disproved, which biases people to believe the opposite. You want to present your spin in a certain blur.
Many prominent sociologist pretty much explain the mechanisms media and advertisers employ in detail. To say this is a fringe position is misleading too.
There is a difference between withholding information, selective emphasis, and outright lies. They are all bad, but they are equally bad. If you want to make things better you attempt to differentiate better from worse actors.
TLDR; all media, and all people, are biased, but they are not all equally biased. This bias can produce false beliefs. If you think false beliefs are a bad thing you promote the better actors and condemn the worse.
Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.
Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.
At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.
It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)
> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.
Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.
"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."
This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
Deleted Comment
Isn’t… isn’t that a pretty black and white spin on the idea of sociology? Do you have any studies to share that indicate “politically colored armchair philosophy”?
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.
> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
[1] Public Opinion, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html
It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...
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.
That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore.
The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.
> But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
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.
Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1.
They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources.
So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.
I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA.
Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.
> Many credible books on that topic to read.
Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!
What is your evidence such a system exists today?
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.]
HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either.
The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.
This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.
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.
There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study.
> 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.
Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this.
[1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/d...
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.
You are correct. Its a hardscrabble life.
There is no payoff, except for the duty of the profession.
This is unfortunately the one thing that society seems to be lacking dramatically these days. From policemen that don't rush in to rescue children in danger of being murdered by psychos, to administrators that feel that doctors should get time off to "reflect" on X person getting killed by a cop (cancer doesn't take days off... grandma's back pain doesn't take the day off). Duty is severely lacking across all layers of society.
The tone from the top seems to be encouraging this. Now, "its ok to be soft" instead of "power through, people depend on you"
We need more Taibbis and Intercepts, willing to do their duty.
It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.
"Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"
It's not one uniform block, it's thousands of people with different intensions and knowledge.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ
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?
Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.
Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"
Seriously though, within a city, they had morning and evening editions (12 hour lag) hundreds of years ago. For national stories, the lag was more like a week, then dropped to 12 hours when the telegraph was invented. Also, back then, there were orders of magnitude more newspapers (multiple in each big city, and at least one in small towns), so most modern censorship techniques simply would not work. Yeah, Elon Musk would have owned a paper, but (by law) only one, and multiple other wealthy tech people would own papers in the same market.
Hasn't Trump been talking about the 'fake news media' for 5+ years? And don't half of Americans lap that stuff up?
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.
One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.
Deleted Comment
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Same's happening to the physical product; mostly a thin wrapper around state/national news from Gannett corporate.
I almost wish they would pick up a template website though, because theirs is super buggy (I'd likely get the print version anyway).
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...
Stations that did run an editorial with a given partisan viewpoint were even required, by law, to allow an opposing view to be aired in response.
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...
https://www.quora.com/Did-CIA-Director-William-Casey-really-...
> [...] the American press gave a completely distorted picture of what happened in Laos in the summer of 1950, with the Washington Post and the New York Times being among the worst offenders. [...]
> Press dispatches bore such news as "Viet-Minh troops advanced to within 13 miles of Samneus city" (UPI), and even the staid British agency Reuters headlined on September 3 that "the Royal Laotian Army was today preparing to defend the capital of Vientiane"; while on September 5, an editorial of the Washington Post, citing the "splendid examples of alert on-the-spot reporting" of its columnist Joseph Alsop spoke of "full-scale, artillery-backed invasion from Communist North Viet-Nam." All this was just so much nonsense. [...]
> Two weeks later, the letdown began. Even the New York Times report in Laos, who, until then, had swallowed whole every press release circulating in Vientiane, noted on September 13 that "briefings have noticeably played down the activities of North Viet-Nam in the conflict. This led some observers to believe that Laotian political tacticians were creating a background that would soften the blow if the [United Nations] observer report on intervention by North Viet-Nam was negative." Indeed, the Security Council report of November 5, 1959, did fail to substantiate the theory of a Communist outside invasion of Laos. [...]
