[HN Gopher] Half of Americans now believe that news organization...
___________________________________________________________________
Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately
mislead them
Author : jwond
Score : 532 points
Date : 2023-02-16 13:35 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| HybridCurve wrote:
| This is a known problem with cable news, relevant info from the
| FCC: https://www.fcc.gov/broadcast-news-distortion
|
| Spreading disinformation from politically aligned media sources
| is a fundamental authoritarian strategy. Politicized news is used
| to generate outrage which excites the electorate into
| participating in elections.
|
| There was a good episode of Freakonomics on NPR concerning
| negative bias in the media and why people respond to it.
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-u-s-media-so-negativ...
|
| You can't fix negativity, but you can better regulate media to be
| accountable without infringing on free speech. There has been a
| very sharp downturn in factual quality and impartiality of
| information provided by news organizations over the past two
| decades in the US and we are overdue for a course correction.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Well, you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that
| pretty much all of American MSM is _highly_ partisan, some worse
| than others.
|
| I grew up in the UK and 70s-80s BBC seemed a lot more neutral,
| but of course every news organization has their own implicit
| world view, relative to which they report the news. There is no
| such thing as an unbiased news source, although there are those
| that try to brainwash you and those that at least _try_ to keep
| it factual.
| pookha wrote:
| In America it's not just partisan it's state sponsored. The
| American media has a history of being covert propagandists.
| George Edward Creel was the OG master at slipping in narratives
| to publications. Creel never used straight-out propaganda like
| the BBC would have and preferred that "news media" (on all
| sides of the spectrum) inject state-sponsored innuendo. That's
| always been how we manufacture consent in the US. At one point
| Creel had 80K on his payroll and to the best of my knowledge
| it's never properly been explained how his WWI organization was
| re-orged.
| Aperocky wrote:
| I've always thought about having one news agency/aggregator
| that are strictly _opinions verboten_ , i.e. just report the
| fact and nothing else, use as little adjective or subjective
| wording as possible.
|
| Something happened here at date involving these people. Done.
| No opinion, no analysis, no conjectures or sarcasm, no calling
| people with words that either accurately describe them or
| inaccurately, only official titles and names.
|
| It might just be possible when the rest of the field have
| clearly departed from objectivity, competition seems low
| enough.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >just report the fact and nothing else, use as little
| adjective or subjective wording as possible
|
| Wouldn't work. There are too many facts and it is possible to
| build a narrative just by choosing which facts to show or not
| show.
|
| Easy example, pick some demographic. Now report just the
| facts about all violent crime that demographic is involved
| in. Add in the most news worthy violent crimes of other
| demographics (the ones other news channels are carrying) to
| help create the image of impartial coverage, but always
| ensure an abundance of violent crime reports from the
| targeted demographic.
|
| Thanks to the size of the total US population, you'll always
| have a new story to cover even without having to add in any
| opinion. The US, with 300,000,000+ people, will have a few
| new leads every single day. The disproportionate coverage,
| even while sticking to just facts, will be feeding a false
| narrative just as much as any opinionated coverage would.
| [deleted]
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| CSPAN exists. People aren't interested in just the facts.
| aww_dang wrote:
| There's not enough filler and it isn't spicy enough to get
| clicks. The entire news cycle would condense down to about an
| hour or less.
| [deleted]
| ivraatiems wrote:
| We have them - they're called Reuters, AP, and CSPAN. They're
| not perfect but they're there and they have been for a long
| time.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Note: I'm not trying to engage in political axe-grinding
| here. I found the below example after about ~30 seconds of
| looking.
|
| These organizations are fact-forward, but far from
| unbiased. It's impossible to read an article like this
| one[0], for example, without a clear understanding of which
| side of the argument the author is rooting for.
|
| That article is pretty deceptive, actually. Like, how could
| they bring themselves to include this line:
|
| > "The idea that we have a social contagion encouraging
| people to be trans in a climate that is this hostile to
| trans people in so unbelievably offensive," said Chase
| Strangio, an ACLU lawyer who has litigated against the
| Arkansas and Alabama laws.
|
| ...without mentioning that the number of trans kids has, in
| fact, been rising rapidly?![1]
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-republicans-target-
| trans... [1]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/transgender-
| teena...
| fullshark wrote:
| Won't work, the issue isn't so much a news organization
| writes "you should think X about this problem" it's more how
| they frame information, what information they leave out, and
| what information they choose to amplify in order to make a
| certain point, to the point of misleading in many cases.
|
| There's certain words that have subjective connotation which
| they also use, and it's near impossible to write anything
| coherent for an audience if you decide any words with
| subjective connotation are forbidden.
| becquerel wrote:
| Even stories reported with utmost objectivity fall prey to
| the fact that somebody has to choose _which stories get
| reported in the first place_.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Perfect cannot be the enemy of good, it's the direction
| that we want something to happen, doesn't mean it must be
| perfect, or even need to be perfect eventually.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Differing definitions of "mislead" are going to make these
| comments useless.
|
| > Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe
| national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or
| _persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view_ through
| their reporting.
|
| The headline defines "mislead" as including "leading via truthful
| reporting" aka "present opinion".
| pessimizer wrote:
| That is a pretty garbage question phrasing. The idea that
| journalism shouldn't persuade is a bizarre affectation meant to
| make journalists appear as special professional class, like
| doctors. When your kid tells you what happened at school,
| they're a journalist.
| yboris wrote:
| Obligatory: _Media Bias Chart_
|
| https://adfontesmedia.com/
|
| Arguably the best place to help you pick better media outlets.
| quacked wrote:
| I never watch or read any news, I'm just sick of them reporting
| on things that have full unedited videos without posting the full
| unedited video. One example is the Floyd case. The full bodycam
| video was available for almost half of a year before it was
| pushed in the media during the trial. My extended family
| exclusively saw it through the professional news filter, which
| means that those who watch bluer news organizations came to the
| conclusion that he was murdered, and those who watch redder news
| organizations came to the conclusion that he overdosed. I'm not
| saying that everyone should "draw their own conclusions" or "do
| their own research" whenever there's a new video, but it helps to
| keep a clearer head when you've seen the evidence and are now
| waiting for expert analysis, rather than seeing the evidence
| pushed by a relatable authority figure who's already been
| instructed to be in a certain mood and is only showing short
| clips at a time.
|
| I sometimes daydream about a "grey news" organization. No hosts,
| just text articles with confidence intervals next to claims, all
| sources listed, no editorials, and all interviews and videos
| reported on have full transcripts next to the full unedited
| video.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| 'grey news' not a bad idea but can still be manipulated by
| editorial.
|
| Org A is the one you want to promote. Only show clips that make
| org A look good. Org B is the one you want to demote. Only show
| clips that make org B look bad. If org A does something bad pad
| it with 'org B' doing the same thing or never show it. If org B
| does something good never show it.
|
| What is shown to you, and order matters. The talking heads bits
| most orgs go for along with it just adds color to it. But it is
| the same editorial process. You only have X amount of time and
| Y amount to show X < Y. Something has to go. You can pick sides
| even with that method.
| quacked wrote:
| That's a good point.
|
| I've also thought of a structure where there's a news
| organization that's just openly biased, the prime directive
| is listed on the front page, and each news article is
| explicitly edited to explain how the article is presented to
| support the main mission of the organization. Maybe could
| link to refutations to keep the appearance of honesty.
|
| This of course falls into a funny counterfactual scenario
| that I don't have a clever term for. "In the world where this
| solution is possible to deploy, the problem doesn't exist".
| If you could staff an entire news organization that was so
| dedicated to exposing its own bias, it would mean you had a
| critical mass of adults in society that were actually
| concerned about the truth, and you could just do news the
| regular way.
| m3047 wrote:
| Early in the internet SPAWAR ran a web site named Planet Earth.
| Always the best place to get international news, first. Not
| kidding.
| adversaryIdiot wrote:
| Am I really smarter than half of my neighbors :|
| surume wrote:
| Such a shame that this is our state of affairs. If half the
| public don't trust the establishment, then how stable is that
| establishment? Last time I checked, chaos is not fun.
| cramjabsyn wrote:
| Why is it that propaganda somehow has become a new idea? Is it
| because the phrase "fake news" dumbed it down?
|
| Either way its always been a factor, and was likely worse before
| the age of information.
|
| The big problem now is there are multiple competing false
| narratives, instead of just the one in the paper.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What propaganda? Don't trust your instutions and don't trust
| the media?
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/564013066...
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| Except that the purpose of the phrase "fake news" was, in fact,
| to create propaganda itself. It is certainly not better for the
| president of the country to be the gatekeeper of truth based on
| what aligns with their political motivations. It is the very
| definition of propaganda.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| It was journos who started the "fake news" meme. I believe
| they were complaining about completely fabricated clickbait
| like "Pope endorses Trump". The journos were seemingly
| unaware that their own perceived fakeness would be much more
| salient.
| pookha wrote:
| Only half? Good lord.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Only half?
|
| That might actually be correct though. I have friends who are
| republicans who just think that MSNBC are elite-class shills; and
| democrats who just think that Fox News are elite-class shills.
| Only some people I know have reached understanding that any
| corporate news media has serious propaganda agendas.
| mentos wrote:
| Only takes me one minute and thirty six seconds to convince
| anyone I meet of this point:
|
| "This is Extremely Dangerous to our Democracy" -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
| gspencley wrote:
| This discussion was just had on Joe Rogan's podcast about a
| recent CBC article, which appeared to be deliberately trying to
| equate the word "freedom" with "something bad and scary"
| through a guilt-by-association argument.
|
| https://youtu.be/Imh5qst3gCg
| pkphilip wrote:
| Only half?!
| skymast wrote:
| When one looks objectively at media reporting and takes that
| objective viewpoint on a sliding scale backwards through various
| reports, it becomes obvious that their mission is not to report
| news, but to shape public opinion.
| SaintSeiya84 wrote:
| Maybe because is true?
| [deleted]
| ChickenNugger wrote:
| After being in a story that was reported on and being misquoted
| even if it's not deliberate they still get things wrong.
|
| Also:
|
| > _"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
| You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know
| well. In Murray 's case, physics. In mine, show business. You
| read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no
| understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the
| article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward--
| reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause
| rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with
| exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and
| then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read
| as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about
| Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and
| forget what you know."_
|
| -- Michael Crichton
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I read a book called "The Fourth Turning"(published 1996) quite
| awhile ago. It ended up predicting many of these recent events
| and generally tries to bring awareness of the eternal recurrence
| of "turnings" in one's life.
|
| > If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005,
| then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around
| 2026.
|
| > The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the
| spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely
| populated areas, killing some. Congress enacts mandatory
| quarantine measures. The president orders the National Guard to
| throw prophylactic cordons around unsafe neighborhoods. Mayors
| resist. Urban gangs battle suburban militias. Calls mount for the
| president to declare martial law.
|
| Civic virtue tends to get lost in the daily news cycles during
| the climax of a crisis, but it is frequently regained. Moral and
| cultural standards are increasing and thus the news will have to
| adapt to it as it always has. People are slowly returning to
| classic virtues.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| Correct me if I am wrong, but this is attributed to Jefferson:
|
| "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man
| who reads nothing but newspapers"
|
| Makes you wonder who remains to be trusted, the governments are
| not reliable at all times either in most parts of the world.
| tootie wrote:
| He said this (I believe) in the context of the French
| Revolution. Possibly also as a dig to Alexander Hamilton.
| Jefferson was most likely advocating for a rounded education
| that did not rely solely on topical information. He was an
| ardent supporter of free press and even considered it more
| important that functioning government.
|
| https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/jefferson-s-preference-for...
| clarge1120 wrote:
| Half seems low, but then again, I am in the 50% that believes
| news organizations deliberately mislead for biased gain.
| brookst wrote:
| Conspiracy theorists strong in this thread. Is this really a HN-
| aligned topic? The responses do not reflect well on the
| community.
| [deleted]
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| News organizations write articles and headlines to deliberately
| mislead people if it means those people will click on those
| headlines, open up an article, and engage with some ads. Is
| this so controversial that nearly half of people disagree?
|
| This doesn't come from a partisanship bias, as nearly all well
| known media outlets, large and small, engage in that behavior.
| Their content often still has some value, and we need both hard
| and soft reporting to make sense of this world. That doesn't
| mean all this content is motivated or framed by some selfless
| desire to shine the brightest light on the darkest places at
| any cost.
|
| I don't think automatically equating skepticism with conspiracy
| theory adoption is fair. I can't really think of any conspiracy
| theory I buy into.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't disagree, but the impressive syntactical gymnastics
| you did to obfuscate the motivation ("get clicks") and the
| guilty act ("intentionally mislead") is telling.
|
| Untangling that sentence gets us the much clearer, and I
| think more accurate, "new organizations chase clicks without
| any interest in whether their headlines are true or false".
|
| Skepticism is not conspiratorial thinking, of course. I meant
| it in the most narrow way -- many people in this thread
| believe, without evidence, that some group of people is
| consciously coordinating massive distortions of news to
| further specific ends.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Lot of people think that all the media are lying to them but
| some random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or
| globalists is the one true news source.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or
| globalists is the one true news source.
|
| Seymour Hersh, Jeff Gerth and the CJR, Wemple at the WaPo,
| Chris Hedges (ex-NYT Middle East bureau chief, ex-NYT Balkans
| bureau chief during the Yugoslav wars.)
|
| Not to mention recent nonpersons like Taibbi or Greenwald.
|
| You were required to read and believe what these people wrote
| in order to get your liberal card in the very recent past,
| but for having the wrong opinions on rising nationalism they
| get demoted to "random guys."
| megaman821 wrote:
| I don't see a conspiracy at all. Sentiment analysis of the news
| shows a strong shift to fear and anger. Those emotions drive
| engagement. People here didn't like when the Facebook news feed
| was surfacing these things to the top to drive engagement, but
| seem to be more OK with human editors doing it.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's "deliberate" though. I think the biases of
| the reporters just comes through. There's no big conspiracy.
|
| Still, to cite a recent example, the reporting from most news
| outlets on things like the Kenosha shootings and trials were
| outrageously bad.
| aww_dang wrote:
| 99% of what we see in the news is editorial content. We are being
| informed of where partisans stand on issues. The actual event is
| tertiary. The narrative surrounding it is secondary. The primary
| item is the partisan goal.
|
| "Joe Biden fell off his bicycle", we can believe that much. The
| other 99% of the content is partisan posturing. Maybe if I were
| there, I could have further insights, "His aides should have
| given him platform pedals instead of cages". Thankfully I wasn't
| there. Even if I had been there, my observation would have still
| been subjective.
|
| However, there are some narratives and editorial positions which
| are trivially self-refuting. We can evaluate them from first
| principles. "A misinformation czar is required to protect
| democracy" or "We need censorship to preserve a free and open
| society" If we trust people to vote, then we must trust people to
| consume and evaluate information independent of state
| institutions.
|
| Ultimately these discussions revolve around our premises. Our
| first principles inform us. The specific event can be almost
| irrelevant in many cases.
|
| There are other crank ideas like those advanced by David Icke. I
| cannot prove that world leaders are not lizard people, but I'm
| naturally skeptical. Even if I watched Biden fall, I couldn't
| prove it. Crank theories don't threaten me, they amuse. Hopefully
| this is something which isn't controversial for partisans on this
| site. We could substitute other news items and theories.
|
| I'm more troubled by the users shouting down these delightful
| absurdities. "My truth is bigger than yours"
|
| From my side they have my deepest sympathy for wherever the
| disagreement injured them. However, moving forward perhaps it
| would be best if they didn't identify so closely with
| editorialized content or specific news outlets? "9 out of 10 HN
| users chose Brand-X Truth and here's why..."
| yalogin wrote:
| There are good and bad parts about the media, just like
| everything else. Unfortunately the current political landscape
| just accentuates the bad and just hammers it down into people's
| minds. The perception that media is biased is more important for
| politics than nuanced observation and we are here because of
| that. People should always be skeptical about what is fed to them
| but taking these kind of blanket mind alterations are just bad
| for society. Not sure how to fix it though once someone is on
| that slope.
| bhaney wrote:
| Only half?
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Just a reminder that Fortune is now a pay-to-play publication.
| celtoid wrote:
| Albert Einstein alluded to the issue in 1949.
|
| "Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands,
| partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly
| because technological development and the increasing division of
| labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at
| the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is
| an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which
| cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized
| political society. This is true since the members of legislative
| bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or
| otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all
| practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.
| The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not
| in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged
| sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions,
| >>private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly,
| the main sources of information (press, radio, education)<<. It
| is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite
| impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective
| conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."
| [0]
|
| [0] https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
| EGreg wrote:
| That's why I started https://rational.app
|
| We are currently building it and will be rolling it out to our 10
| million users around the world in a few months.
|
| If anyone wants to be involved, you can contact me by filling out
| the form on the bottom.
| motohagiography wrote:
| There is a simple reason for this. The necessary ingredient in a
| news story is a conflict of some kind, and the people who feel
| misled recognize that the conflicts that news orgs present,
| decorated by mostly real facts, are synthetic, the product of an
| ideology. In a story, there's a figure-ground relationship
| between facts and the tension between them, and the people very-
| concerned about "alternative facts" don't get that others don't
| believe them not because of the disinformation on the internet,
| but because they register to us as liars who sprinkle some facts
| as palatable icing over an underlying lie derived from an
| ideology designed to produce cheap conflict. In a moral sense,
| news that uses synthetic conflict sourced from ideology is in
| effect, false witness.
|
| To me, anything problematic or anti-problematic is a synthetic
| conflict generated from underlying pre-problematizations. One
| doesn't have to agree with this assessment to understand it, but
| pretending to be mystified as to why a majority of Americans
| don't agree with them only makes the divide irreconcilable, imo.
| janjanmax wrote:
| Propaganda is not something that happens to other people. It is
| happening to you now. It is in the movies, tv, and mass media.
| CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, OANN. They Are their own palatable version
| to their own captured audience. Each viewer believe the opposing
| political network is the one with crazy propagandized viewers.
| They are emotional manipulators. The music, colors, graphics,
| tone and speech are to mislead. Try watching the news on mute and
| think what you are not feeling and supposed to feel. Do it for a
| week. 9 hours of news on mute see the opposite side from your
| believes too. You will be surprised what you will find.
| adolph wrote:
| Ok, I see Chomsky/Hermann and Astral Codex mentioned here, but no
| Martin Gurri yet.
|
| _Gurri spent years surveying the global information landscape.
| Around the turn of the century, he noticed a trend: As the
| internet gave rise to an explosion of information, there was a
| concurrent spike in political instability. The reason, he
| surmised, was that governments lost their monopoly on information
| and with it their ability to control the public conversation._
|
| _One of the many consequences of this is what Gurri calls a
| "crisis of authority." As people were exposed to more
| information, their trust in major institutions -- like the
| government or newspapers -- began to collapse._
|
| https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the...
|
| Blog: https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/
|
| Book: The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the
| New Millennium: https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public
| KwisatzHaderack wrote:
| Reminds me of a Richard Pryor joke: "Who you gonna believe? Me or
| your lying eyes?"
|
| There's been many times when news articles have been easily
| discredited by simply looking at the original source(video,
| image, research papers).
| flybrand wrote:
| What's wrong with the other 50%?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Eh, most of it is IMHO due to optimising for entertainment value,
| i.e for ratings. More of a commercial agenda than a political
| one.
|
| Is that "deliberately mislead"? It depends on what exactly you
| mean by that. Don't agree and shift the meaning.
| globalreset wrote:
| Still so low?
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| The other half are in denial.
| uhtred wrote:
| The "respectable" ones don't lie, but they do choose what to not
| cover and what to draw attention to.
|
| For example, the lack of coverage of the train derailment in
| Ohio. And zero articles since the government said the UFOs they
| shot down were benign asking "Hey, government, that's it? No
| explanation as to why you wasted millions of dollars shooting
| down benign objects? With all your capabilities you really can't
| find the debris?"
| goatlover wrote:
| They have to decide what's newsworthy. There's limited time and
| space. Your examples might be apt, but not because they're
| making decisions. That's a given for any possible news
| organization. You can call that a kind of bias, sure. But
| professional news people will have a pretty good idea of what
| their consumers are likely to consider relevant news.
| dopylitty wrote:
| If you're interested in media criticism the podcast Citations
| Needed[0] is very well researched and covers media issues both in
| modern day and with a historical lens that shows how media has
| operated and does operate with relevant source quotes.
|
| 0: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/
| jamisteven wrote:
| ..which is, quite accurate really.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| Another media post, another HN comments feed where more people
| are upset about Hunter Biden's laptop than a president
| cheerleading an insurrection and trying to overthrow the results
| of an election. Less credibility than the media you despise.
| glonq wrote:
| ...the other half of Americans _deliberately want to be misled_
| seydor wrote:
| Including Fortune.com? I think we are learning that the more
| communication we have the more manipulation we have and it's dark
| . Unity and common purpose require a sence of naivety and
| lack/assymetry of information. When most people have the facts ,
| it matters more who is promoting something than what it is, and
| it s full of partisanship from then on.
| kleiba wrote:
| Thanks, Don!
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| "Deliberately mislead" implies a level of knowing competence that
| does not exist in most organizations.
| bigger_inside wrote:
| 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.
| Julesman wrote:
| 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.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Yes, during the cold war. When there were no rules and 2
| countries did whatever they could to counter the other.
|
| What is your evidence such a system exists today?
| pas wrote:
| Two words: evidence where?
|
| > 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!
| bilekas wrote:
| Seymour Hersh is the Journalist/Investigative Reporter and
| he does not mess around.
|
| Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger
| outlets would not publish it without source information etc
| and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking
| to his word of "Not revealing sources".
| barbazoo wrote:
| Was someone able to verify that this was in fact written
| by him? I remember that being an open question when it
| got posted initially.
| pas wrote:
| That's appeal to authority. And it's a good hypothesis,
| we shouldn't discount it, but ... also not take it as
| gospel.
|
| It's pretty clear that to get to the bottom of this we
| either need some leak or enough politicians in Congress
| who take this seriously, and get people to testify under
| oath. (Of course it'd be a good start to hold accountable
| those who lie to Congress, like Keith Alexander and James
| Clapper.)
| blue_pants wrote:
| It may be interesting to read this[0] OSINT analysis of
| Hersh's claims.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648
| 026113
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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).
| m463 wrote:
| > 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?
| michaelt wrote:
| _> So that makes me wonder how this is getting out._
|
| Hasn't Trump been talking about the 'fake news media' for 5+
| years? And don't half of Americans lap that stuff up?
| base698 wrote:
| Classically, fake news was more of a left issue. Trump gave
| it a catchy name and stole the issue.
| lockhouse wrote:
| Is he wrong about this particular issue though?
|
| I know broken clocks and all, but just because you disagree
| with someone most of the time it doesn't mean that they are
| wrong about everything.
| MrMan wrote:
| he used to love Fox, which is by definition fake news, he
| just didn't like the weak pansy liberal stuff.
| mjr00 wrote:
| The actual news on Fox News, i.e. not Tucker and the rest
| of the talk shows, is _not_ fake news, even remotely.
| Absolutely has a conservative bias, but not to the extent
| it would qualify as fake news. It 's even listed on
| Wikipedia a reliable source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
| bcrl wrote:
| There's no way to distinguish between the fake news Fox
| broadcasts and the non-fake news. It's not like Fox puts
| a disclaimer up on the screen saying which stories are
| for entertainment purposes only.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Fox News is the clearest example of mainstream propaganda
| that I've ever seen. I take a pass through there
| periodically just to see what the _aren 't_ covering.
| Which isn't to say places like CNN don't sometimes pull
| that same stunt, but it's much more prevalent on Fox News
| -- they'll completely omit even really big stories that
| aren't what they think their audience wants to see.
| politician wrote:
| Ground News is a great site to help you understand which
| networks are covering which stories and ignoring others.
| It's honestly eye opening the number of big stories
| omitted by the other large non-Fox networks.
| diimdeep wrote:
| Wikipedia reliable sources list is basically implicit
| whitelist, and there is implicit blacklist, news sources
| from countries with hundreds of millions of people banned
| from Wikipedia. All this is contradicting its core
| content policies. Reliable sources based solely on being
| Western, such as being located in the Western world,
| having a Western worldview, being owned by Western
| entities, or aligning with Western national interests or
| security policies.
| brewdad wrote:
| When the shows that draw the most eyeballs and are aired
| at the times most people are watching news at all, the
| morning shows and prime time, are almost entirely made up
| of half-truths and outright lies, I think it's fair to
| say Fox is an unreliable source.
|
| Fox and Friends and Tucker Carlson _are_ lying to viewers
| _every_ day.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| It's not so much that as 'everything he says is a
| confession'...He's pointing out fake news, because he's
| one of the biggest sources. He can't be wrong if he's to
| blame.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| >Is he wrong about this particular issue though?
|
| I mean, yeah? His version of "fake news" is calling
| EVERYTHING that doesn't kiss his ass and lie to make him
| look good fake because what he actually says and does is
| so utterly ridiculous he wants to confuse everyone.
|
| I'm not going to give you specific examples because that
| part of my brain is now closed off, but literally he
| would do X or say X on twitter. Then the media reports on
| it, in a very factual manner, and he just denies literal
| facts constantly.
|
| So let's not use him as an example for this. Also, he
| would never call Fox News fake news.. so, that tells you
| everything you need to know. He calls anyone who doesn't
| do exactly what he says and report favorably on him "fake
| news".
| lockhouse wrote:
| https://www.newsweek.com/trump-polls-fake-news-fox-brett-
| bai...
|
| Actually, he did call Fox News fake news at one point,
| although yes it was due to them running a story about
| polls that were unflattering to him.
|
| However, he is still fundamentally correct about the
| issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright
| lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it
| Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| He was his own anonymous source to news media. Though I
| don't know whether the Enquirer should count as news
| media, per se. Given news was not its focus.
|
| > However, he is still fundamentally correct about the
| issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright
| lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it
| Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.
|
| That doesn't make him, or any other source of
| information, more trustworthy than the corporate news
| media.
| fwungy wrote:
| Watch Dave Chapelle's SNL monologue where he talks about
| Trump. His take on the source of Trump's popularity is
| insightful.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Nowadays "fake news" is just a derogatory term against
| the news media in general, but the term used to mean
| something. If you remember, back to the 2016 election,
| there were literal _fake_ online newspapers that sprang
| up and published essentially election clickbait. These
| sites had news-y sounding names, real-looking content,
| and were designed to look surface-level like legitimate
| news sites, until you dug a little deeper and looked
| around. People started calling these sites out as "fake
| news" but Trump quickly adopted the term, and nullified
| it by using it as a simple insult against actual
| mainstream news sites. But it originally meant "actual
| phony news sites".
|
| > The term "fake news" became mainstream during the US
| election campaign, when hundreds of websites that
| published falsified or heavily biased stories sprung up
| to capitalise on Facebook advertising revenue.[1]
|
| > Mr Trump and his supporters then adopted the term to
| describe media coverage critical of the President,
| especially that of The New York Times, The Washington
| Post and CNN.
|
| 1:
| https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2017/10/09/donald-
| trum...
| kodah wrote:
| 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"
| nhchris wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Even your definition of 'reporting' can be (and is) easily
| abused to play to narratives, by the simple and necessary
| act of determining what is "newsworthy". Reporters will go
| by their biases and beliefs on deciding e.g. which
| homicides are "random" and not worth reporting, vs. which
| are indicative of systemic issues in society, and so
| require national attention.
|
| Cherry-picking.
| karpierz wrote:
| Well let's steelman journalism a bit; journalism provides
| context.
|
| Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this
| morning."
|
| Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident
| today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new
| regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this
| year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government
| is looking to roll back more regulations, which are
| expected to increase fatality rates by 6%."
| kodah wrote:
| In your steelmanned journalist example I think the
| discerning reader would be saying, "Is the agency
| themselves saying more fatalities are expected, is it the
| opposition, etc" The choice to omit _is_ part of the
| narrative, because if people pick up that you 're
| casually and selectively quoting opposition but making it
| sound pre-determined and official then they start viewing
| you as a folk singer.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| >Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits,
| passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%.
|
| See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data
| told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your
| premise which proves with any certainty that the
| increased speed limits are the cause of the change in
| accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political
| agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it
| as part of the basic record of events we call "news",
| rather than as part of the opinion discourse.
|
| This was even a good faith example. If you were _trying_
| to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I think you're wrong here. The idea that a news article
| should be a "basic record of events" is ridiculous. In
| this toy example, the most we could quibble with is the
| words "Due to" and those may be appropriate if there is a
| reasonable amount of evidence referred to somewhere in
| the article which suggests an association. In fact, I
| believe in the case of traffic accidents such a link is
| sufficiently well documented that the casually refer to
| it isn't a great sin.
|
| I think this idea that we need to somehow strip all news
| of even the vaguest hint of a perspective is actually
| pretty condescending to the average news reader,
| imagining that they are so stupid and credulous that
| merely seeing a bit of bias is going to immediately warp
| their brains.
| dooglius wrote:
| "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this
| year alone. Car accidents are up 12% since last year when
| city council rejected the proposed budget increase for
| more snowplows and ice control to meet the city's growing
| transportation needs."
|
| "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this
| year alone. Car accidents overall have jumped 12% since
| AG John Smith added driving-without-a-license to the
| city's informal do-not-prosecute list."
|
| In our toy example, all of these could be simultaneously
| true, and the data given does not support one cause over
| the other. Note that the "due not" need not be present,
| the intended implication is still clear. (For bonus
| points, read these examples again, imagining that overall
| driving increased by about 12% due to people working from
| home less.)
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Sure, there are a million consistent imaginary stories.
| My point is that _if_ a journalist has a reasonable sense
| that the speed limit regulations are related to the
| article in question or that the reader may want to know
| about them, then they should mention them. Indeed, all
| these other imaginary scenarios should also be mentioned
| if there is a reasonable case they may be involved in the
| increased rate of accidents.
|
| The idea that the journalist should present only the
| directly related "bare facts" is so silly that I can't
| even take the suggestion as coming from a place of good
| faith.
| this_user wrote:
| For this to work properly, the journalists would have to
| be experts in the respective field, or would at the very
| least have to possess enough of an understanding to make
| these judgements. But reality has become far too complex
| for that, plus these articles are being written under
| severe time constraints. Ultimately, what will happen is
| the journalist using their personal or the editorial
| biases of the publication to create a narrative
| consistent with their world view. Whether or not that
| narrative has any basis in reality is not really their
| concern.
|
| The question when becomes whether there is any value in
| publishing these most likely faulty narratives compared
| to simply reporting the facts. I would argue that there
| is actually negative value in the former, because the
| audience ends up less informed than if they had never
| consumed that piece of media.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > the journalists would have to be experts in the
| respective field, or would at the very least have to
| possess enough of an understanding to make these
| judgements.
|
| This is why journalists will often attribute cause and
| effect interpretation of facts to expert sources.
| throwaway_75369 wrote:
| Hmm, I like the thrust of your point, here, and I do
| think that when people think critically about the news,
| they aren't "stupid and credulous".
|
| But Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that educated,
| informed readers readily fall victim to, so it's clear
| that the media seems to have some kind of privilege of
| credulity.
|
| I wonder if it's really an effect of people reading media
| primarily for entertainment - isn't there some old saying
| about "people who read the Times are less I formed than
| people who read nothing at all?"
| karpierz wrote:
| If you were going to take this in bad faith, I'm
| surprised that you considered "3 people died in car
| accident this morning" to be reporting. If you wanted to
| be pedantic about it, stick only to the facts, and avoid
| speculation/opinion, it'd have to be written like so:
|
| "A person who our reporter spoke with who went by the
| name of Bob Dylan and claimed to be the coroner of James
| County, said that three individuals passed away recently,
| and he said he believes that they died due injuries
| similar to those involved in car accidents. Our reporter
| also asked the James County Sherriff's Department to
| corroborate, and a person who claimed to be the
| spokesperson for the James County Sherriff's department
| said that there were three individuals in a car accident
| last night, and they were taken to the hospital."
|
| Anyways, I wasn't trying to write a rigorous example for
| each, I assumed that the reader could fill in the
| detailed. I just aimed to give the gist of what it should
| look like. You'd talk to experts, cite papers, etc.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| onetimeusename wrote:
| 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.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| 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.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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.
| kornhole wrote:
| 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.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I gave up on the dream of "objective news" when I was about
| 18.
|
| I had been taught that The Times was the most objective
| news organ here; it did carry an aura and style that seemed
| objective. I realized that what the objective "facts" are
| turns out to depend on your point-of-view, and it's harder
| to know what that point-of-view is if the organ is
| pretending to be "objective".
|
| Ever since, I've preferred to get my news from sources that
| wear their bias on their sleeve.
| screwturner68 wrote:
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| This is such a black and white spin.
|
| 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.
| Julesman wrote:
| 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.
| drpyser22 wrote:
| How does it all work?
| DFHippie wrote:
| 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.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Also some news media actually reports on events that hurts
| the cause of their collective political leanings, some just
| don't. This isn't apples to apples.
| braingenious wrote:
| > 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"?
| pasabagi wrote:
| 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.
| 2devnull wrote:
| 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.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Seems like a cynical take by someone that knows what _they_
| watch is largely fake, and they want to apply the same
| rules to the other side so they feel better about their
| exclusivity to confirmation bias enabling programming.
| 2devnull wrote:
| No, the underlying business model, get people to watch
| your product in order to maximize ad sales, is basically
| the same. The incentives are therefore essentially the
| same. Money talks.
|
| Personally, I don't watch anything. I read across a broad
| array of print sources and prefer to trust specific
| journalists rather than entire organizations. I try to
| get most information from primary sources, or to
| triangulate information from multiple outlets which are
| preferably maximally uncorrelated. This is much easier
| than it may sound. And think tanks and academics are
| often better information sources than entertainment news
| outlets.
| runnerup wrote:
| Most western audiences of professional wrestling know its
| scripted/practiced/"fake". Most western audiences of Fox
| News think it's all real.
|
| Interesting, I worked in Saudi Arabia for awhile...most of
| the Africans and Southeast Asian laborers were all 100%
| convinced that professional wrestling was real. Pro
| wrestling is HUGE in developing nations.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| 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.
| EricE wrote:
| Here's an example from this week:
|
| https://doomberg.substack.com/p/railroaded
|
| "Even though this, and all information quoted in this
| piece, is readily available to any reporter with access to
| Google, countless references to the dangers presented by
| phosgene are giving the public anxiety over the decision to
| execute the controlled burn. To pick one example from many
| dozens, a Newsweek story, titled Did Control Burn of Toxic
| Chemicals Make Ohio Train Derailment Worse?, includes the
| following sentence: "Phosgene is a deadly gas that was used
| in chemical warfare during World War I." The report goes on
| to quote - and we kid you not - a TikTok video from an
| "entrepreneur" for more insight.
|
| Sigh."
| rayiner wrote:
| > For clarity, 40 ppm (parts per million) is equivalent
| to 0.004% of the composition.
|
| Lots of things are dangerous even at concentrations
| measured in PPM. For example, the level of Phosgene
| that's "immediately dangerous to life" is 2 ppm:
| https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/75445.html.
|
| Maybe the point is that this 20 ppm quickly turns into
| less based on further dilution. But there's a lot of
| analysis required to support the post's assertions that
| the author just skips over.
| [deleted]
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| 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).
| slg wrote:
| >I think that most people would read this as "by in large,
| most are lying".
|
| This is still too extreme. "Lying" requires intentionality
| and implies maliciousness. It suggests that people who work
| in media are mostly evil people with the primary goal of
| misleading you. It both ignores and shows ignorance of how
| the media industry actually works. It also removes any hope
| of actually fixing the media industry because the only
| solution according to this mindset is getting rid of all
| the lying journalists. It doesn't leave any room to
| understand or address the incentives that actually got us
| to our current situation.
| xupybd wrote:
| One form of obvious lying is the modern headline. Now
| that clicks drive revenue many story's don't even come
| close to what the headline suggests. I do think this is
| maliciousness, they're telling a lie to draw you in to
| make money off of you.
| slg wrote:
| This is an example of what I'm talking about. Journalist
| by and large are not in favor of editors slapping
| misleading headlines on their work. You are ascribing
| this practice to maliciousness when it is actually a
| reluctant response to incentives.
| cteiosanu wrote:
| Yeah, it does baffle me when audiences that are supposed
| to tackle complex topics everyday (and complexity in
| general) have to fallback to black and white explanations
| in social aspects.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| Disagree. "Lying" is objectively deceit, or intending to
| deceive. It can be, and often is, malicious, but to
| ascribe all lying _as_ malicious is a step too far.
| slg wrote:
| It is pretty funny to see this reply from you. You are
| guilty here of the exact thing you were criticizing in
| your last comment. It is "Perhaps the most wooden way to
| interpret what [I'm] saying".
|
| I never described "all lying as malicious". I said it
| "implies maliciousness" and you said it "often is,
| malicious". I don't see a disagreement here.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| > It is pretty funny to see this reply from you.
|
| :). My apologies, I've misread what you wrote.
|
| I think the tension we're walking here is to keep one
| hand grounded in the fact that words can have a discrete,
| objective meaning *while also* allowing for individual
| freedom of expression. Modernity vs unhinged relativism.
| [deleted]
| Zxian wrote:
| I lie to my children when I say that the TV needs to
| recharge after their morning shows. A way to divert their
| attention elsewhere, but not out of malice.
| pydry wrote:
| Probably media organizations pushing a pro war message
| dont believe that theyre being malicious either.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The Fox horizontal integration is brilliant. They pull in
| people with sports and other complimentary content and
| cross-sell the profitable propaganda.
|
| The New York Post is a great example. It was the sports and
| bookie newspaper - they'd publish Vegas odds and have
| tabloid news. They slowly transformed into a giant
| editorial paper and funnel into the broader Fox ecosystem.
|
| They have an effective, free product. I need to pay to read
| The NY Times, but Fox is free and the sponsors are all low
| quality high margin stuff. Radio is prostate pills, TV is
| old people drugs and gold, etc.
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| The most amazing part of it is that even Fox doesn't call
| itself a news outlet but entertainment. They sell rage
| and self-validation.
| autoexec wrote:
| Fox calls itself "Fox News". Only when they're pressed
| and presented with evidence that they're liars will they
| hide behind "That's okay, this is all just
| entertainment!" excuses. Their viewers don't think
| they're watching made up stories for entertainment.
| They're convinced that Fox/OAN are the only news agencies
| that tell the truth.
| colluphid wrote:
| sed 's/fox/CNN/Ig'
| giantg2 wrote:
| It seems spot on to me.
|
| "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.
| sophacles wrote:
| > intend to mislead
|
| This is literally the definition of lying.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Source? The definitions I saw do not match.
|
| You can intentionally mislead someone through the
| selective use of truths without using any "counter-
| factual" or untrue statements.
| sophacles wrote:
| Google define lie:
|
| * used with reference to a situation involving deception
| or founded on a mistaken impression. "all their married
| life she had been living a lie"
|
| Google "define lying". It says this:
|
| tell a lie or lies.
|
| and this
|
| (of a thing) present a false impression; be deceptive.
|
| ---
|
| Intentionally misleading is deceptive, even if it states
| only facts.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Here's one from an actual dictionary.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lying
| sophacles wrote:
| Google pulls from the OED. Anyway, have fun with
| ridiculous semantic nonsense - I'm going to go find
| people who bother to interact in good faith.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I am interacting in good faith. A lie requires a
| falsehood. There is a difference between a lie and
| deception - they aren't perfect synonymous. The example
| from your cited definition is really a poor one since it
| relies on a saying more than a factual use of the word,
| and the example itself does imply an actual falsehood in
| that someone lied during the marriage vows or during the
| marriage.
|
| But wait, let's look at the instant replay. _You claim
| that lying and deception at the same. So why would you
| get involved in this conversation to say that? According
| to you, their use is interchangeable and makes no
| difference._
|
| If you have something to add to the actual conversation
| and not about definitions, then please do.
| sophacles wrote:
| There is concept called a "lie of omission". I did not
| invent that term - it's older than you and i combined.
| Intentionally witholding information to deceive a person
| has long been considered a lie.
|
| There is a difference between telling a lie and being
| mistaken, no? If you are learning something and give the
| wrong answer on a quiz, are you lying? Both of those are
| falsehoods that aren't intending to deceive, and most
| people wouldn't count those as lies.
|
| The word lie, requires an intent to deceive.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "The word lie, requires an intent to deceive."
|
| This isn't being debated.
|
| "There is concept called a "lie of omission"."
|
| And that's why it's a _concept_ and requires additional
| words to convey. It 's not included by default. This
| would moee generally fall under deception.
|
| I'll ask again, anything to add to the _actual_
| discussion?
| sophacles wrote:
| There's a couple other concepts I suggest you look into:
| adjective and category. "Bird of prey" is still a bird
| no? "Person of interest" is still a person, no? "Box of
| chocolates", "bag of food", "bottle of whiskey", and
| "bowl of soup" are all containers no?
| wrycoder wrote:
| That's spin, not lie.
|
| Your source is spinning the definition of lie, for some
| reason.
| sophacles wrote:
| It turns out this is a very old discussion. There is a
| concept called a "lie of omission". Here's a wikipedia
| page about the entire concept of lies:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
|
| A question for you: if you make a mistake or
| misunderstand something then share it, are you a liar?