> There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that certainly North Viet-Nam and perhaps even Red China, gave military and political support to the Laotian rebellion. But their aid was in no way as overt as originally suggested in the alarming reports spread around the world by American press media, some of which went so far in their affirmations as to accuse almost anyone who doubted their stories as being either a blind fool or "soft" on Communism. Joseph Alsop's "Open Letter" to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life (both of which refused to be stampeded by their less hard-headed colleagues) is a prime example of this attitude. [...]
> While the British and the French--whose sources of information in Laos already had proved more reliable the year before--awaited more hard facts to go on, Washington took up the cudgels in full, both officially and in the press. In a somber column, Mr. Joseph Alsop spoke of the "yawning drain" which Laos was likely to be engulfed in; compared the 1954 Geneva settlement to the Munich sell-out of 1938; and called our Canadian allies who had staunchly defended the Western viewpoint in the international cease-fire commission (the other members being India and Poland), "approximately neutral."
This was written in 1964, so over a decade before Bernstein's expose.
[1] Street Without Joy, pp. 331-337
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.
There at least used to be a remaining vestigial substructure to society in things like churches and civic organizations. As we've slowly grown into a society of unbelievers, the churches have splintered into myriad heterodox sects, and we've supplanted much civic engagement with work and internet use, this substructure is failing.
Chapo Trap House touches on this frequently, but their recent episode called Arrival (ep 706) had a pretty poignant example. It was commentary on a series of NY Post and Times articles about the supposed drastic increase in crime, and how people, especially those who live in the burbs, are starkly disconnected from the reality of the world. And specifically because of some of these factors I outlined above.
I have slowly formed a trusted circle of programmers on Discord of various political stripes that are able to keep each other somewhat in check and connected to reality WRT the happenings in the world over the past 7 years or so. It has definitely helped keep me grounded in the past few years of covid and suburbia driven isolation and a drastic increase in media consumption.
Sorry for the bluntness here.
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.
Sometimes, something just isn't true and the other side doesn't get equal attention to defend their points. You can calmy explain how lizard people inside hollow earth run Hollywood to turn our children into gay frogs, but these people shouldn't get any air time, not even to be made fun of.
If one side says cook at home as much as possible for your family to be healthy, and the other side says go down to the ditch and drink the pond scum, what are you doing by representing both sides there? One of the important duties of journalism is making editorial decisions that drinking pond scum isn't a balanced opposition to cooking dinner.
Journalist practice for decades has been going incredibly far out of its way to find an alternative "side" for any perspective that's presented. They then do a lot of work for them making it seem as reasonable and mainstream as possible.
This is exactly how you get fringe reactionary political views elevated to the level of national concern.
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.
I use media to find out what America believes, and where it is headed. Your list of sources is going to leave you surprised fairly often. My goal is to not be surprised.
Personal opinion is not news. It's merely one person's unfiltered view of the world. And because it's uncurated by a trustworthy filter, it's impossible to know whether it's worth your attention, much less serious consideration.
Dead Comment
But it shall not be confused with journalism.
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.)
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2021/07/26/l-a-times-needs-to-st...
and usually these days when you find an LA city councilmember with an FBI indictment for corruption, they had an LA times editorial board endorsement.
Because... Editors couldn't possibly have motives that similarly contain bias, corruption, out other such common frailties of the human condition?
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).
Eg keeping people bickering about racial issues instead of agreeing on the aspects of policing which need reform, or from focusing on class issues.
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.
I don't put those 2 channels in different categories at all. And certainly they don't divide from each other along lines of objectivity. They are both in the News Entertainment industry. Neither cares in the least about objectivity.
The only split I see between them is their mutually exclusive audiences.
Fox News is actually in a better place because they don't seem to be hiding the fact that they are there for entertainment and audience-building. They both care about their ratings first and foremost, but CNN is still trying to keep some veneer of serious journalism.
As a test: I haven't watched it recently, but how has CNN mea culpa'd over the news that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? A "serious news organization" should have had a real period of soul-searching over that. I bet it was barely a blip on their radar.