|
| I don't mean like your current actions - the part where
| you are pretending that you have never encountered the
| notion of lying like this is clearly itself some sort of
| lie. I mean like say you apply some math rule incorrectly
| on a test. Should you be kicked out for lying to the
| teacher?
| wrycoder wrote:
| To lie is to tell a deliberate falsehood - to say
| something you know to be untrue. Sometimes this is taken
| to be acceptable - to tell a "white lie", e.g. in
| response to, "Does this dress make me look fat?"
|
| Saying something incorrect, but which you believe to be
| true, is no lie.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Are not "intend to mislead" and lying synonyms? Misleading
| without intent may not be, but if you mislead with intent
| you are lying.
| ptero wrote:
| I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors
| might be way off, but I think those two things are quite
| different. Lying is making statements that the speaker
| knows are false.
|
| An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the
| actual information and omitting or obfuscating other
| parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually
| making false statements. This is _literally_ what most of
| the layers do much of the time in court.
|
| To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person
| can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is
| what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.
|
| Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to
| expose through rational exploration. Possible, but
| requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a
| normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is
| likely to doom the case. My 2c.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > those two things are quite different.
|
| Your grasp of English seems fine, to me.
|
| I think your "quite different" distinction is incorrect.
| The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead
| isn't a clear one. There's a gradation from plain lying
| your face off, through mixing in a few truths with your
| lies, through lying by omission, through presenting true
| facts in such a way as to make the reader believe
| falsehoods.
|
| The tactic most-used by newspapers is lying by omission.
| Newspapers routinely "spike" stories that aren't aligned
| with the paper's political agenda. You can search the
| paper's output, and you won't find a direct lie; but a
| parallel search for truth will also fail. Truth is to be
| found in the gaps.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead
| isn't a clear one."
|
| There is if you look up definitions. Lying involves
| falsehoods. You can mislead someone using selective
| truths without using falsehoods. That's why the article
| etc was about misleading, persuading, etc and not
| mentioning lying (aside from the commentor I originally
| responded to).
| autoexec wrote:
| Yep. Lies are not the same thing as being dishonest. You
| can use lies to be misleading, or manipulative, or
| dishonest but you don't need to, and it's usually more
| effective if you don't (or at least don't entirely).
|
| If someone can't see how a person could be misleading
| without lying they're going to fall for a lot of
| bullshit.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Then what distinction was being made? Knowingly providing
| an incomplete picture, focusing on one side, or selective
| editing are intended to misled. They are not "outright
| lies" nor "counter-factual".
| anonym29 wrote:
| Lying? Of course not! It's just paid marketing for a
| sponsor's ideological position! /s
| 1659447091 wrote:
| The way I classify them is lying is "outright lies".
| "intend to mislead" is manipulation. The nuance between
| manipulation and lies is that manipulation usually
| distorts a collection of facts through rearrangement,
| omission or massaging those things to create a _view_
| that is not factual, which I think may also relate it as
| implicit lies. Lying is stating explicitly counter-
| factual things. I prefer the distinction of using
| manipulation over implicit lies as I think it
| communicates the narrower focused maliciousness of it,
| where lies don 't always have that same level of
| "premeditation", for lack of a better term.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| No, there are several contractions here:
|
| > intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public
|
| persuasion is not misinforming is not misleading.
| autoexec wrote:
| misleading and misinforming are often used to persuade,
| but it doesn't always require it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Hence why they're called out separately.
| tgv wrote:
| The parent comment said:
|
| > it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge
| that the media lied about every war ...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Hmm I do seee that now.
| kleiba wrote:
| _> With a mountain of examples_
|
| It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from
| the field. Thanks.
| NDizzle wrote:
| <Norm Macdonald meme> "It says here in this history book that
| luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are
| the odds?"
| dylan604 wrote:
| That was one of the lessons that stuck with me from the
| first time a teacher actually admitted that "history is
| written by the winners".
| tobr wrote:
| 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!
| golemotron wrote:
| Russia has been just about the lose the war for close to a
| year now.
| DFHippie wrote:
| I don't know where you heard that. The media keeps
| reporting that Russia is losing the war, or may be losing
| it,* but that it is likely to drag on for a long time. No
| one that I have heard from since the first weeks of the war
| has ever said or implied that it was about to end.
|
| * As Russia changes its aims, the definition of "winning"
| changes. This is a separate way Russia can win: declare
| victory with whatever territory you have seized and call
| for peace negotiations.
| oezi wrote:
| This is hilarious because all reputable media won't even
| report on most of the progress because they can't
| independently verify the information given out by the
| parties at war. Thus we get this big lack of actual news
| about the war which can't be filled by people on Twitter
| and Reddit translating from Telegram and random videos.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| _Manufacturing Consent_ by Herman and Chomsky is a great
| start. _Messengers of the Right_ and _Dark Money_ are also
| great.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| manufacturing consent isn't evidence. Its pop philosophy.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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.
| guelo wrote:
| It was the media's fault but not Bush and Cheney's? I don't
| remember where I got the information that led me to join
| the largest antiwar protests in history in 2003 but a lot
| of us knew Bush was lying because of the media.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I didn't say it was media's fault alone, but their share
| of responsibility is a large one. How else would the Bush
| administration have gained the support of the public? By
| transmitting their falsehoods through popular private
| media corporations such as CNN. And the media were all
| too happy to lap up the narrative fed by the
| administration without bothering to investigate deeper.
| guelo wrote:
| Not investigating deeper is different than outright lying
| for propaganda. "The President Said X" is newsworthy
| though maybe lazy reporting. If X is a lie it's on the
| president.
| screwturner68 wrote:
| It's really hard to blame the media for the Iraq war, the
| Bush II administration wanted to go to war, particularly in
| Iraq and were happy to beat the drums as loud as necessary
| to get the public's backing. Who can ever forget Powell
| lying in front of Congress, but that what was necessary to
| seal the deal and the media was more than happy to report
| what they learned.
| Teever wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film)
|
| "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]"
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > With it gone, many people never learned to healthily
| distrust their information, and many are unsettled that
| people can not agree anymore.
|
| Definitely agree. But it's also difficult to fact check
| even if you do distrust. Even educated bloggers and readers
| can have difficulty accurately interpreting information,
| and what that information indicates, if technological
| advances make their knowledgebase outdated.
|
| > Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run,
| the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is
| irrelevant for that.
|
| In some cases, such as when the source of particular facts
| all originate from the same person, sure. Or when
| everyone's article is just a rewrite of the AP News or
| Reuters release. But in the general case we all can know
| who won the superbowl, and by what margin and what plays.
| mandmandam wrote:
| All US news stations covered Trump's campaign at least
| 20x more than Sanders.
|
| All US news stations covered Hilary's campaign at least
| 5x more than Sanders.
|
| That's without even getting into the hit pieces, the
| lies, the questions sneaked to Hillary in advance.
|
| That style of narrative warping is repeated across every
| topic that might hurt corporate profits. There's facts,
| and then there's repetition, presentation, sentiment.
|
| Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern train
| derailment - one story on page 20, with no context
| linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no
| context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock
| buyback last year, no context about their lobbying
| against the very regulations that would have prevented
| this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't
| even name the company.
|
| US media is absolute unequivocal dogshit across the
| board. It's utterly indefensible. That half of American's
| have any faith at all in corporate news is astounding.
| Trust them for sport coverage, sure - but that's
| entertainment friendo, not news.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern
| train derailment - one story on page 20, with no context
| linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no
| context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock
| buyback last year, no context about their lobbying
| against the very regulations that would have prevented
| this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't
| even name the company.
|
| And all of the investigative journalism sites that would
| report in this detail on events like this are asking for
| donations to keep going. The advertiser support isn't
| there.
| yks wrote:
| > don't apply to independent journalists
|
| What a naivete. 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > 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.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| And both of those position changes feed INTO their
| 'Independent' thinker audiences not contradict with them.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Yeah they're pandering to people who value the truth. /s
|
| Your comment makes no sense with Matt Taibbi's
| statements. I'm not sure you understand what he said and
| corrected.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Not those that value truth. They are pandering to
| contrarians and people who need the world to make sense
| and have order hence all the nefarious plots behind
| everything.
|
| Do you mean when he apologized for adamantly saying that
| Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and it was only
| 'dishonest types' that were pushing the narrative that
| Russia was going to invade? I mean, when Taibbi gets the
| start so so incredibly wrong in such a biased (an anti-
| discourse) way I kinda stop following anything old boy
| says so you are going to have to give me more details
| about what specific walk back of his you are referring
| to?
| user3939382 wrote:
| > when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong
|
| I see. So, when he retracts and apologizes for a mistake,
| he can't be listened to anymore. If he doesn't retract a
| mistake, he's one of the Bad Guy independent media who
| never corrects a mistake. The requirement then is to be
| 100% right about every take in his career.
|
| I wonder how that standard holds up to the corporate
| media who, just as a single example, told everyone the
| Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian op, likely
| changing the result of our Presidential election, whereas
| Hunter years later admits the story was real and the
| laptop was his?
|
| > nefarious plots behind everything
|
| The "nefarious plot behind everything" is that our
| government is corrupt. Just like most governments around
| the world, and just as has been largely the case within
| empires for millennia. To frame government corruption as
| a wild conspiracy theory requires ignorance to much of
| human history.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Have you seen what happens with communitys who caught there
| leaders lying and not retracting? Flamewars and death.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > 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:
|
| 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.
| l3mure wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/file
| s/d...
| ROTMetro wrote:
| As a shit poster myself, why is the first post making factual
| claims with zero reference to 'literal mountains of studies' so
| that was can talk to the facts claimed? Why are facts claimed
| about 'soft science' studies? What is happening to HK? I just
| canceled my account at a music makers forum because it turned
| into this tear down all trust crap. Please not here too.
| Please.
| croes wrote:
| What is "the media" that lied about every?
|
| It's not one uniform block, it's thousands of people with
| different intensions and knowledge.
| NDizzle wrote:
| Well, since you asked for it, here you go.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE
|
| 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ
| croes wrote:
| And that's still not "the media" but only a part of it.
| NDizzle wrote:
| What part of the media is that in the united states?
| Ballpark estimate... Is that the 80% or the 20%, in other
| words?
| croes wrote:
| How many stations are in the Youtube clips?
|
| The US has over 7000 stations
| NDizzle wrote:
| Do you think syndication of at least Fox, CBS, and ABC
| stops and starts with the specific clips that were
| gathered for this video clip? There are 7,000 stations...
| are you saying the fact that VH1 isn't saying this
| particular message means, "not all media..."
|
| What a disingenuous argument. Proceed, I won't stop you.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > literal mountains of sociological studies
|
| Which ones prove systemic, deliberate deception?
| VieEnCode wrote:
| "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.
| bnralt wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] Public Opinion,
| https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I wonder how much of the advertising market is what drove
| the strong, pre-WWII, anti-communist push. Prior to the
| holodomor even authoritarian statist communism hadn't been
| responsible for anything on the order of what capitalism
| had done.
|
| Some support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare
| #Seattle_Genera... "Even before the strike began, the press
| begged the unions to reconsider. In part they were
| frightened by some of labor's rhetoric, like the labor
| newspaper editorial that proclaimed: "We are undertaking
| the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country
| ... We are starting on a road that leads - NO ONE KNOWS
| WHERE!"[6] Daily newspapers saw the general strike as a
| foreign import: "This is America - not Russia," one said
| when denouncing the general strike.[7] The non-striking
| part of Seattle's population imagined the worst and stocked
| up on food. Hardware stores sold their stock of guns.[8] "
| bnralt wrote:
| He actually has a fairly interesting segment on the
| reporting of strikes:
|
| > The underlying trouble appears in the news through
| certain easily recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike,
| disorder. From the point of view of the worker, or of the
| disinterested seeker of justice, the demand, the strike,
| and the disorder, are merely incidents in a process that
| for them is richly complicated. But since all the
| immediate realities lie outside the direct experience
| both of the reporter, and of the special public by which
| most newspapers are supported, they have normally to wait
| for a signal in the shape of an overt act. When that
| signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or a
| summons for the police, it calls into play the
| stereotypes people have about strikes and disorders. The
| unseen struggle has none of its own flavor. It is noted
| abstractly, and that abstraction is then animated by the
| immediate experience of the reader and reporter.
| Obviously this is a very different experience from that
| which the strikers have. They feel, let us say, the
| temper of the foreman, the nerve-racking monotony of the
| machine, the depressingly bad air, the drudgery of their
| wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess of
| their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested
| with these feelings. But the reporter and reader see at
| first only a strike and some catchwords. They invest
| these with their feelings. Their feelings may be that
| their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping
| goods they need in their work, that there will be
| shortage and higher prices, that it is all devilishly
| inconvenient. These, too, are realities. And when they
| give color to the abstract news that a strike has been
| called, it is in the nature of things that the workers
| are at a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to
| say, of the existing system of industrial relations that
| news arising from grievances or hopes by workers should
| almost invariably be uncovered by an overt attack on
| production.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I feel this.
|
| It brings in contrast the public response to workplace
| shootings, or even the rarer instances when the entire
| staff of a workplace quit at once.
|
| We quickly found out about a bunch of the nuance of the
| Half Moon Bay shootings, and appear to be doing things to
| make those workplaces and living places better (though of
| course this doesn't help the larger problem of
| agricultural labor practices). And I think most readers
| get a vicarious sense of justice out of mass quitings.
| But yeah strikes, and unionization in general, make
| bystanders nervous.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm not trying to dispute or detract from this point, but
| I'd also like to add that there is also a simple motivation
| behind media bias that can't be ignored: people wanting to
| shape public opinion to their own worldview - be they
| journalists or people who own the presses.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'd go even further and say the the motivation isn't
| specifically to shape public opinion to your view, but
| simply to present the content in a way that doesn't
| create cognitive dissonance with your personal view. If
| you personally don't believe that a piece of information
| is relevant, then you leave it out. That piece might not
| be relevant to your own view of the subject, but could be
| crucial to an opposing view.
| bnralt wrote:
| He actually touches on this as well:
|
| > There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it
| requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with.
| The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he
| departs from the region where it is definitely recorded
| at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone
| into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story
| of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the
| analysis of the economic conditions on which he was
| shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred
| different ways. There is no discipline in applied
| psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine,
| engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct
| the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the
| vague realm of truth. There are no canons to direct his
| own mind, and no canons that coerce the reader's judgment
| or the publisher's. His version of the truth is only his
| version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it?
| He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair
| Lewis can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth
| about Main Street. And the more he understands his own
| weaknesses, the more ready he is to admit that where
| there is no objective test, his own opinion is in some
| vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes,
| according to his own code, and by the urgency of his own
| interest. He knows that he is seeing the world through
| subjective lenses. He cannot deny that he too is, as
| Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which
| stains the white radiance of eternity.
|
| I recommend giving the book a read at some point if you
| have the chance (there's also a free audio book up on
| YouTube). It's a very thought provoking journey through
| how public opinion gets formed, and the myriad of
| different elements at play shaping them.
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-
| misinformat... (which of course will be immediately accused
| of bias, but he's not wrong about the facts of the extent to
| which those people are funded by supplements)
|
| 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...
| jpadkins wrote:
| the nytimes link is /opinion/ which is held to a different
| to a different standard than standard news. I'm glad they
| at least label it as opinion.
|
| I think people reading opinion as news is part of the
| problem.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| There's quite a few independent UK journalists who are
| refugees from editors that started spiking their stories.
| Jonathan Cook and John Pilger both had to leave The
| Guardian.
| dlkf wrote:
| The media is full of shit, but compared to the academic
| sociologists you're referencing it's not that bad.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Here's the thing though, the top level comment isn't citing
| any sources, isn't giving studies that can be criticized on
| its merits to determine if it's a correct conclusion,
| particularly if you yourself have explicitly said "Most
| conclusions may be wrong". There's no reason for you to
| upvote this if you believe the above poster is most likely
| relying on a false authority.
|
| I'm merely pointing out this broad inconsistency.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Nothing he says relies on sociology. It's just a random
| interesting anecdote from his background. He's not
| appealing to the studies or any authority, but simply
| rejoicing in the fact that society at large is coming
| around to a conclusion that's been somewhat evident for
| him to years. And society's not coming around because of
| some study or whatever, but because of lived experience.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| jasmer wrote:
| The media is mostly in service for themselves.
|
| 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.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| > 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.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| 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_ ).
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| 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).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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.
| y-curious wrote:
| Just wanted to say that I like your points and you write very
| well. What is your background?
| recuter wrote:
| > 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.
| yaksha wrote:
| What is Keshloggied? Haven't seen that term anywhere before.
| politician wrote:
| Jamal Khashoggi: All you need to know about Saudi
| journalist's death https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
| europe-45812399
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| recuter wrote:
| How does one make a great living by being a guest on free
| podcasts? And which fringe outlets are we talking about?
| Joe Rogan? He has more viewers than CNN.
| woooooo wrote:
| Taibbi is publishing a ton on the links between government
| agencies and Twitter right now, by doing the work of poring
| through thousands of emails. He's been doing it for months.
|
| His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than
| him.
| lovich wrote:
| Kinda seems like he's more doing PR for musk than
| journalism. He's posting stories aligning with musk's
| interests on musk's platform using data supplied by musk.
|
| I watched a debate panel with several journalists who
| were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had
| full access to everything because an engineer sat in the
| room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to
| believe that the database couldn't have possibly been pre
| filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on
| the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the
| journalist literally claimed that they couldn't have
| possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase
| myocarditis that quickly.
|
| I know we're in tech and have a closer understanding of
| technology than experts in other fields but it was kind
| of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the
| data they were being shown could be manipulated and I
| feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their
| credibility.
| Dig1t wrote:
| He is posting emails and communications that have
| literally nothing to do with Musk. They are comms between
| people who used to work at Twitter and politicians. How
| is that doing PR for Musk? I don't understand.
|
| Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't
| really seem like the simplest explanation.
|
| You are right though that there is a certain level of
| trust here in Taibbi's reporting and fact checking.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| He's publishing it because it is more of the same
| reactionary crap that he's getting rich off of. The
| difference between him and an actual journalist is that a
| journalist would wait until they were done with the
| investigation to write a story. He needs more eyeballs
| than that to justify his existence.
| woooooo wrote:
| Documenting links between intelligence agencies and
| domestic propaganda is "reactionary"?
| phatfish wrote:
| I guarantee, if he wasn't getting fluffed by Elon
| sycophants on Twitter he would back to Covid conspiracy
| theories or whatever else get the attention of rubes
| these days.
| woooooo wrote:
| In the actual record, though, he's done a ton of actual
| journalism aimed at exposing corruption.
|
| His Twitter lovers and haters mostly haven't, and are
| generally making judgments based on "social group" rather
| than the factual record.
| recuter wrote:
| Reactionary is a term commonly used by communists to
| described enemies of a revolution, interesting choice of
| language.
|
| I understand that you feel he is getting rich but do you
| have knowledge of his personal finances to make this
| assertion? Or even some sort of a basis for this
| intuition you can point people towards? Please enlighten
| me with some napkin math.
|
| Meanwhile, the slacks and emails he posted are certainly
| real.
|
| > He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his
| existence.
|
| As opposed to journalists who don't need eyeballs to
| justify their existence?
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Ah, going with the attack on character of the commenter
| angle and the 'words they choose to use'. Wow, this
| discussion is definitely not HK worthy. And this is
| coming from me a low quality kinda shit poster.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half
| a century to trickle through."
|
| Trickle through to HALF the population. Frankly it's shocking
| that 50% don't think information they receive is a component of
| some narrative.
| natch wrote:
| Wow, one has to wonder how the other half can be in such a daze.
| Yuioup wrote:
| What makes it hard for me to trust online news nowadays is click-
| bait. As advertising dollars going the way of polar ice caps it's
| gonna get worse, not better.
| __jambo wrote:
| This is very old news. The encyclopaedia Britannica article on
| the subject says a good propagandist knows the mainstream news
| are untrusted, and will target their audience through receptive
| channels, like influencing family or social groups.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Media-of-propaga...
| talkingtab wrote:
| This is really simple. Media are now in the service of
| advertisers. Or more specifically of people who are willing to
| spend money to target particular people. For example, the NYT
| targets the wealthy, which is why they frequently have stories
| about "how much will $900,000 buy in a home"? By targeting the
| wealthy, the NYT and other media present a view of the world that
| is very much at odds with the way many if not most Americans
| experience the world.
|
| There is another set of media that sells access to the "less well
| off" in America. Here's looking at you fox. It is hard to call
| them media because what they do is foster outrage and sell that.
| This audience is targeted by those with political agendas.
|
| Who pays for your media determines how you see the world and what
| you see of the world. Period.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Not really, it's clear demand for Christian stuff in America is
| huge. Yet the media avoids this like crazy. One of the biggest
| movies of all time is "The passion of the christ" there.Yet
| most media in America is highly liberal and arguably anti-
| christian. It's not about the money clearly, its not about the
| money.
|
| American Corporations have undergone idealogical capture. There
| is no other reason Disney risked and lost their self governance
| by going up against Desantis.
|
| This maybe changing though. My firm is actively beginning to
| re-evaluate its social activism after 15% layoffs (more layoffs
| incoming too). The next big phase is regaining our market in
| the "heartland". I'm in strategic meetings with a lot of
| executives, that are becoming screaming matches over the
| direction of the firm.
| ghqst wrote:
| Disney also employs a lot of LGBTQ employees who were quite
| understandably really pissed at DeSantis. There's a line to
| be toed between "public liberal good boy points" for PR and
| the benefits of self governance, and I think Disney made a
| decent compromise.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Its certainly an interesting case study (as someone being
| trained for an executive position), I think about it a lot.
|
| You are really fucked as an Executive here. You're social
| activists employees will undermine and subvert you. Florida
| will use State power against you. Maybe the Federal
| government might intervene in your space, but they probably
| won't care.
|
| My conclusion and many executives at my firm is target the
| social activists for layoffs. I've combed thru so many
| social media profiles in preparation for next
| restructuring/layoffs at my firm.
|
| Just can't risk it in the current economy. The general
| feeling is the economy is going to get worse before it gets
| better.
| chowchowchow wrote:
| This isn't a refutation. If the markets for christian stuff
| and <everything else> are sufficiently disjoint then it can
| and probably is perfectly rational to choose the bigger
| <everything else> pie rather than trying to compete for the
| Christian market. You see "ideological capture," other see
| the market at work. Somehow I also doubt passing laws in
| Florida to force Disney to make Mickey Mouse less woke will
| have the intended effects but it probably feels exciting to
| you all the same.
|
| To be clear I also think its a bit ridiculous to have Disney
| operate as a local goverment of a town. But I'd say that if
| Disney was a feed supply company and not a media/theme park
| outfit just the same while your (and Ron D's) concern seems
| to be that "Woke Disney" specifically had that jurisdiction.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| It's idealogical capture. Example: Hallmark doubles down on
| LGBT content, president splits to create the Great American
| Channel with pro-christian and anti-lgbt content. The GAC
| channel is one of the channels with the fastest increase in
| subscribers.
|
| This is a case study that several researchers we have are
| actively investigating as we look to buy ads on that
| network.
| chowchowchow wrote:
| I don't even understand, if the guy was able to leave and
| create a new channel to serve this audience how is that
| an example of what you call ideological capture.
|
| An important part of business is targeting your offering
| to the intended market -- it sounds like the intended
| market for Hallmark is not the same as the intended
| market for Great American Channel. If Hallmark content is
| so objectionable to its viewership that they lose all
| their viewers to Great American Channel, surely Hallmark
| will pivot, or go out of business.
|
| Or do you think Ron Desantis has to pass a law forcing
| Hallmark to make the kind of content which the Great
| America Channel shows? Is that your solution here, a
| command economy for basic cable?
| stuckinhell wrote:
| I agree you don't understand.
|
| Hallmark is a traditionally conservative channel, this is
| extremely well known to marketing arms of other firms.
| It's rapid switch to LGBT content was idealogical capture
| because a large amount of its executives,employees,and
| target market did not want such things.
|
| Hallmark is a company that was ideologically captured.
| Imagine a meat company, that forces its president out, to
| become a vegan company. That meat company underwent
| idealogical capture, and now works against its original
| goals that were profitable. Notice how this is different
| than a pivot, a pivot is executed when the company is not
| profitable.
|
| The Great America Channel was created and supported by
| many many ex-hallmark channel employees including
| executives, actors, finance, and more. It's subscribers
| increasing every day. Our firm fully expects it to become
| the new "hallmark" channel within 2 years.
| chowchowchow wrote:
| I guess I figured there was some import to the idea of
| ideological capture. If by that you mean leaders can set
| direction of their company, some can disagree and leave
| and found a competitor, and the winner can prevail in the
| market, then, that's what I call market capitalism and
| what you call ideological capture I suppose.
|
| (You're spelling "ideological" incorrectly)
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Fox is generally more popular among the very wealthy in the
| business world
| nickdothutton wrote:
| 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.
| Lammy wrote:
| And earlier than that in the 'teens:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
|
| "[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.'""
| yonaguska wrote:
| New people are born every day, and increasingly they are raised
| on the teat of whatever media they are exposed to at a young
| age.
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| I have believed this since 1993.
|
| I was a student in high school and did interviews for both a
| local newspaper and television station.
|
| In both instances they misrepresented what I said, editing or
| rearranging my words to construct a different narrative, or in
| the case of the newspaper they just made up things.
|
| The stories weren't even about anything serious, just local
| hometown feel-good filler stories and the actual, literal, lies
| that the journalists willfully constructed were inconsequential
| and actually made me look good.
|
| But I figured if are willing to lie about something so trivial as
| what they lied about, then it was highly likely the entire system
| is a sham.
| politician wrote:
| Only half?
| alphabettsy wrote:
| There's a certain subset of powerful people who would love
| everyone to distrust the media so they themselves can be the
| truth tellers.
|
| I don't think the news from major media organizations
| deliberately misleads people. I think people often mistake News-
| based entertainment shows for news as well as things like opinion
| and editorial for news. There is bias but that's not necessarily
| the same as being misleading.
| amoruso wrote:
| Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly
| reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw
| newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts,
| not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I
| saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and
| complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw
| troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors,
| and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of
| imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing
| these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional
| superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact,
| history being written not in terms of what happened but of what
| ought to have happened according to various "party lines."
|
| -- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
| nokcha wrote:
| Highly relevant:
|
| https://AstralCodexTen.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
| mc32 wrote:
| It's right in that they don't often feed you with provably
| false stuff --at least not at the time of publication (such as
| Hunter's Laptop being Russian misinfo but now owned up to by
| Hunter himself) but yes, they lie by omission, innuendo/leading
| and half truths. Similar to how quite a few social programs are
| based on small unreplicated studies that sound good on paper
| --the intent matters more than the results or reality.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Don't forget the talking about how one thing now could lead
| to something else down the road.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Slippery slope arguments that don't allow for a middle
| ground solution by painting one side as insane.
| tootie wrote:
| Bad take. For one, any time you try to evaluate "the media" as
| a single entity, you've already failed. Secondly, the first
| example of "not really lying" is most definitely a deliberate
| lie.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| The entire point of the article is to damn with faint praise.
| The NYT is no worse than infowars. Both may mislead and omit
| extremely relevant information but actual lies, no. It's a
| knock on the NYT and by extension the entire news media
| journalism complex.
| tootie wrote:
| Which is stupid. Infowars is an absolute sham from top to
| bottom and the leader of Infowars is an absolute monster
| who will spend the rest of his life paying restitution for
| well-proven slanders. And has never produced a single
| "scoop" of verifiable value in it's history.
|
| Meanwhile, the NY Times has made a few mistakes or let some
| bias slip through by the human beings who work there and
| produce thousands of relevant and accurate stories per
| year. Many of which are of vital national interest.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| How is reporting on actual data from a government website a
| deliberate lie?
| tootie wrote:
| Because the data was completely misrepresented. VAERS is
| unvetted raw data from the public. Anyone who has
| experience or imagined a malady after self-reporting that
| they received a vaccine dose can make a report to VAERS.
| Portraying VAERS reports as conclusive causation is most
| definitely lying.
|
| The headline presents the conclusions as unambiguous: "New
| Vaccine Data Shows Alarming Number Of Stillbirths And
| Miscarriages Caused By Covid Shot". Aside from referring to
| "covid shot" as a single thing and the 8 different vaccines
| available.
| bmacho wrote:
| > The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly.
| Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false.
| When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting
| things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while
| ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line
| category called "misinformation".
|
| I don't think it's true (why would it be), and even it is true,
| it is stupid to assume that it is true. It only can cause harm,
| but no benefits at all.
| whynaut wrote:
| > It only can cause harm, but no benefits at all.
|
| you're on HN. surely you have the imagination.
|
| edit: apparently not
| kqr wrote:
| What do you not believe is true? That print space in
| newspapers is limited so you have to report selectively and
| your news organisation may just find one category of articles
| more relevant or interesting or important than another?
| jeffwask wrote:
| No, I don't believe it. Corporate media owned by giant
| conglomerates is untrustworthy.
| anovikov wrote:
| What's to "believe" about it? It's what they are, what they
| always existed for: shape public opinion in a way beneficial for
| its sponsors. I can see nothing wrong about it, read both a left-
| leaning and a right-leaning source and you will be able to figure
| out what really happened, more or less.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| throwawaytimes wrote:
| Don't trust any news organization that publishes opinion pieces.
| Because they welcome people who align with their ideologies only.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Don't trust any news organization that doesn't publish opinion
| pieces, or pretends that the guest editorials they publish are
| anthropology rather than assistance. They're hiding their bias
| as neutrality.
| throwawaytimes wrote:
| You can validate news but not opinions.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Yes --- and the biggest offenders are the ones who regularly
| complain about it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Citation needed.
| brink wrote:
| With all due respect, you either don't live in the US or are
| living under a rock if you feel like you need citation.
| Denying the US's propaganda machine is like denying climate
| change at this point. The news corps don't tell flat lies,
| they cherry-pick facts and events, often reporting them out
| of proportion to paint a narrative; which is almost as bad as
| telling flat lies.
| marpstar wrote:
| Agreed. Pull up Fox News and MSNBC... they're never
| consistent, so who's telling the truth?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I was after a citation for the claim that talking about
| media bias is correlated with media bias.
|
| You seem to be talking about the general existence of media
| bias, for some reason.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| This isn't Wikipedia. It's a discussion.
|
| Almost everything that someone posts is an anecdote, and
| you can't expect everyone to come armed with reams of
| well-researched facts.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Another issue is the ease of cherry picking supporting
| "facts" to suit one's argument.
| jasmer wrote:
| I suggest not using the term 'propaganda' in this context
| becuase in all but very specific cases, that would be the
| wrong term.
|
| MSNBC doens't generally run 'propaganda' for Pfizer, so
| much as they will avoid stories that make them look bad as
| they are big advertisers.
|
| During a pandemic or war, the news system will close ranks
| and the stories come out differently but there are civil
| reasons for that.
|
| And FYI I'm not denying propaganda exists, but it's of a
| very different nature that most of the bias in the press.
|
| If all we had to deal with was state supported propaganda
| it would be frankly refreshing.
| keyanp wrote:
| Yes I know that traditionally media has been used for propaganda,
| but I'm surprised by the reactions in this thread and those who
| find what seems like fairly objective reporting as biased.
|
| Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news sites
| that are deliberately misleading? If this propaganda is so
| rampant then where is it? (Note: I'm opinion articles excluded
| because they are uh opinions).
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/section/world
| https://www.nytimes.com/section/us
| criddell wrote:
| Even great, objective reporting can be sullied by a headline
| writer who is rewarded for doing things the news org can easily
| measure.
|
| https://www.instagram.com/nyt_headlines
| sixQuarks wrote:
| There is so much. Any time there's a war, the NY Times
| manufactures consent, Iraq war and weapons of mass destruction
| for example, more than half of Americans thought Saddam had
| nukes.
|
| Russiagate is a recent example:
|
| https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/03/reveal...
|
| Misleading can also be what the NY Times doesn't cover. For
| example, the Columbia Journalism Review published a scathing
| report on how the media misled on Russiagate and NY Times and
| other MSM just tries to ignore it:
|
| https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
|
| Watch this 10 minute video by Glenn Greenwald that goes over in
| detail how the NY Times misleads and lies:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZB0jan4QSY
| EricE wrote:
| Yes, the utter malice that has been displayed by the NYT over
| the years is mind boggling - yet they still seem to have this
| reputation as "the gray lady" as if they should be held in
| upmost regard. I get it that people want to trust in our
| institutions - but seriously, people need to wake up and stop
| taking things for granted. At least display a slight does of
| healthy skepticism every now and then.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I don't think its individual 'truth failures' driving such a
| largescale change, but rather a gradual big-picture slide. For
| a softball example, an article on the front page of Hacker News
| right now is "Study Suggests Fructose Could Drive Alzheimer's
| Disease." See enough articles making such declarations and
| where they lead, and you gradually start dismissing them as
| probable junk without even opening them. It's not because
| you've carefully debunked past studies, but simply because what
| was implied (major breakthrough) and what happened (nothing)
| don't jive.
|
| So a better example for your search might be to go back to the
| Internet Archive, and grab the NYTimes from a year ago. And
| start reading the articles, and see if things ended up
| logically leading where the articles imply they would. Beyond
| this I also don't think you can, in good faith, disentangle
| opinion from fact. Yes we SHOULD, but it's not like people
| carefully scrutinize a headline or article to assess whether it
| was categorized as opinion, and then largely disregard it if
| so. People treat opinion and factual reporting, more or less,
| the same. And sites intentionally interweave them in order to
| drive clicks. So you can't have your cake and eat it. Generate
| clicks by publishing junk, and people are just going to
| remember you publishing junk.
| fundad wrote:
| Newspapers have a problem with quoting law enforcement as if
| it's fact. 2 Hugh examples:
|
| NYT quoted a Russian asset at the FBI claiming Trump's campaign
| had no clear links to Russia. Then Trump's own kid released the
| "later in the summer" thread. Newspapers quoted MPD about
| George Floyd's "medical emergency".
| EricE wrote:
| >Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news
| sites that are deliberately misleading?
|
| How about their "reporting" on the jews and certain activities
| with them in a European country before the US entered WWII?
| Just do a modicum of research and if you are not thoroughly
| repulsed by the character of the NYT...
| nostromo wrote:
| The 1619 project:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project#Historical_ac...
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...
| rhcom2 wrote:
| Controversial sure, deliberate misleading? I don't see it.
| nostromo wrote:
| The basis for the entire piece is false, as many historians
| have said. People within the Times have admitted as much,
| and have even silently edited the piece without issuing
| corrections to remove some of the most blatant falsehoods
| as an attempt to save face.
|
| The Times has lots of good journalism still, but is a
| propaganda laundering outlet. Falsehoods are published
| there so that other journalists, lawmakers, and academics
| can reference falsehoods in the Times as truth. This has
| happened in the past, just reference how they were used to
| launder misinformation with regards to weapons of mass
| destruction in Iraq.
| asdff wrote:
| You don't have to be deliberately misleading. You can
| intentionally omit certain stories or pieces of stories, and
| focus the bulk of your coverage one way or another to the
| omission of perhaps the wider truth. You can find expert
| opinions going every which way on every topic, so who you bring
| in as an expert to give an opinion also has weight to the
| narrative you are creating. In fact you have to do these things
| in many cases, because you have a finite amount of journalists
| you can hire or experts opinions you can reasonably draw on to
| cover a limited set of stories; news orgs don't scale to
| infinity. Perhaps in some cases, good access to sources depends
| on maintaining a friendly relationship toward these sources in
| terms of what you are publishing about them. Maybe you also
| don't want to jeopardize your relationship with your
| advertisers.
|
| Herman and Chomsky have written about this phenomenon:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
| myhorsehasworms wrote:
| Given enough time - NYT will generally correct a deliberately
| misleading story - so tracking down these sorts of changes
| requires use of internet archive.
|
| Here is one!
|
| On a story about Joe Rogan and his covid treatment - the NYT
| said "he was treated with a series of medications including
| ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug"
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210901220929/https://www.nytim...
|
| Later this was changed to "as well as ivermectin, a drug
| primarily used as a veterinary deworming agent."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221203221548/https://www.nytim...
|
| The first version of the article, calling ivermectin a
| "deworming veterinary drug" is intentionally misleading as it
| is WIDELY used internationally in humans for all sorts of
| issues.
|
| It is on the WHOs list of essential medications for HUMANS, it
| is the 420th most commonly described medication in the US for
| HUMANS, the inventor won the Nobel prize for how it helps
| HUMANS.
|
| Luckily, the NYT changed it to be less misleading - but the
| point stands. They intentionally misled their readers.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > Luckily, the NYT changed it to be less misleading - but the
| point stands. They intentionally misled their readers.
|
| It's telling that even when they issue a correction, the
| corrected language is always quite clearly still misleading.
|
| They did the same thing with the 1619 project. One of the
| original articles stated:
|
| >"...one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to
| declare their independence from Britain was because they
| wanted to protect the institution of slavery."
|
| Many prominent historians evicerated them for this
| fabrication.[0] The NYT responded in a manner scarcely
| discernable from lying[0 again], after which they were
| subject to a second eviceration[1], and only then did they
| issue a (weaselly) correction[2], which was presumably the
| smallest change they could manage.
|
| >"...one of the primary reasons *some of* the colonists
| decided to declare their independence from Britain was
| because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."
|
| Which, of course, is clearly intended to suggest the very
| same lie.
|
| [0]https://archive.is/OC7xu [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/id
| eas/archive/2020/01/1619-proje... [2]https://archive.is/oHWLR
| fundad wrote:
| This is why some media outlets (I don't need to describe
| them) don't do corrections.
| ChickenNugger wrote:
| The whole entire Russiagate thing was a complete fabrication
| and tons of articles were based on it:
| https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
| manv1 wrote:
| Let's go Brandon -> this is probably the most obvious of the
| stories.
|
| Pretty much all of the followup stories re: the Abbot formula
| factory in the NYT and WaPo say that the factory was closed "in
| response to the FDA investigation" instead of the reality,
| which is it was closed "because the FDA needed to investigate."
|
| The difference? The factory wasn't closed due to an FDA
| finding, it was closed so the FDA could find something. Big
| difference.
|
| Those two are pretty simple.
|
| Another trend is calling pretty much everything "voter
| suppression." Is asking for an ID voter suppression? Apparently
| it is. What about not allowing random people to collect and
| deliver ballots? Yes. What about making rules and regulations
| about ballot drop-off sites? Yes, voter suppression. The
| guardian is notorious for doing this.
| te_3239843 wrote:
| The full surveys are worth reading IMHO:
|
| Part 1: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/10/Amer... Part 2:
| https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Amer...
|
| Some thoughts:
|
| The first part of the survey focuses on the question: who pays
| for news? An executive overview of the opinions is: most (3 in 4)
| say that news organizations are first and foremost motivated by
| their own financial interests. However... well over half of
| people say that they will never pay for news (although this
| summary obscures a lot of details in the PDF).
|
| So, there's a bit of a contradiction here. News is usually a
| business first and foremost (government sponsored news
| organizations being the main exception), and one would postulate
| that the less reader subscriptions are necessary, the more news
| will tilt towards satisfying commercial interests (or other
| sources of income) above all.
|
| As far as trust is concerned, online news and US cable news fairs
| poorly. The former despite a growing amount of people preferring
| to get their news online; the later despite being the most used
| news source currently. "Big 3" network news and (surprisingly for
| me considering the network decay of local news towards low-
| quality national-generated junk I've seen over time) local news
| TV fares better.
|
| Low trust in national news is linked to a negative outlook in
| democracy and other aspects of the political process.
|
| One aspect of these types of reports that I always wonder about
| is how much of these actually reflect issues in interpreting news
| in its core. The current digital era generates _tons_ of
| articles, much of which is useless noise. So sometimes, I feel
| that some complaints about media in reality are an inability to
| sort out critical information from the noise in media (both in
| news and everything else).
|
| So, an interesting tidbit of this survey to me is this finding:
| "Americans with low emotional trust in national news are much
| more likely to find it difficult to sort out the facts in today's
| information environment."
|
| Is information overload a huge part of the trust problem? I
| suspect this is the case. A conclusion I postulate is that (as
| per the above) too much of the "news" is (to equivalate with
| food) low-nutrition "junk food" designed merely to stimulate
| clicks and maybe some base emotional response, but offering
| nothing insightful or valuable for the long term.
| jasmer wrote:
| Good, we need to stop being naive.
|
| Obvoiusly they do.
|
| They are clickbait and narrative drive, almost all of them.
|
| Even those with high journalistic standards can be heavily
| misleading.
|
| MSNBC has high journalistic standards (and some brilliant minds,
| with great researchers) and some of their taalking heads have
| pretty heavy bias and FYI I'm not 'taking sides' here.
|
| The most interesting thing about the 'news' is trying to
| determine where the bias comes from.
| gtmitchell wrote:
| 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.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| 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.
| megaman821 wrote:
| 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.
| didntreadarticl wrote:
| American news organisations are all paid for by advertisers
| who have a vested interest in the status quo
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It's hard to take this comment at face value when the
| content on CNN and Fox News is so different. I wouldn't
| really argue against CNN being interested in maintaining
| the status quo, but Fox News is reactionary.
| goodpoint wrote:
| They are different but they both fit into the very small
| american https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
| krapp wrote:
| Fox news is reactionary against progressivism, leftism,
| etc... but the status quo in the US is pro military, pro
| oligarchy, pro gun, pro life, conservative, white and
| Christian. The "leftist" party in the US, the Democrats,
| can at best be described as center-right, there is no
| true left with any real political power.
|
| The Democrats are pro-war, pro-capitalism, only nominally
| anti-gun, pander to the Christians as much as
| Republicans, and don't even side with labor anymore, as
| we saw with Biden crushing the railroad workers' strike,
| which was even supported by supposed progressive
| firebrand AOC.
| didntreadarticl wrote:
| There's more overlap between them than you realise, if
| you compare what counts as mainstream 'left' and 'right'
| in the USA vs Europe
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Do you have an example of a particular interest in status
| quo? Status quo can be both good or bad.
| didntreadarticl wrote:
| I would point to the general way that in the USA the
| balance of rights is tipped away from people and towards
| corporations, e.g. very little sick pay, very little paid
| leave, very little parental leave, very few rights for
| employees, Healthcare provided at the whims of employers
| and insurance companies. etc
| goatlover wrote:
| Is that the fault of advertisers or strong
| ideological/political current against such things?
| didntreadarticl wrote:
| The strong ideological/political current is the status
| quo that I referred to previously
| lib-dev wrote:
| Advertisers influence the ideological/political current
| by manipulating the minds of the people. So yes.
| notdonspaulding wrote:
| > 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.
| goatlover wrote:
| 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.
| donohoe wrote:
| >> 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.)
| asdff wrote:
| These orgs are notoriously political, though. LA times in
| particular has an axe to grind against cal HSR:
|
| 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.
| locustous wrote:
| > 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?
| donohoe wrote:
| My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow
| works. You may not even be aware there is one. There is. It
| usually accounts for a lot of this. Not perfect, most
| systems are not - but it goes a long way to providing
| better reporting.
|
| Think of it from a coding point of view.
|
| Many people think that some developers write code directly
| on production, to their personal style, and thats it. That
| certainly happens.
|
| Other teams have coding standards, style standards. Tabs
| versus Spaces. CamelCase for Class names but something
| different for variables?
|
| The commit their code, and do a pull request and someone
| else reviews it. Edits are proposed or demanded. Code is
| reviewed again, then maybe it goes to production. Its been
| known for production code to have issues, but generally
| after going through a process most are prevented then if
| the developer was able to merge in code without review.
|
| The larger orgs I mentioned have a involved editorial
| process for editing stories.
| locustous wrote:
| > My point is that you do not know how the editorial
| workflow works.
|
| I think you have it the other way around. The bias is
| institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it
| essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias
| point of view out of the organization.
|
| Look at how tightly political leanings are tied to news
| outlets.
|
| If it were as easy and objective as you say we would get
| a lot more random pieces out of outlets instead of the
| rather rigid ideological publications we see in existence
| today.
|
| Even Reddit subs and hacker news, which are much more
| random than news outlets, have pretty clear political
| leanings. With sufficient samples you can even break down
| the subgroups within the community.
|
| News orgs don't have nearly the internal diversity
| required to possibly remove such bias. They are
| homogenous.
| donohoe wrote:
| >> I think you have it the other way around. The bias is
| institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it
| essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias
| point of view out of the organization.
|
| That appears to be your opinion, likely that of many
| here. However thats not how it works.
|
| I have worked in media for 20 years and have had the
| opportunity to see how many editors, newsrooms, and
| publications in general work. I have sat in editorial
| meetings where coverage and stories are discussed. I have
| been present when editors and writers go back and fourth
| on stories.
|
| The problem is that for any given news org, you and most
| people do not know what it takes to publish a story at
| some of these places. Thats NOT a criticism of you - I
| think we'd all be better off if folks knew how it worked.
| locustous wrote:
| > Its been known for production code to have issues, but
| generally after going through a process most are
| prevented then if the developer was able to merge in code
| without review
|
| One more point.
|
| Companies never ever have evil anti user dark patterns
| enter production because of code reviews, do they?
| donohoe wrote:
| The analogy only goes so far.
|
| That said, I believe you're thinking of Fox News.
| brookst wrote:
| 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).
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| But "meant to" by whom?
|
| The tens of thousands of reporters, mostly young liberal
| arts majors?
|
| It's the "meant to" that makes it a conspiracy theory. Tell
| me that news is unhealthy, or that each individual actor
| has self interest in promoting some agenda, and I think
| it's an interesting topic.
|
| But as soon as there is a person or group out there
| secretly "meaning for" some result from the actions of tens
| of thousands of people, that's by definition a conspiracy.
|
| I think it's just human nature. We are wired to believe
| that "there must be some explanation", and it's easy to
| lean into a sentient God or an evil cabal.
|
| IMO the truth, that it's a runaway uncoordinated emergent
| behavior with thousands of actors pushing and pulling in
| different directions for their own reasons, is a lot
| scarier.
| overrun11 wrote:
| > But as soon as there is a person or group out there
| secretly "meaning for" some result from the actions of
| tens of thousands of people, that's by definition a
| conspiracy.
|
| There are many interest groups pushing to influence mass
| behavior in many kinds of ways. Some do so transparently,
| others less so.
|
| We've overloaded "conspiracy" to mean at least two
| different things: the traditional definition of secret
| plotting to do bad things and a more modern derogatory
| connotation involving far-fetched conspiracies like
| politicians being lizard people.
|
| Something can be a conspiracy and also be true and it is
| reasonable to investigate the extent to which reporting
| is influenced by different interests.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 'meant to' by incentive structures and culture in how
| these companies work, which are set by the 'higher ups'
| who benefit most from them. For example, a popular anchor
| (say, Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow) will naturally
| also be popular and influential within their associated
| organization. They benefit from pushing a certain
| perspective, and so they will of course influence the
| organization to further move in that direction.
|
| While there isn't some hidden moustache twirling
| mastermind carefully directing all of the media about
| what to report and how to report it. Practically, I don't
| think the distinction matters too much because they all
| share the same incentives and they are individually
| deliberate in applying those same incentives.
|
| As a broad example, Tucker and Rachel both benefit from
| appealing to their respective base's political views.
| They also benefit greatly from the bickering between
| their bases, thus it suits them to further push that
| divide (if they actually get issues addressed they have
| to constantly figure out what people want next to stay
| relevant). Similar incentives apply to politicians, so
| they do the same. Both Tucker and Rachel also benefit
| from being close with the associated politicians, so they
| tow that line too. The result being that they act in
| concert without explicitly conspiring with each other to
| do so.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Triangulation is the best strategy to approximate the truth and
| counter biases/agendas.
|
| 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.
| aww_dang wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| [dead]
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| 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.
| randcraw wrote:
| 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.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| The same strategy holds: one never looks at a single data
| point as "truth".
|
| Once again, even in a Reddit thread, the goal is to
| triangulate. This may include, for example, seeking out
| info in other sub-Reddits (moderator bias), seeking more
| niche sub-Reddits, etc.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| This is not binary.
|
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| That's right and you need some sort of boundary of what are
| you willing to discuss. Eg. for the guy I mentioned it's
| very clearly justifying Russian invasion, but then he's
| open about it.
|
| Of course it sometimes creates other problems. In the end I
| think root problem is almost complete lack of
| responsibility for lying to wide public(not even legal
| responsibility, but just social). As climate change denier
| you're free to repeat the same disproven BS over and over,
| without no evidence and nothing happens.
| smcl wrote:
| Thing is the lizard-people theory is ridiculous at its face
| and it could be argued that giving someone like that
| airtime would _harm_ the lizard-people conspiracy. It 's
| the more mainstream (but still niche) beliefs that are
| vulnerable in this one-on-one environment, like a debate on
| man's effect on climate change. There's a pretty general
| consensus that we _are_ contributing to the change of our
| planet 's climate, but hosting a "both sides" debate on
| something like this makes it seem like it's an open
| question. And a motivated bad actor who wanted to shift the
| needle has _many_ tools at their disposal that an honest
| person doesn 't - lying, misleading, misrepresenting
| research, or simply pulling the "just asking questions, do
| your own research!" line.
|
| Sorry to be clear we're both in agreement, I just could see
| a both-sides-er chiming in that actually a debate on
| lizard-people would be a bloodbath and therefore everything
| actually _should_ be presented this way, and wanted to
| added another issue.
|
| Additionally for another real-world example with more
| immediate consequences we can look at the whole "vaccines
| causing autism" issue - something that was completely
| fabricated by a now-disgraced ex-doctor called Andrew
| Wakefield, but which gained traction due to being presented
| to the public as if we just don't know for sure (when we
| did, and his "research" was utterly eviscerated). Wakefield
| was basically laughed out of the medical profession, but
| due to the legwork the media did he's managed to establish
| himself over in the USA and his work effectively kick-
| started the modern-day anti-vaxx movement.
| fuckyah wrote:
| [dead]
| Jcowell wrote:
| > and it could be argued that giving someone like that
| airtime would harm the lizard-people conspiracy. It's the
| more mainstream (but still niche) be
|
| Not necessarily. The thing about arguments is that it's
| like businesses. What determines your success isn't if
| you have the best product. It's that you have the best
| _business_. Marketing , connections , etc. The best
| product , and likewise the best argument, doesn't
| necessarily win on merit alone. You just have to make it
| _look_ good enough for it to be viable , even if the idea
| isn't viable at all.
|
| I'm not saying that _I_ could get on TV and argue about
| lizard-people. But there certainly is _someone_ who could
| and that's enough.
| b4je7d7wb wrote:
| 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.
| mantas wrote:
| It's not an issue. You just assume that this is government
| voice. It's good to have direct propaganda channel to learn
| what your government is up to.
|
| But it shall not be confused with journalism.
| [deleted]
| arecurrence wrote:
| One must only take a glance at the ownership breakdown of any
| major story on Ground News and it will be rather clear they may
| be onto something.
|
| 3 or 4 conglomerates are often 85%+ of the news sources.
| beej71 wrote:
| I never thought it was malice. I thought it was greed. They'd say
| whatever made the most money. People talk about news agencies
| trying to brainwash people to a particular world view, but I
| don't think that has some kind of left/right bias. It has a "most
| money" bias.
| cryptope wrote:
| Almost certainly true. Just look at how they dealt with the
| Epstein story, for example. So many high-profile rapists and
| child abusers, and it was all swept under the rug. The news
| organizations are captured by these abusive elites.
| StreamBright wrote:
| "News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is
| advertising." - William Randolph Hearst
|
| I think it is undeniable that new organizations are deliberately
| misleading the public in many cases, not necessarily part of the
| conspiracy but simply acting as the agent of the government.
| There are many cases when is became obvious.
|
| It is also easy to find sources that are free from government
| collusion usually classified either far left or far right
| whatever those mean.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| They don't?
| [deleted]
| jsonne wrote:
| 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).
| lumb63 wrote:
| 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.
| fundad wrote:
| The last thing conspiracy theorists are willing to blame is
| capitalism.
| verteu wrote:
| > Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional
| to pull something like that off even if they wanted to.
|
| A moment's research shows this to be false -- eg
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_prog...
| dudul wrote:
| That's exactly what someone involved in a global cabal would
| say! /jk
| Liquix wrote:
| "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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20131025035711/http://www.carlbe...
| l3mure wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] Street Without Joy, pp. 331-337
| djkivi wrote:
| Did CIA Director William Casey really say, "We'll know our
| disinformation program is complete when everything the
| American public believes is false"?
|
| https://www.quora.com/Did-CIA-Director-William-Casey-
| really-...
| o_1 wrote:
| _cough_ davos
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _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".
| [deleted]
| twelve40 wrote:
| So much bitterness here in the comments like "duh", "took them
| long enough", etc. So, honest question: if, you know, a pillar of
| democracy is by default laughed at, how can then this democracy
| function? If half the country thinks they are getting
| brainwashed, and the other half doesn't think they are getting
| brainwashed (while possibly getting brainwashed right in that
| same moment). How can such people make educated choices?
| dudul wrote:
| Let me ask you what educated choices do they have to make?
| twelve40 wrote:
| voting, which is presumably the cornerstone of the society,
| is done by this same mass of people, and results in electing
| people with the most deadly powers in the world, among other
| things.
| dudul wrote:
| Interesting how you conflate "voting" and "electing
| people". While voting is indeed a corner stone of
| democracy, as a supporter of sortition I think that
| elections are anti-democratic.
|
| You're putting people "in charge" (as if people in office
| were actually in charge) by selecting between a very very
| narrow pool of pre-approved candidates.
| VLM wrote:
| The purpose of democracy is to pacify people who vote into
| thinking that they have responsibility or they are somehow
| "heard" while leaving the people who select the candidates in
| charge.
|
| "Look, you had a choice between two candidates whom are
| identical other than social issues both sides have agreed to
| never actually do anything about, so stop rebelling and
| protesting in the streets, you got to vote so now its your turn
| to mindlessly obey your leaders and stop complaining"
| carapace wrote:
| They don't make educated choices, they don't make choices at
| all.
|
| Human societies can be broadly categorized into three groups:
|
| 1) The largest group (typically more than half) don't know
| what's going on.
|
| 2) The second group sees what's going on but doesn't do
| anything about it.
|
| 3) The third group (which is really tiny, like 1-in-10000) sees
| what's going on and does things, or they try to.
|
| The open secret among groups 2 and 3 is that group 1 has to be
| managed (otherwise they go off the rails and crash civilization
| pretty quickly. It's happened before.)
|
| So you get things like Religion, Sports, War, etc. all more-or-
| less to keep "the masses" on the tracks. The invention of the
| TV was a huge advance for this purpose. Suddenly people are
| staying inside and not causing trouble! You can even sort of
| program them: en mass people behave with statistical
| predictability. (E.g. you can get women to start smoking
| cigarettes. True example.)
|
| Anyway, from this POV (I read "Manufacturing Consent" at a
| tender age) the masses have no agency. Democracy is a side-
| show, part of the management API for the masses.
|
| What we're seeing now (from my POV) is the Internet ripping the
| lid off of the propaganda control system. "How Ya Gonna Keep
| 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
| rewilding wrote:
| Can you support your claims as for these ratios? I can't
| support my claim well, but I picture people to be more
| equally-distributed among those 3 groups.
|
| Also, I'd state it more starkly: 1) 1/3 don't know or care
| about the suffering of people in general. 2) 1/3 wish harm on
| others or care so little about others that they'll seek even
| small personal gains at others' great expense. 3) 1/3 at
| least feel compassion for others, but might not have the
| ability or resolve to make substantial change.
|
| Why do you think that group 1 is the one that needs to be
| controlled? Why not the ones seeking harm? I encourage
| apathetic people to become more politically-conscious, but I
| don't blame people for wanting to live their own lives.
|
| I do agree that a lot of institutions are just toys: certain
| religions which talk about peace but whose followers openly
| and proudly support policies which harm others, political
| parties which offer team identities but no real change, etc.
|
| Please don't take anything here as a blanket statement
| against any particular group.
| [deleted]
| aww_dang wrote:
| Educated people disagree on all kinds of things. There are
| various schools of thought.
|
| Perhaps smaller polities would be less controversial. Perhaps
| mass democracy or democracy generally is disfunctional.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Hmm if only the founding document of America was written in
| such a way as to divide the country into smaller polities
| that could focus on their own issues, we could I don't know
| divide the country into 50 geographical areas and have them
| manage within their borders pretty much anything that isn't
| defense, foreign policy, or weights and measures. But that's
| nonsense of course, why shouldn't voters in SF decide the
| best way for the people of Bismark to live.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There is an infinite amount of things to report on. Every
| preference is politics. Most news organizations in the US are
| left leaning white collar interest groups, half the country is
| right leaning. Hence the results here.
| jawns wrote:
| 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.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| 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?
| jahsome wrote:
| Former journalist.
|
| 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.
| latchkey wrote:
| > Media literacy should be mandated in school.
|
| Just try for basic literacy first. 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.
|
| https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
| jahsome wrote:
| I don't disagree but it doesn't matter in this case. In
| fact, this is _precisely_ why (especially local) newspapers
| targeted "5th grade level" vocab and syntax, or lower. It's
| been the unofficial standard since long before the study
| cited.
| latchkey wrote:
| It absolutely matters for cognitive ability. You might be
| reading the equivalent of children's books, but if you
| can't understand the deeper message, you're going to have
| a very hard time telling right from wrong.
|
| The analogy I use for software developers is that the
| difference between a jr and sr developer is that a sr can
| evaluate 5 different database technologies and choose the
| right one based on the current use case. A jr developer
| chooses whatever is trending on hackernews.
| autoexec wrote:
| It's the same for math and science. Most Americans aren't
| capable of anything beyond a 6th grade level. The lack of
| literacy and numeracy in this country explains a lot about
| where we are today.
| latchkey wrote:
| We prioritize other things, like military spending, over
| teacher salaries.
| DLTADragonHawk wrote:
| 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.
| jahsome wrote:
| I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with non profit trade
| groups, as they're generally full of people with very tight
| butts about journalistic integrity and fewer
| advertisers/grant committees to please.
|
| Honestly though the goal is to get a good lay of the land
| for both how a story goes from whiteboard/notebook
| brainstorm to print, and the general shape of the industry.
|
| Small but impactful example: headlines are often written by
| a different person than the article. This leads to a lot of
| conflict, which is healthy in terms of producing quality
| journalism, but potentially confusing for the consumer who
| may not understand why.
|
| The main goals would be
|
| - Understand the roles of reporters (gathering), editors
| (verification), managing editors (suits), publishers (sugar
| daddies) and their roles for a single given piece, and
| within the org at large
|
| - Media conglomerates disproportionately dominate local
| news. It's not just Fox and CNN or the NYT/WaPo, and the
| impact is far more damaging than the more obvious corporate
| influence).
|
| These days I tend to stay away from the news for the most
| part, in an attempt to retain sanity. You don't need 24
| hours of news. I read up for about 2-3 hours a week and
| feel more informed than ever.
|
| Here are a few resources who probably can get you set in a
| better direction than I would:
|
| Columbia journalism review Nieman lab Poytner institute
| spacemadness wrote:
| 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.
| fidgewidge wrote:
| _> 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.
|
| There's way more.
| Retric wrote:
| Average doesn't mean everyone all the time.
|
| 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.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| What sources do you personally trust?
| Metricon wrote:
| While in no way a panacea, you might want to check out
| Ground News (https://ground.news/). They at least make an
| attempt to point out how different news sources respond to
| the same stories. Perhaps most interesting are the
| "Blindspot" sections which show news stories that are not
| covered by opposing political sides.
| lodi wrote:
| Not OP but for me it's not about what sources to trust
| (blindly? literally none of them), but what type of
| information you can trust. Naked facts seem to be safe for
| the time being, context should be assumed to be heavily
| biased in a particular direction, and opinions are worse
| than worthless.
| fidgewidge wrote:
| Unfortunately I've found journalists and/or their sources
| often lie about basic facts too, even when those facts
| are easily checked.
|
| You'd think they wouldn't do this. Probably they do it
| because they know most people will take factual claims at
| face value, or the journalists are so sloppy/confused
| that they themselves don't realize the claims are wrong.
| fidgewidge wrote:
| The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their
| claims, which are correct when checked, which allow or
| encourage open commenting with third party moderation so I
| can quickly see disagreement, etc. Mostly that means
| Substacks, these days.
| gaws wrote:
| > Mostly that means Substacks, these days.
|
| Yikes.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their
| claims, which are correct when checked
|
| What makes the _citation_ correct or trustworthy?
|
| Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?
| fidgewidge wrote:
| Turtles all the way down, yep. At some level you have to
| rely on heuristics and just make a judgement call, but
| the checking at the prior levels still has a lot of
| value.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Straight news reporting _has_ no lower level, short of
| your going out and talking to the same kind of people the
| reporter did.
|
| Commentary can have such citations. Investigative
| journalism might have citable passages _in part_ , but
| ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary
| source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever
| attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself
| (which won't be some hyperlink you can go check).
| Journalists create the things that _others_ cite. If they
| could produce what they need mainly by reading and
| citing, they wouldn 't be journalists.
| fidgewidge wrote:
| News can be checked in lots of ways. If there's a factual
| claim about some public data, check it. If someone is
| assigned a job title, is that actually their job title?
| Does it contain internal contradictions? Does it make
| claims that contradict knowledge you already have, or
| things that were previously claimed? All those types of
| checks are ones I've done before to news stories and
| found they failed them.
|
| Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone
| discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder
| victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the
| 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID
| doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of
| something else and stuck his name into Google. That
| surfaced another news report about the murder. This is
| _basic_ fact checking but the NYT didn 't do it. The data
| was too good to check, so they didn't.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That murder victim in the C-19 data was only exposed
| because he was #6 in the list. Imagine if his name+age
| were buried on page 23/45. Checking each and every name
| in a list that long is beyond a reasonable standard for
| fact-checking for an individual journalist.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Any you particularly recommend? Trying to stretch my
| reading material.
| blululu wrote:
| Not the OP, but this is a leading question that goes in the
| wrong direction. You can't really trust any source 100%.
| You need to do your own research and be humble about it.
| Journalists are good at this kind of work but they make
| plenty of mistakes (and as the child of Journalists I will
| also add that they can be total idiots who are more focused
| on emotional stories than facts). Basic media literacy with
| a healthy dose of skepticism and humility is necessary to
| get anything more than urban legends out of the paper.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The problem with "doing your own research" is that it is
| unworkable as a policy for the masses, as it leads most
| to settle on believing well-spoken hucksters. Humility to
| know when you should trust someone else as a guide is
| necessary until you've developed the personal
| experience+knowledge to evaluate sources independently.
| mlindner wrote:
| > - 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".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The Columbia Journalism Review is about as reliable on
| media matters as you could want, and Jeff Gerth is a
| Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with decades of
| investigative journalism experience at the NY Times.
|
| He lays out an extensive case showing that there was an
| effort to mislead the public.
|
| https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-
| versus-p...
| adolph wrote:
| _"There was message distortion," former director of
| national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told The Fact
| Checker in a telephone interview. "All we were doing was
| raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian
| disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we
| said. It was clear in paragraph five." He said he was
| unaware of how Biden described the letter during the
| debate._
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-
| bi...
| mlindner wrote:
| Yes there's any number of sources one can dig up to
| support either argument that come from well trusted
| sources.
|
| Russia's known to want to disrupt elections anywhere they
| can however. They'll even spread in the media the
| _appearance_ that elections were distorted to muddy the
| waters further even if no election interference took
| place.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
|
| https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
| adolph wrote:
| I don't doubt that many foreign entities have interests
| at stake and ongoing efforts to influence US elections
| and vice versa. These efforts will take many forms with
| some appearing less legitimate than others.
|
| If you see the world as indecipherably muddy other than
| Russia has some otherworldly electoral propaganda power,
| well then it isn't clear why you comment.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Those are pretty much all problems at the level of the
| editors, not the individual journalists.
|
| > 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.
| jawns wrote:
| 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.
| skibidibipiti wrote:
| 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?
| lubesGordi wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| A major factor here is trustworthy news organizations are
| extremely vulnerable to being bought as propaganda platforms.
| remote_phone wrote:
| 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.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| 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).
| Merad wrote:
| If you really think that this started with Trump, you must
| not have been paying attention before. The media
| (conservative media in particular) hounded Obama about some
| extraordinarily stupid things. Famously there was a
| significant controversy one time about the color of his
| suit [0]. I honestly can't remember whether Bush 43 got
| similar treatment. Maybe the prominence of
| clickbait/outrage journalism didn't come about until the
| end of his presidency? Or maybe the incidents have just
| faded from my memory.
|
| 0:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_tan_suit_controversy
| godshatter wrote:
| > I honestly can't remember whether Bush 43 got similar
| treatment.
|
| Probably, but the main thing at that time was 9/11 and
| the Iraq war. Media was pushing the weapons of mass
| destruction narrative hard, and woe be the person that
| disagreed.
| colpabar wrote:
| I don't remember that one, but I do remember fox talking
| about how obama was "disrespecting the office" because he
| took his suit jacket off in the oval office. It was at
| that point that I realized fox is not a serious news
| organization, because who could seriously think that was
| worth talking about? And then when trump got two scoops
| of ice cream, every major "news" outlet except fox ran
| stories about it, and I decided to stop taking _any_ of
| them seriously, because they exist to make money by
| pissing people off, not to help us understand what 's
| going on in the world.
| q1w2 wrote:
| It got way WAY worse with Trump.
|
| Many news organizations happily threw out their
| journalistic integrity to "fight Trump". Honest reporting
| became taboo. You were either FOR or AGAINST Trump, and
| anyone not choosing a side was just secretly on the other
| side.
| rewilding wrote:
| Please share some examples of the unfair reporting on
| Trump. But while you're looking, take note of how many
| articles were on substantive evils he was constantly
| committing.
| overrun11 wrote:
| It is inarguable that there were many examples of unfair
| or plainly factually wrong reporting on Trump. This list
| was compiled just a year in:
| http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-
| rep...
|
| > But while you're looking, take note of how many
| articles were on substantive evils he was constantly
| committing.
|
| The implication you are making is that it's acceptable
| for the media to report inaccurately or unfairly if the
| subject deserves it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > It got way WAY worse with Trump.
|
| Trump was a _birther_ FFS. He was part of that lovely
| group of people who thought Obama was the antichrist for
| wearing a tan suit or eating arugula. He made media
| worse, not the other way around. They sullied themselves
| by pandering to his and his supporters ' insanity. This
| happened way before he became president.
| brewdad wrote:
| TBF, the man DID try to overthrow an election. Perhaps
| those news organizations were on to something.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Some of the stuff they covered was ridiculous, too, but
| they guy was an absolute _machine_ for creating gaffes
| and outrageous behavior. Giving him the same treatment as
| any other candidate would still have looked like
| "picking on him".
|
| If anything, they didn't pick on him enough for some
| things--I still can't believe the man became President
| after suggesting his supporters might assassinate his
| opponent, if she won. And that wasn't spin or bias,
| that's just _what he did_ , the whole thing's available
| for anyone to watch. When he did that and his campaign
| kept trucking along without a hitch was the moment I
| decided our democracy itself was in danger (which turned
| out to be _very_ right--maybe I should join a think-tank
| or become a political commentator or something, I also
| got a ton of the course of Iraq more-correct than most
| commentators)
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| ...by covering the nonsense of the Trump show, they
| lessened the impact of the news of the real evil of the
| attempted overthrow. Instead of being presented as the
| danger it was, it was reduced to the season finale of the
| Trump show.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| Who attempted to overthrow an election and where?
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| The people who built a gallows outside of the building
| where the election results were being officially counted
| and threatened to use it to lynch the person presiding
| over that count if he didn't produce a fraudulent count
| in their favor and then stormed said building with every
| appearance of intending to carry out that threat.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The call to the Georgia Sec. of State asking to find
| 11,809 more votes was far closer to the genuine overthrow
| attempt.
| anthomtb wrote:
| I remember left-wing media hounding Bush 43 for his
| pronunciation of nuclear:
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/09/why-does-
| bush-go....
|
| That Slate article is actually pretty fair to Bush. But
| others from that time, which I cannot find, were not so
| fair. Nuc-u-lar versus nuc-lee-are certainly gave my
| left-leaning extended family reason for an hour of Bush-
| bashing at one of our gatherings. While I thought then,
| and still do now, that the whole thing was ridiculous.
| remote_phone wrote:
| Fox has always been biased and never trustworthy. Trump
| is definitely what broke the rest of the mainstream media
| though.
| lordfrito wrote:
| Before Trump they dumped on Obama
|
| Before that they dumped on Bush II and Chaney
|
| Before _that_ they dumped on Clinton
|
| Before _that_ they dumped on Bush I (I remember the
| ridiculous attacks on Quayle)
|
| I'm sure they did it to Regan too, and Carter before
| that, and Ford before that.
|
| But I would agree that any pretense of "balanced" or
| "fair" reporting got thrown out of the window with Trump.
| It's like they aren't even hiding their intentions
| anymore.
| djkivi wrote:
| For some reason they don't seem to go after Biden to the
| same degree.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Before _that_ that, there was yellow journalism.
|
| Before _that_ , there were revolutionary pamphleteers.
|
| The Trump hysteria was a reversion to the norm.
| ss108 wrote:
| Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them
| is sufficient to expose them as bad people, I don't really
| think there was much spin. In fact, I would say the media
| was far too nice to him and his supporters, and continues
| to be.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| You can find unflattering footage of anybody's
| supporters.
|
| I was never a Trump supporter, but as someone who has
| friends and family who are/were supporters, I resent the
| situation where people think like you do.
|
| In fact, I think that attitude is part of why these
| people end up voting for Trump. They know what the cool
| kids on the blue team say about them when they aren't in
| the room (hell, even when they are in the room). Not to
| give all Trump supporters a pass, but they're not all (or
| even most) the cartoon character you have in mind.
| cbar_tx wrote:
| cool kids? unreal.
| ss108 wrote:
| I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I
| unfriended them. I believe in morals. I believe in God.
| There's no way I can be friends with people who, at best,
| only pay lip service to those concepts while using them
| to further patent evil.
|
| To be clear, I'm not really on the "blue team" either.
| But that's a team that hasn't been taken over by the
| worst of its fans, nor is it motivated by things such as
| xenophobia, willful and prideful ignorance, and malice.
|
| I think the view that you are advocating for basically
| bends morality to accommodate the fact that so many
| people have to do and believe x. I'm a religious person.
| I don't believe in changing the criteria just to avoid an
| unsavory conclusion about people.
|
| (To be clear, I mention the God thing not so much as a
| "holier than thou" thing, but in allusion to the fact
| that these differences cannot be bridged--I find it
| incredibly idiotic when people say things like "we need
| to talk to each other more to stop the division". Such a
| thing would only fuel the division, in my opinion.)
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| Agreed, I did the same. I decided a couple years into his
| presidency that I'm fundamentally morally incompatible
| with people who could support such an abhorrent asshole.
| Not to mention their incredible propensity for
| confirmation bias, which is frankly reason enough on its
| own to remove them from my life. I lost a few
| acquaintances and one friend during the latter Trump
| years. I value my friends highly, but I regret nothing,
| and would happily do it again.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| > I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I
| unfriended them. I believe in morals.
|
| Ironically, the behavior you describe is immoral in my
| view. I also am a religious person, and I also don't
| believe in bending morals or that talk will heal all
| disagreements. However, with political opinions, the
| primary reason otherwise well intentioned people support
| bad things is that they don't understand that they are
| bad. Shunning someone actively makes that situation
| worse. Sure you can't win people over by arguments, but
| you can influence them gradually, and if they are your
| friends, you should want to do that for their own good.
| ss108 wrote:
| I understand your perspective, but I do not think that
| they do not understand that the things are bad. From what
| I can tell from conversations those people, they, for the
| most part, just don't give a shit about what's good and
| bad.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Have you heard of the fundamental attribution error?
|
| https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-
| attribution...
|
| I think it's relevant here.
|
| Added to "don't understand" and "dont care" is a third
| option: "don't agree", based on different upbringings and
| cultural values, some of which you or I would find
| abhorrent, because of our own upbringing and cultural
| values. But I think you should recognize that there is a
| good chance you'd have the same beliefs if you had the
| same life experience.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Are you saying unfriend as in real life? I've only heard
| that term referring to social media, which I don't see as
| the same thing as real friendship.
|
| Do you pay taxes to your government? There's a good
| chance you're funding some evil shit (among good things
| as well obviously).
|
| Are you part of a church? Some of the people involved
| with that church probably do or have historically done
| some pretty evil shit.
|
| I think life is messier than the picture that you're
| painting.
| ss108 wrote:
| Yes, unfriended in real life.
|
| Your examples are so many degrees removed that I do not
| think they are apposite. For example, people who
| supported Trump did so with full knowledge of his
| attitude towards immigrants, asylum seekers, etc., his
| rhetoric about building the wall (which many of his
| supporters cited specifically as their reason for
| supporting him), his "birtherism" re Obama, etc. Thus,
| they can much more strongly be said to affirmatively
| support those things than, for example, an American
| taxpayer whose money goes to help the Israeli government
| bulldoze Palestinian homes, or do any of a number of
| other foreign policy things that qualify as "evil shit".
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| So indirection washes away the evil? Is complacent
| support that much better than affirmative support?
|
| Compare actively supporting "birtherism" to passively
| supporting blowing up brown kids with drones.
|
| I think you're better off looking for common ground with
| the people around you, rather than putting up barriers
| based on which politician panders better to them.
|
| Edit: Case in point: we disagree here. I don't hate you
| for it, I'd hope you don't hate me, and I think this is a
| fine conversation to have. The alternative is we could
| each say fuck you and go our separate ways, and the world
| is a slightly worse place for it.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| But the ones who aren't cartoons don't really do enough
| to counter the ones who do. Just a bunch of whataboutism
| and "anything to own the libs" mentality.
|
| And honestly being supporters of a person instead of a
| policy or a position is itself a psychological failing.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| And how many on the blue side are actively policing their
| own?
|
| > And honestly being supporters of a person instead of a
| policy or a position is itself a psychological failing.
|
| You'll get no argument from me on that front, but I think
| that's a pretty bipartisan failing.
|
| Edit: although thinking about it more, it's the person
| who is going to get your pet agenda items enacted, so
| practically it probably works better.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| > Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with
| them is sufficient to expose them as bad people
|
| You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad
| people, as if they have no other motive than to do evil.
| I didn't like him either, but give me a break and try to
| let go of that media narrative. His supporters were just
| people. Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the
| spotlight
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| >You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad
| people
|
| They're not all bad people, most are just stupid.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Nah, about 15-20%. Hillary's "basket of deplorables", as
| stated (IIRC "about a third" of Trump supporters was how
| she put it--her entire point was that most weren't
| actually awful). That was _just true_. Generous, even.
| The rest were along for the ride for various reasons,
| often because they felt compelled to vote for the
| candidate most likely to support a pro-life position.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Maybe not 46%, but c'mon. No Democrats ever came up to me
| at a restaurant and told my three year old they hoped
| Daddy was smart enough for vote for Hillary. I don't
| recall any attempts by Democratic supporters to run a
| Trump bus off the road. I've never seen the equivalent of
| "Fuck your Feelings" flags flown by liberals. Remind me
| of the years long conserted effort on the part of
| liberals to claim a Republican politician was born in
| some other country. How many of that 46% you refer to
| believe _to this day_ that Obama is a secret muslim or
| Kenyan? Please be honest.
| refurb wrote:
| You clearly haven't lived in San Francisco if you think
| crappy behavior is limited to the right.
|
| The vile they'll spew at someone who doesn't adhere 100%
| to their views is pretty shocking.
|
| And in terms of violence didn't some Democrat shoot at a
| bunch of Republicans playing baseball a few years ago?
| ss108 wrote:
| > You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad
| people
|
| So? You judge the moral and intellectual merits of things
| by how popular they are? That's your call. I don't.
|
| > Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the
| spotlight
|
| Not really. Only one set of nutjobs actually stormed
| Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an
| election. You've bought into a narrative that minimizes
| what is an insane fact.
| fwungy wrote:
| Washington D.C. is a high crime city, but you can safely
| walk in the National Mall at any hour of the day or night
| alone, and people do. If it were anywhere else it would
| be a place be a place most people wouldn't feel safe at
| when alone late at night in a city like DC.
|
| Know why?
|
| Because Capitol Hill and the Mall are secured six ways to
| Sunday. It is the seat of the US global empire.
| Congressmembers and high officials are common sights all
| around DC and they move around pretty freely. It is
| common to see them around town. It would seemingly be
| easy for extremists to find these people and intimidate
| of harm them, and yet this almost never happens.
|
| That's because DC itself is highly secured, at least
| where the government people live and work. Congress and
| the Mall are a secure fortress within a secure city.
| There are soldiers, air defenses, snipers, and heavy
| surveillance everywhere.
|
| The J6 protesters had no guns, no supplies, no secure
| communications, no central command. They were no match
| for capitol security. The police officers who allegedly
| died that day are not listed at "line of duty" deaths,
| i.e. no one says they were killed by J6 protester
| violence. Capitol security shot and killed an unarmed
| woman protester, the only death attributable to direct
| violence. This was also not the first time protesters had
| occupied the building.
|
| I don't claim to know what actually happened on J6, but
| it is quite obvious that many of the media narratives
| about it are highly incompetent at best.
|
| You can only lie to my face so many times before I start
| to question your credibility.
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| QAnon nuts don't represent all conservatives, just as the
| people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't
| represent all liberals. Black and white thinking is
| stupid in this day and age yet it seems to persist
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > QAnon nuts don't represent all conservatives
|
| They represent all conservatives who vote republican.
| Literally, in congress and as our last president. If you
| vote for a qanoner you can't say they don't represent
| you.
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| Sure, just like all who voted for JFK were right then and
| there baptized as Catholics
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| They were certainly represented by a catholic.
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| The ideals of Qanon were implicitly accepted into the
| American right, and have been working their way into the
| mainstream. How do you think MTG got where she is?
|
| The Republican party is the party of conspiracy nuts. If
| you don't like it, then kick them out. But you can't,
| because a significant percentage of your group would be
| gone, and a larger percentage don't disagree with much of
| what the Q-tards believe.
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| Great to see percentages thrown out without citations,
| unless you've of course spoken to most of them throughout
| the US personally.
|
| Also I'm not a Republican so
| fwungy wrote:
| MTG got where she is because she's a representative from
| a small, hard red district. The whole country could
| absolutely hate a representative and it makes no
| difference because it's the populations of those small
| districts that vote.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| That's the "basket of deplorables" thinking. You'll hear
| less-dressed up terms like "garbage people," like someone
| ought to be thrown out with the trash, applied to huge
| populations. It's kind of wild.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Mask off, at least 46% of Americans are bad people. Most
| people in every country are chiefly interested in
| furthering their own goals.
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| Wanting to further your own goals !== "bad people". You
| can want to further your own goals while helping others.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I believe this "further your own goals" thing is a
| particularly American thing.
|
| There's a saying that Americans vote with their pocket-
| books. It does appear to me that whatever other policies
| they claim to espouse, when it comes to the crunch they
| vote for tax reductions.
|
| I suppose that's partly because of pork-barrel politics,
| and the huge tides of money that wash around US election
| campaigns. If all the politicians are bought and paid-
| for, then they can't be trusted to handle taxpayers'
| money properly.
| bojo wrote:
| Absolutely this. Media had my neighbor yelling in my face
| and threatening to fight me over our differences in
| opinion over masks. Objectively he's not a bad guy, and I
| told him that I think we have more in common than not,
| then went inside.
|
| We really need to stop this cycle of hate. I want to feel
| safe in my neighborhood and get along with folk. We don't
| need to agree, but we need to recognize that we are
| Americans and on the same damn side in the end.
| refurb wrote:
| You realize Hilary lost election using that same
| argument?
|
| Labeling your political opponents as "trash" turns off a
| lot of people.
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| Sometimes spades need to be labeled as such.
| anononaut wrote:
| You're a jaded, delusional, and bitter redditor.
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| Jaded, absolutely. Bitter? Rarely.
|
| But delusional? Not at all. Please feel free to embarrass
| yourself attempting to prove that anything I've stated is
| incorrect.
| epiphonium wrote:
| [dead]
| anononaut wrote:
| This line of reasoning is why media has gotten away with
| being as deliberately dishonest as it is.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with
| them is sufficient to expose them as bad people,
|
| Only in a moral framework where not wanting people who
| speak a different language to move into your
| neighborhood,[1] makes you more of a bad person than
| writing software that gets kids hooked on social media
| that's bad for their mental health, or exporting jobs to
| China, or figuring out how to dupe people into buying
| more cheap imported crap they don't need, etc.
|
| [1] Or insert any other worldview common to ordinary
| people from Ohio to Mexico to India.
| UhUhUhUh wrote:
| The NYT and Bush was earlier.
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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.
| dudul wrote:
| When was this?
|
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Right, things seem to have gotten a lot worse.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > 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.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Both can happen at the same time, it doesn't have to be one
| or the other.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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?
| llanowarelves wrote:
| 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.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| 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."
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| 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?
| llanowarelves wrote:
| I agree and you are very correct that the "truth" is a hard
| problem. But that's why we go the other direction: we know
| what a lie looks like (even if unintentional). This works
| great in court, and has a method to it. Falsification is
| scientific. Libel and slander laws do a good job in a
| narrow domain (personal reputation).
|
| And that's why I use the word "truthful" (spirit of the
| thing) not "truth" (itself) because like science, ideally
| we are just falsifying. Scientific truth (of everything,
| itself) is some asymptotic holy grail end state that we
| never reach, but hopefully are approaching by falsifying
| over time.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| >we know what a lie looks like (even if unintentional)
|
| "But do we?" is I guess my point. There's a lot of intent
| and, again, determining what the "truth" (or even
| truthful) is that stands in the way. It's a very
| complicated problem I feel doesn't really have a
| solution. To be clear I'm not knocking you, I agree with
| you, I just worry about how it plays out writ large.
|
| If one person says and _insists_ on air that "WWII began
| when Germany invaded Poland," but someone else _insists_
| on air that "WWII began with the Japanese invasion of
| Manchuria," do we force them to acknowledge the other
| viewpoint as valid? Do we say only one is correct? It
| seems a bit ridiculous I admit, but just substitute the
| example for something more stark I guess. Do we have to
| decide "well this is debate and this is other thing is
| fact" and see where the chips fall? Feels like we're
| trading problems there too.
|
| Imagine trying to say "coal and petroleum are bad for the
| environment and contributing to climate change." "Certain
| outlets" balk at the claim and say "you're wrong and
| lying and corrupt and bribed, it's not leading to climate
| change and even if it did it's not enough to matter." To
| me that's patently absurd, yet they downplay it all the
| time and throw all sorts of nasty allegations out there.
| Where's the line? Do we fine them? Censor them? Let them
| be because "it's a debate," even if their claim is
| incredibly fringe and lacking quality evidence? I don't
| know the answer to be honest. I'd love to pull the plug
| on them but that's a dangerous door to open.
|
| I hope this stream of conscience makes sense. I'm
| enjoying this conversation!
| bjornsing wrote:
| > 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.
| gamechangr wrote:
| They do. (deliberately mislead)
|
| The days of subjectivity are over.
|
| It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for Large corporations to have
| self interest and to highlight stories that benefit them and
| minimize/ignore things that would negatively effect them.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| To me, "news" is different than "journalism" (and obviously way
| different than "opinion") but most media orgs go way out of their
| way to just completely blur these.
|
| Every "news" article (an election, a shooting, an earthquake, a
| new science study) is wrapped in spin - why this is bad or good
| for America, why it's racist or a sign of moral decay, how you
| should feel, what these other people think about it, who agrees
| with it.
|
| I gave up and just use primary sources - reading the actual ArXiv
| paper or gov website or watching the eyewitness video is a better
| use of my time.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| We believe that because news organizations deliberately mislead
| us.
| slenk wrote:
| I can't get past this ever:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| The real question is, what is the other half thinking?
| kornhole wrote:
| I am only shocked that half of the country does not believe MSM
| has deliberately misled them. We have much more work to do to
| reveal this to them.
| dvh wrote:
| 50% isn't much. If you ask people if they believe something
| obviously false (is Obama lizard?) 5% people will tell you they
| believe it. If you ask them something that COULD happen (did
| Biden tried to cover up New Hampshire docks shooting (I just made
| it up)) 30% will tell you they believe it.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I (live in the US) started reading a lot of BBC. At least their
| agenda isn't to promote some kind of ideology within my own
| country.
|
| What's frustrating is that almost all news sources I come across
| have agendas. I used to watch a lot of the Daily Show in the
| 2000s, but when it was a slow news day, just make fun of Bush.
|
| Later I used to watch the Nightly show with Colbert, but a year
| into the Trump presidency they got so hyper-focused on Trump that
| they didn't talk about anything else. I stopped watching.
|
| Now that I commute occasionally, I sometimes listen to NPR.
| Sometimes they offer news, but most of the time their point of
| view is just promoting a narrative that I either find
| uninteresting, or irrelevant. I lean pretty left, but I don't
| need to listen to a story about a fringe group every time I sit
| in the car.
| bmacho wrote:
| Half of Americans now believe the news organizations
| ihatepython wrote:
| The Pulitzer Prize is named after the guy who invented Yellow
| Journalism
| vt85 wrote:
| [dead]
| smcl wrote:
| In an ideal world this means people will simply start taking what
| they're told with a pinch of salt and are little bit more
| sensible about believing sensational things. However we don't
| live in such a world. I suspect that what's more likely is that a
| bunch of people will fall into believing in stupid shit like flat
| earth or qanon, and will end up following weird conspiracy freaks
| like Alex Jones or white supremacists like Nick Fuentes.
| naasking wrote:
| They are deliberately misleading. Not outright lying usually [1],
| but very, very misleading, both in their coverage and what they
| don't cover.
|
| [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-
| co...
| jamesgill wrote:
| All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions
| and arbitrary values. --Marshall McLuhan
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| Genuinely surprised its only half because Fox News viewers often
| think CNN is lying and CNN viewers often think the same about Fox
| News. Both groups can therefore answer 'Yes' if asked if they
| think news organisations deliberately mislead. I'm picking those
| two as being big news channels but I think it holds for other tv
| and for newspapers too.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| It's so interesting how our country can be divided almost
| perfectly into "do you subscribe to the thought
| process/consensus of FOX news or CNN?"
|
| Like, how often is there a viewer who actively watches
| both/switches between the two?
|
| It's very polarizing.
|
| I can't think of any way to fix it culturally. One party thinks
| the other is deranged and lying.
|
| Will it get worse? Will it get better? Where does this lead us?
| asdff wrote:
| Just look at history. The 1930s in europe were like this. You
| had monarchists, republicans, fascists, communists, every
| political spectrum represented to its maximal extent with
| actual organized boots on the ground and people willing to
| take up arms and die for these causes. Everyone thought the
| other side was wrong. Things didn't end up getting mended
| though, people tore eachother apart in world war II and in
| the years after, and made whatever schools of thought weren't
| in control of whatever spit of land political exiles, removed
| or imprisoned or worse.
|
| In the U.S., we didn't make war with eachother, but we hardly
| "mended" our political misaligmnets from the 1920s and 30s
| either. In the post war years we simply made talking about
| communism in the media illegal, blacklisted progressive
| voices, and ran witchhunts under mccarthyism to root it out
| of office. Then after mccarthyism, we used the civil rights
| era and drugs to further alienate political groups from what
| is legal, proper, and ordained as bonafide american by the
| ruling class, versus unifying many of these new progressive
| ideas into our national culture. In later years we divided
| the labor class into irreconcilable factions, neither of
| which often thinks critically of the facts of their situation
| but rather believes the words of their chosen political party
| leaders as gospel, and never looking back or forward either
| unless told by said leaders.
|
| If we consider history and our current status, we are at the
| moment where divisions are being made, and once divided into
| a group people don't tend to switch groups, they usually die
| believing that ideology they latch themselves on to. What is
| next is probably either two things: a period of instability
| as different groups vie for power (unlikely as the ruling
| class is unified in its position in the class war above all,
| and much political commentary is just fodder to distract from
| the class war), or, radicals will get the hippy treatment,
| and be pacified by both the conveniences of modern American
| capitalistic life, as well as the fact that their radical
| ideology receives no honest voice at all in mass media or
| wider politics.
| rewilding wrote:
| They're both biased; watching both doesn't necessarily
| accomplish anything. In fact they share the same basic pro-
| imperialist, pro-capitalist biases.
| mint2 wrote:
| CNN is not the counterpart to fox. That comparison is apples
| and oranges. It's almost like saying strawberry ice cream is
| the counterpart to chocolate and implying non chocolate
| eaters all eat strawberry.
|
| Yes cnn is a newsertainement org like fox, but it's not the
| anti-fox. For starters, No one actually cares about cnn
| except fox watchers.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| What would you call The New York Times's 1619 Project? Historians
| tore it apart. Non-historian and simply rational human beings did
| as well. The entire project is a propaganda piece with a goal
| that requires deliberately misleading the public.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Only half?
|
| Title is editorialised however, its mislead or adopt a particular
| view.
|
| But making readers adopt a particular view is basically their
| purpose.
| G_z9 wrote:
| The entire China narrative is a CIA psyop. Everywhere in the
| media you see China being portrayed as a massive threat, a
| looming threat to our national security. Every event in global
| politics involving China is twisted to fit this narrative by the
| media lapdogs of the CIA. Nothing could be further from the
| truth. China is extremely weak both geopolitically and in terms
| of leadership. It is the most geopolitically vulnerable country
| in the world besides Yemen et al. It has to import everything
| from food to intellectual goods. China poses precisely zero
| threat to us because China sucks.
|
| The China balloon thing is a good example. It was an embarrassing
| mistake that was a result of disintegrating leadership structure
| in the cpp. It accomplished literally nothing and never could
| have. But these huge obvious questions were ignored by the media.
| Questions like "what did they stand to gain?" Nothing. "Was this
| deliberate?" Not on the part of ping. "What does this say about
| China?" That they are a joke of a country.
|
| Look at mike baker on joe rogan. That's how the CIA answered the
| rogan question, what are we going to do about this pesky guy who
| has a larger audience than cnn but isn't a slimy media executive
| who would be receptive to our requests to shape the narrative
| around certain topics? They send in mike baker who handily fools
| rogan into thinking he's just a good dude who used to be a spook.
| And they chit chat and once in a while, when the conversation
| turns to something geopolitical, mike sprinkles in some CIA
| narrative. Never believe anything a spook says.
|
| The CIA and FBI are behind this thrust against disinformation.
| Where was this disinformation frenzy at when it comes to people
| believing in even more wild shit like the idea that the universe
| keeps track of your good and bad deeds and punishes you or
| rewards you accordingly? Or the belief that the position of the
| stars and planets determines what personality your baby will have
| or whether or not you'll be given a promotion? If disinformation
| mattered as a principle then wouldn't these things make liberals
| foam at the mouth too?
|
| It's so ironic that the liberal camp has become the exact
| opposite of what it used to be. It is the vassal of the CIA and
| FBI.
|
| https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1589606899569377282?s=46&...
| w0m wrote:
| honestly shocked half of Americans don't think they're being
| misled by their medium of choice.
| mc32 wrote:
| I mean, talk about delusions --believing your lies so much you
| don't believe you're lying or believing it's necessary because
| people are too stupid to figure things out for themselves.
|
| They want to be able to set agendas but also want to be known as
| authoritative and uhhh unbiased. Both cannot be true
| simultaneously. Cry me a river!
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Cronkite, Murrow, and Russert have been spinning in their graves
| for years.
|
| As soon as the fairness doctrine died, real journalism was
| crushed by corporate greed.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| That and de-regulation of media ownership, allowing
| unprecedented consolidation.
|
| Hard to tell which did more damage, since they came so close
| together. Possibly one would have been fine if the other hadn't
| happened.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| A relevant idea I stumbled across recently: Gell-Mann Amenesia:
|
| "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You
| open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.
| In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the
| article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of
| either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it
| actually presents the story backward--reversing cause and effect.
| I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full
| of them.
|
| In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple
| errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or
| international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper
| was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you
| just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." -
| Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
| hunglee2 wrote:
| 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'
| ErikCorry wrote:
| Counterpoint: People are dumb on average and their citizen
| journalism will be even worse.
|
| 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...
| wincy wrote:
| 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.
| recyclelater wrote:
| 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.
|
| Sorry for the bluntness here.
| wincy wrote:
| Maybe I was being a little dramatic and hyperbolic for
| effect.
|
| I don't mean I never leave the house. I go to concerts and
| the zoo with my kids and whatever. I went on vacation
| across the country the other day. None of those things are
| helping me discern what's going on in the world, unless
| "Disneyworld is a fun place" and "the ocean is a nice place
| to laze around" count as my lived experience.
| rjbwork wrote:
| 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.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Yes, there are no liars in socialism. And there certainly
| isn't any state boots on your neck. Everyone gets a nice
| car, good friends, and honest state propaganda, comrade.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Capitalism and socialism are extremely broad descriptors
| of essentially who owns the means of production and to
| whom does surplus value flow. Neither necessitates a
| state nor do they prescribe anarchy.
| justin66 wrote:
| > In one small consolation, in both cases Americans had more
| trust in local news.
|
| This trust in "local" news is often misplaced given how many
| local news outlets - television stations or newspapers - have
| been subsumed by larger interests.
|
| For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Deadspin video of dozens of
| local news anchors reading the same editorial content handed down
| by Sinclair Broadcast Group is striking:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
|
| https://deadspin.com/how-i-made-a-dumb-video-making-fun-of-s...
|
| There is an awful lot of really, really good stuff put out by
| local newspapers and TV stations but people ought to be
| thoughtful about their use of any media.
| karaterobot wrote:
| People deserve the news they click on.
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| Dualism is a form of misleading, and many news organizations
| aren't explicitly seeking to be nondualist sources, so that's a
| form of deliberate misleading flying covertly under the rest of
| this.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I don't see how someone could not conclude that at the very least
| some major news organizations mislead by spinning things to fit
| their agenda. If that wasn't the case, then you wouldn't see such
| radically different takes between, for example, Fox News and
| MSNBC on the same issue.
| atlgator wrote:
| I recall in elementary school being tested on whether a sentence
| was a fact or an opinion. It seems to me that most people now
| would fail such a test, as journalism has become little more than
| upsold editorials. Any type of conclusion drawing or motivation
| attribution is highly subjective opinion, yet taken as gospel by
| viewers.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| The problem is that people look at some (relatively rare) media
| lie, decide mainstream media aren't trustworthy and go to
| "alternative" media that lie all the time.
| kneebonian wrote:
| I realized that a lot of MSM was grox turds when they spent two
| full weeks of nonstop coverage on covefe and whether it was
| some sort of secret Nazi dog whistle. If anyone can defend why
| we needed to spend 2 weeks on covefe though I'm all ears.
| foldr wrote:
| It doesn't make a lot of sense to ignore good reporting
| because there's also some bad reporting.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| A lot of people who come to the conclusion that news is
| 'fake' have a gateway moment. Mine is from 25 years ago and
| something rather silly. In this particular case a typo.
| What we see out of the email dumps on twitter should scare
| many this is the case. They were having twitter 'take care
| of it'. To pretend they are not doing this to our media and
| other web sources would be a bit of a stretch to say the
| least. Our media is manipulated. Seeing good sources
| amongst the sea of bad ones is a tough ask.
| foldr wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone has ever suggested that Twitter (in
| general) is a reliable source of information, so I'm not
| sure why you bring it up. Apart form that, perhaps I am
| misunderstanding, but you seem to be saying that you
| decided not to trust the news because you saw a typo in a
| news story 25 years ago. I'm doing my best to be
| charitable here, but how can that possibly make any
| sense?
| ouraf wrote:
| The bombardment had a funny effect, though: instead of outraged,
| most of the audience is just desensitized to unchecked bias, fake
| news, twisted citations and the like. It becomes case of
| "believing this lie until someone i like with more viewers says a
| different lie".
|
| Feels very demoralizing.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| When everything is fake news, the fascists win.
|
| Democracy is dying and "both sides" believe the other is the
| "enemy".
|
| It's going to get bloody, folks.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Go back to reddit
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Keep your head in the sand.
|
| You cannot have politicians and media telling people day in
| and day out that people who don't look like you or believe
| like you are the enemy and not have people try and hurt their
| "enemy". You can't.
| svieira wrote:
| It's not unique to America or to the present day, "There's no
| news in _The Truth_ and there 's no truth in _The News_ " was a
| saying in some regions of the world not all that long ago.
| irrational wrote:
| I would really like to know more about the half that don't
| believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them. Anyone
| who has had personal experience with an event and then reads the
| news coverage of it knows this is true. And it's not a new thing.
| I was traveling in the Middle East back in the mid-90s. I was
| eyewitness to an event. When I got back to the states I checked
| what various newspapers had to say and was shocked at how they
| misrepresented it (though, I found that news sources from Europe
| were accurate, I'm not sure if that still holds). I guess I'm
| fortunate I learned that lesson early in my life.
| tuatoru wrote:
| I don't know about the "deliberate" part, but on "mislead" this
| is good news. Gell-Mann amnesia[1] is wearing off.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
| MrLeap wrote:
| IDK I've watched this video looking for a "lunge" a hand full
| of times and it seems like a deliberate lie. An honest headline
| would probably center around a man getting his face grabbed,
| but that's not at all how it was reported.
|
| Rare to be able to factcheck an article without leaving the
| page and disprove it from its own content, but the lies are not
| rare.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/video-mike-rogers-held-back-he-lung...
| csours wrote:
| How many Americans believe that news organizations deliberately
| mislead OTHER people?
|
| If you dig a little deeper, how many people realize there are
| different formats like opinion, commentary, and analysis?
| Opinions can't be WRONG, but they sure can be BAD.
|
| You can only fact check facts. You can't fact check analysis. You
| have to apply critique (aka critical thinking skills, or a
| critical framework).
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| This is a good insight. When you see people complain about
| "misinformation," and especially if they complain about
| "needing to do something about it," your follow-up question
| should be: do you want _your_ news to be censored, or do you
| want other people 's news to be censored?
|
| I suspect when most people reference "protecting from
| misinformation," they actually mean protecting _you_ from
| misinformation, not themselves. After all, anyone sophisticated
| enough to recognize the problem is surely capable of filtering
| their own information stream, right?
| captainbland wrote:
| At least here in Britain I recognise a lot of the news
| outlets I prefer often print total crap. I wouldn't say
| there's much of an answer in censorship (for instance the
| existing limits on what can legally be called 'corrupt'
| already go too far). But I'd call into question incentives
| for sure, because some journalists seem to act without self
| respect in the levels of barrel scraping they go to when
| clearly trying to contrive a story to conform with some
| particular direction.
|
| I could elaborate but the short version for me is: If we
| could decouple editorial direction from funding sources I
| think we'd end up much better off.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I think a lot of problems would become non-problems if
| people would admit they read the news primarily for
| entertainment. This expectation that "the news must supply
| me with reliable facts" is an intellectually-dishonest
| complaint from an unreliable narrator. It's nobody's job to
| tell you what to think, and even if it were, it's not also
| their job to tell you what's important to think about. An
| objective press is definitionally impossible as long as
| "the news" can't include a story about every time a tree
| falls in the forest. Selection bias is unavoidable, and any
| expectation of a publisher to avoid it is one borne from
| intellectual dishonesty, because you can only shift the
| bias, not remove it.
|
| The most objective way to read the news is to read all of
| it. Unfortunately that's not usually possible. So the next
| best thing you can do (short of ignoring it) is to read the
| most divergent sources, and fill in the blanks yourself.
| I've seen this referred to as "triangulating the truth" -
| is there a story on Fox but not CNN? That editorial
| selection bias is itself additional information that you
| can use to infer the motives of the publishers, and over
| time, based on observed bias, the motives of the subjects
| in the article. And then you can think from there about why
| they have those motives and what their agenda might be.
|
| ...but that's all a lot of work, which is why I'm also an
| advocate for deliberately ignoring the news for weeks at a
| time. Don't fall for the "informed citizen" trap - that's
| how they keep you hooked to the propaganda.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| I mean it's easy to see why, just consider the trash NYT
| publishes in the opinions section, or manufactured consent in
| general
| hackeraccount wrote:
| If your goal is to lead people than you end up misleading them.
|
| I understand that it's probably impossible to simply report the
| news ; that the very act of picking what you're reporting is an
| editorial act. That said, I also think that most of the people
| who go to work in news do that because they have an agenda they
| want to flog; the only distinction is that some of them admit it
| to themselves and the rest don't even understand that they're
| trying to do just that.
| elil17 wrote:
| Better headline: half of Americans don't know that (many) news
| organizations deliberately mislead them.
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
| fimdomeio wrote:
| Not in the US, but I usually see a lot of people saying don't
| trust the news but it's also not as if they are doing any
| rational thinking about it. And a lot of the times is just
| because news are not validating their own beliefs so I think
| it's even worse than just having bad news.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| In the US we used to feel like the news was more trustworthy
| even if it didn't support our views because it maintained
| some pretense of neutrality and objectivity; however, that
| broke down as the media became increasingly politicized and
| sensationalized--a lot of people felt that if the media isn't
| going to tell THE truth, they would find a media that would
| tell THEIR truth (hence your bit about "validating their own
| beliefs"). So we get fragmented and relative epistemology, in
| large part because the traditional media decided to be
| activist even if it meant overtly and obviously lying about
| things that were trivially verifiable. This is why we need to
| roll back to a media that aspired toward neutrality and
| objectivity rather than an a la carte model.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I would say its hard to do any rational thinking about come
| to the conclusion that the 24/h news orgs are meant to inform
| you.
|
| The easy angle is product placement [1]. Literally fork over
| a small sum of money and you get the news org to rave about
| your product without doing any verification.
|
| There's also how a headline is not written by the author so
| it won't always reflect the contents of the article.
|
| > And a lot of the times is just because news are not
| validating their own beliefs
|
| IMO, the news orgs have a symbiotic relation with their
| viewers. The viewers want their viewpoint reinforced and the
| news org wants views. So the news org put out a biased
| product so that their viewers will selectively watch that
| news org. However, this still means that news org aren't
| actually trying to inform.
|
| My biggest gripe is how often they'll refuse to link to
| actual legal documents when talking about filed lawsuits and
| the like and in general I don't find some of their claims in
| the article to be as supported by the actual filings.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Lawfare blog my dude. They don't shy away from the raw
| legal source code.
|
| https://www.lawfareblog.com/
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I don't think it takes much rational thought to realize that
| the news are incompetent at worst and intentionally
| misleading at best.
|
| Even without validating beliefs, there are so many cases of
| news organizations publishing incorrect or misleading
| information in a rush to cover a story, only to then issue a
| silent correction weeks later when the damage has been done.
|
| This weakens trust in two ways, first is just people who pay
| enough attention to notice the correction and gradually lose
| trust as they see how often that happens. The other is the
| more damaging, more common way, where someone has read the
| incorrect/misleading article and internalized the information
| only to find out much later that the information they
| internalized was incorrect (without ever seeing the original
| correction).
|
| One example that comes to mind is regarding the supposed
| sudden Starlink outages in Ukraine back in October around
| when Musk was tweeting dumb stuff about appeasing Russia. CNN
| was quick to report the outage implying that it was
| unexpected by Ukraine and they were shutdown to blackmail the
| West into paying. This article was all over the news.
|
| Then weeks later they put out an article stating that it was
| just 1300 terminals which were being provided by the UK which
| were shut-off due to the UK deciding not to pay for the
| subscription anymore, with Ukraine having been fully aware
| and having swapped them out beforehand with the other ~18000
| still operating terminals. But this one got nowhere near the
| same traction and was still misleadingly headlined.
| soco wrote:
| Data set of one, but the people I met claiming they don't
| trust the news, all take their news from youtube and random
| taxi drivers. This doesn't say anything about the news
| outlets, just about those people and their peculiar ways to
| "think for themselves".
| Swizec wrote:
| Try this experiment: Read old news for a while.
|
| You'll quickly learn not to trust the news. Not because
| it's wrong - it's pretty factual for the most part - but
| because it keeps trying to make you care about the wrong
| things. Whipping up an emotional reaction to matters that
| don't affect you. Ignoring large elephants in small
| rooms. Talking juuuust slightly past the core issue
| hoping you won't notice.
|
| Much of news, especially daily news, is like discussing
| the color of a bike shed instead of the core design
| problems of the reactor it sits behind. Because talking
| about the big stuff isn't sexy and doesn't get the
| clicks.
|
| And even when you do find a source of boring news, you'll
| find that most of it affects your life not one bit. It's
| just entertainment to keep you busy. In the words of a
| quote I once heard and can never find again: _"The news
| doesn't tell you what to think, it tells you what to
| think about"_.
| kneebonian wrote:
| The quote is from the book Pre-suasion by Robert Caldini,
| he points out that what we focus on will elevate the
| importance of whatever is focused on.
|
| This is part of the reason I don't trust the news,
| because they all are focusing on the same things for a
| few weeks and then it drops never to be heard from again.
| Some examples
|
| When Trump met with Kim Jong Un everything in the news
| media was about North Korea for weeks, it was painted as
| the vital question of our times that was a clear and
| present danger to democracy. 3 years into Biden I have
| barely heard anything about NK.
|
| Another exmaple is oil prices, does anyone else remember
| during the Bush years how the oil prices dominated
| everything in the news and the Middle East was the most
| important region in the world, to the point that we
| supposedly went to war in Iraq over oil? Yet when it was
| hitting $5-6 a barrel I wasn't hearing anything about it.
| Or how many of us have heard anything on Iraq or Syria
| since ISIS?
|
| You can look for countless examples but even if it isn't
| outright lying by choosing what to focus on the media
| already sets an agenda.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Indeed. People are replacing mainstream news with
| something that's often far _less_ accurate.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| This can only be true if we assume that news _is_
| accurate. It simply isn 't.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| It might be accurate, but that's not the priority.
|
| Think about it: broadcasting information costs something.
| Nobody is going to pay that cost unless they're getting a
| return for it. Nobody is going out of their way to
| provide you with information out of the goodness of their
| heart. They're doing it so that you buy what they're
| selling (e.g. pharmaceuticals, gold) or vote for their
| party, etc.
|
| A lot of times that information will be technically not
| wrong, but that's not the goal.
| goatlover wrote:
| There's a range between 0% and 100%. Saying news is
| either would be false. Giving it a percentage would just
| depend on what news and what situation.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Accuracy isn't a binary.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| Is that an accurate statement?
| ben_w wrote:
| Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, depending on the
| domain.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Probably a selection bias at play. The people you meet
| who don't trust the news for reasonable reasons aren't
| going to come out and state it that simply because they
| don't want to be associated with the people who claim
| they don't trust the news because the have preconceived
| notions which they trust any source for (even if random
| taxi driver) and distrust any source against (even in
| peer reviewed research). They likely even purposefully
| consume the news, realizing that even as an imperfect
| information source it is still an information source
| worth the trade off between extent of imperfect and ease
| to consume.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I have a different take on this.
|
| Unless I am asking the taxi driver about traffic problem
| in their work area, or rider behavior, or...
|
| We have become citizen journalists. We have to research
| our own news. I think that is not a bad thing.
|
| I write journalist because if an establishment journalist
| can get away with single-sourcing something, why can't I?
|
| YouTube is a cesspool of hot garbage, but there is also
| plenty of good information.
|
| The key part in my opinion is to have the ability to
| collect, sift, confirm, and then make deduction.
|
| Alas, we no longer teach fundamental thinking skills in
| schools.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Alas, we no longer teach fundamental thinking skills in
| schools.
|
| Control this and you can control the world.
| nirimda wrote:
| I think there's a difference between not trusting the
| news, as in, thinking what they're saying is lies and
| there's actually a great conspiracy that we can work out,
| and not trusting the news, as in, thinking that the
| information that gets conveyed via news outlets is
| selected and presented to push public opinion in a
| certain self-interested direction.
|
| I think for the most part, people who take their news
| from youtube and random taxi drivers fall into the former
| category, whereas people who vote against the
| party/candidate recommended (overtly or covertly) by
| their local paper fall into the latter category. It's
| quite possible that a lot of people in the latter
| category would say they don't trust the news as part of a
| national opinion survey, but they wouldn't ever outright
| say to a stranger "oh, don't read the stuff printed in
| the City Courier, it's all lies". Particularly as the
| news is more and more national, but the political parties
| continue to attract around 50% of the vote each, I'd
| generally expect about 50% of the population to have at
| least this much distrust for at least some of the news.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If a youtube video shows a reality that the news denies
| or doesn't report, that _should_ make you trust the news
| less.
| krapp wrote:
| Why would you believe that a youtube video necessarily
| shows reality?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's a good question, that you should also ask about
| the news.
| krapp wrote:
| I do, but I also wouldn't trust Youtube to fact-check the
| news.
| goalieca wrote:
| > validating their own beliefs
|
| There can be a huge discrepancy between what your experience
| is and what is being reported. Most people will tend believe
| what they see and know.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I've had the same experience where it seems people who "don't
| trust the media" get all their news from some random facebook
| page or a website along the lines of realtruth-nolies-
| chronicle.blogspot.com.
| k1m wrote:
| Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU
|
| Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I
| AlbertoGP wrote:
| And even Chomsky himself is not immune, having famously said
| in late 2021 that the unvaccinated should remove themselves
| from the community for the safety of others and make
| arrangements to get food ( _"their problem"_ ) without coming
| into contact with others:
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/noam-chomsky-unvaccinated-remove-
| them...
|
| All based on the false idea that the Covid-19 "vaccines"
| stopped transmission, which they never did. He still won't
| recant (video is from 2023-01-20) although the rest of the
| interview is still interesting:
|
| "Chomsky on ChatGPT, Education, Russia and the unvaccinated"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgxzcOugvEI&t=58m47s
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Why do you have vaccines in scare quotes?
|
| If a vaccine makes it less likely that you catch a disease,
| wouldn't that make it less like that you spread the
| disease? Am I missing something here?
| fidgewidge wrote:
| He puts it in quotes because the COVID vaccines don't
| meet the criteria normally used to define a vaccine
| previously. In fact they rather notoriously actually
| changed the dictionary entry for vaccine during the COVID
| years to enable them to qualify.
|
| _> If a vaccine makes it less likely that you catch a
| disease, wouldn 't that make it less like that you spread
| the disease? Am I missing something here?_
|
| The COVID "vaccines" or vaccines or whatever just reduce
| symptom severity, they're actually more like therapeutics
| than normal vaccines. They don't reduce your likelihood
| of catching disease. In fact the raw data (which is only
| rarely available) showed that over time the vaccinated
| started catching COVID far more often than the
| unvaccinated. This was then adjusted via statistical
| games to make the effectiveness look positive.
| flyingfences wrote:
| He also assured us that Pol Pot was doing nothing wrong.
| Miner49er wrote:
| This was clearly him giving an opinion, not trying to pass
| off a lie as fact.
| AlbertoGP wrote:
| You are right, and I did not intend to imply otherwise. I
| just mean that he bases this particular opinion on
| unfounded claims, as an example that even he can be led
| astray.
| mc32 wrote:
| Truth be told, it's high time we (everyone not only Americans
| at this point) have a healthy amount of skepticism when it
| comes to media -all media including or especially the ones you
| "trust" or are on "your" side.
|
| This is a good thing. For too long the media was trusted as a
| believable source of acceptable impartiality and truth.
|
| The audience has matured and no longer believe in the fairy
| truth teller.
| kneebonian wrote:
| That's why I only get my news from 4chan and Tumblr I figure
| then I'll get coverage of every possible issue from every
| possible side.
| randcraw wrote:
| And a heavy dose of crazy nonsense.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| My biggest gripe with the news, and the journalist class, is
| they don't report on themselves enough or really at all.
|
| All media critique comes form comedians these days. Which is
| kind of grim because sometimes things actually matter and
| aren't just jokes. Yet Journalist A gets to carry water for
| criminal X, and Journalist B doesn't say anything about it.
| Then some comedian makes a joke and everyone moves on. The
| journalists still get to be journalists. The comedian's are
| making jokes and were all out here seeing no consequences for
| anything.
|
| The post truth world of journalism isn't fun.
|
| There's checks and balances in government, but the 4th estate
| just seems to be a wild lands of bullshit and can't check
| itself. And those same Journalists seem to think this is a good
| system.
|
| Anyway rant over. I use patreon to support indie media and news
| I like. But even that has downsides, filter bubbles etc.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Do you have an example from the last year how CNN deliberately
| misled? How often does that happen?
|
| My view is that serious news organizations clearly don't
| deliberately mislead but they have some amount of bias and
| contain inaccuracies as a result of low-quality reporting.
|
| And I think the perception of "MSM" which is common among the
| group of people which includes Elon / libertarians / MAGA
| fanatics / alt-right is obviously wrong and stupid.
| nerdix wrote:
| And I'll add that in being large multi-billion dollar
| publicly traded businesses, they are mostly driven by profit
| motive and not political motives.
| kneebonian wrote:
| I said it farther down but I'll say it again. What possible
| justification could there have been for 2 weeks of continuous
| news coverage on covefe?
| RivieraKid wrote:
| High interest in that topic and therefore more ad
| impressions.
|
| (Assuming you're right that there was non-stop coverage, I
| don't know.)
| acdha wrote:
| There wasn't non-stop coverage: a couple of stories when
| it came out, and months later some separate coverage of a
| bill introduced in Congress to require official social
| media accounts to be archived which was given that
| nickname.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The official white house spokesperson said it was a secret
| message:
|
| White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated, "I think
| the President and a small group of people know exactly what
| he meant."[4]
|
| Because admitting to a typo in an unfinished, now deleted
| tweet was apparently impossible for the man in charge of
| nuclear weapons. That's worth a bit of coverage.
| boringg wrote:
| Best headline: half of Americans don't know that (many) news
| organizations deliberately mislead them and all of them are
| watching cable news.
|
| Aka cable news (one site specifically with the largest reach)
| is constantly engaging in deception and the viewership doesn't
| know. Other orgs are also engaged in deception but not with the
| same level of flagrant abuse.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I believe Fox has the biggest viewership, and are in a huge
| lawsuit right now about how much they misled people about the
| last presidential election. Is that who you meant?
| brookst wrote:
| Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with
| superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.
|
| I've worked in a newsroom. The idea that puppet masters
| thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the
| point of hilarity.
|
| Yes, Rupert Murdoch, etc. But it's all emergent behavior. There
| is no master plan. These organizations are not well run enough
| to deliberately get stories out in time, let alone conspire to
| mislead.
| kneebonian wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
| thereddaikon wrote:
| This is mostly due to local news stations being lazy and
| regurgitating copy without doing any work on their own. The
| way news works involves stories and information being piped
| from party to party. Much of it comes from the AP or major
| national news bodies. Having seen how the sausage is made
| for these small local outfits, they are often run on a low
| budget with limited staff, old equipment and little
| bandwidth for their own editorial work outside of specific
| local news. Anything larger is likely going to be a copy
| paste job. The same is true for the weatherman. He's mostly
| just reading what the weather service puts out.
| nerdix wrote:
| Plus aren't a ton of local news stations owned by
| Sinclair? MBA Bean Counting 101 would suggest that if you
| owned 200 news channels across the country that the first
| thing you'd do is look for stories that are relevant
| across all (or multiple) channels then pay 1 person to
| write it once. Rather than paying 200 people to write the
| story 200 times.
|
| You'd also likely want to implement standards around
| language use that would create a consistent product with
| broad appeal, limit an editor's ability to go off the
| rails and do something that would harm the brand image,
| and that limits legal liability.
| LocalH wrote:
| The problem there is consolidated ownership of local
| television. Sinclair and Nexstar own the majority of TV
| stations in this country that aren't owned and operated
| (O&O) by the networks themselves. Actual local television
| ownership is dwindling, and those stations lose network
| affiliation, because the networks would rather work with
| large station groups to get more money in retransmission
| fees (as stations getting paid more money by operators
| means that the networks can demand more money from _all_
| affiliates).
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| No it's not due to laziness. Most local news is now owned
| by conglomerates or hedge funds that are "streamlining"
| them, removing their journalists and circulating non-
| local stories from other sources they own. The vast
| majority of "local" news - print or television, has been
| bought up. Sinclair, digital first media, Gannett,
| Tribune, etc. all own vast swaths of the "local" news
| media landscape.
| djfobbz wrote:
| I heard all local news stations in US get a copy of
| coordinated news agenda from Associated Press (AP) on a
| daily basis.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The scary part is that they don't conspire to mislead. They
| actually believe their own bullshit. It's enforced
| ideological conformity in hiring and groupthink. If they were
| organized Machiavellian propagandists, I could at least
| respect the skills.
| wincy wrote:
| It doesn't require coordination any more than a flock of
| birds requires some "master bird" to tell it which way to
| turn. When all your friends are journalists, and all your
| Twitter friends are journalists, and you have to think about
| what your journalist friends will think about what you've
| written if you want to stay gainfully employed, or when
| you're looking for a job in a few years, no dictatorial
| Illuminati is required.
| paywallasinbeer wrote:
| Articles like this probably don't help
| https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
| ErikCorry wrote:
| Complete red herring. The question as asked does not require
| a conspiracy. It doesn't even require all news organizations
| to be pulling in the same direction.
| pjc50 wrote:
| _Conspire_ , no, but the emergent behavior is like stochastic
| terrorism; if everyone in the chain of production places
| their finger slightly on the same side of the scale, you can
| very easily end up with a very misleading result. You can
| produce misleading news by who you don't cover as much as who
| you do.
|
| A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-
| on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily
| skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the
| paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the
| press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side
| from the point of view of people most closely affected.
| soctac wrote:
| > A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-
| sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is
| heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named
| source in the paper, or people have had previous bad
| experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles
| that don't cover the side from the point of view of people
| most closely affected.
|
| That is a demand from a trans advocacy group. They don't
| want criticism of the movement they are promoting because
| it brings up uncomfortable questions about impositions upon
| women's rights, and the medical abuse of children. Rather
| than addressing these questions, they attempt to shut down
| any coverage. Much of social media has been censored this
| way already, and they are attempting complete ideological
| capture of traditional media too.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Isn't that what the LGB did during the 2000's ? Trans
| advocacy groups are simply doing the same thing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| ?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's
| rights
|
| The only right alleged is a right to exclude trans women,
| and consequentially a right to screen all women suspected
| of being trans.
|
| > and the medical abuse of children
|
| The children in question want to transition, and their
| parents or the state want to prevent them; defining this
| as "abuse" without actually listening to the allegedly
| abused is the problem.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Children also want to only eat chocolate coco puffs, so
| it gets complicated (parenting is hard) how to care for
| them when clearly their strongly held beliefs should be
| questioned.
| soctac wrote:
| That is of course just your opinion, and reflects only
| one side of the issue. It would be a very biased
| journalism if only this and closely similar viewpoints
| were to be promoted.
|
| Which is basically what the NYT said in their response:
|
| " _We received the letter from GLAAD and welcome their
| feedback. We understand how GLAAD sees our coverage. But
| at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD 's advocacy
| mission and The Times's journalistic mission are
| different._
|
| " _As a news organization, we pursue independent
| reporting on transgender issues that include profiling
| groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice
| faced by the community, and how society is grappling with
| debates about care._
|
| " _The very news stories criticized by GLAAD in their
| letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of
| care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our
| journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect
| the experiences, ideas and debates in society - to help
| readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that
| and we 're proud of it._"
| noobermin wrote:
| Google "manufacturing consent." Chomsky's entire point is
| that it is emergent behavior from a system with certain
| incentives.
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| [dead]
| elil17 wrote:
| Oh, I agree it's all (or at least mostly) emergent behavior.
| I also believe that a lot of reporters are misleading me,
| either because they have their own agenda (which often but
| not always lines up with the overall bias of the organization
| they work for) or because they're just overworked and it's
| easier to parrot someone's simplified narrative then do the
| real research.
| didntreadarticl wrote:
| It doesn't have to be a conspiracy, its just natural for big
| news corporations to promote news that benefits big news
| corporations, and to stay quiet about the news that doesn't
| benefit them
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It doesn't require central coordination, a distributed norm
| enforcement network causing self-censorship is fine. In this
| case, it's done by Twitter: all journalists are on Twitter,
| all journalists are petrified of saying something that will
| upset the other journalists on Twitter, and so they all self-
| censor to not do that. No master plan needed.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| That's the old Chomsky quote from _Manufacturing Consent_ :
| "[the mass communication media of the U.S.] are effective and
| powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-
| supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces,
| internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without
| overt coercion".
|
| There is no need for a conspiracy for the media to be
| misleading.
| DeWilde wrote:
| > Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with
| superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.
|
| But they are not well co-ordinated or executed, that is the
| reason many people are catching on to the manufactured
| narratives.
|
| This isn't done by some Matrix-type entity or does it need to
| be run by something as perfect as an AGI. All it takes is to
| have the top editors deciding which stories to run and with
| what narrative. Of course this break down as the rank and
| file journalist are the ones in charge of writing the stories
| and presenting them.
|
| And the people at the top of this aren't by any matter a
| cohesive group or a big brother type entity rather just
| people with money and power doing what they think will help
| them keep money and power.
| xtian wrote:
| This line assumes that each person exists in the world as an
| ideal individual, subject only to their own independent
| logic, biases, and whims. In reality, we all have concrete
| material interests which are determined by concrete economic
| relations. Our logic, biases, and whims--the very nature of
| our consciousness--all flow from our material and social
| reality.
|
| These material interests are not entirely individual and
| distinct; they fall within broad strata based on the overall
| structure of the economy (e.g., the class of people with the
| capacity to own a major media organization and the class of
| people who make a living by serving them). Thus, there is no
| need for a conscious conspiracy coordinating every aspect of
| the media machine since the basic character of the
| consciousness of those involved flows from a more fundamental
| material reality. At the same time, there's no reason one
| can't become consciously aware of the stratum of shared
| material interests that one exists within, and I think it
| would be foolish to assume that the people at the highest
| levels of power and wealth in the world have failed to do so.
| malwrar wrote:
| I feel like newsrooms mislead, but more of in a Manufacturing
| Consent/Hate Inc sense. It feels obvious after reading
| articles about stuff I know about, and has lead me over time
| to generally not trust the media as an institution. Organized
| conspiracies make no sense, but perverse institutional
| incentives at scale has a lot of explaining power.
| snehk wrote:
| I think the main argument here is not that they're conspiring
| to mislead. It's that they wouldn't be mainstream media if
| they weren't willing to publish propaganda.
| vintermann wrote:
| Sure, it's emergent behaviour, and it emerges from having an
| intuitive feel for how to avoid upsetting the wrong people.
| If you lack finely tuned antennas on such matters, you don't
| get ahead.
|
| Most of all, you understand the risk of breaking rank. If you
| look at a story, and think "hey, why aren't others covering
| this story? Why aren't more people upset at this? Shouldn't
| this be a big deal?", you either learn to think "No.
| Everything is all right in the media world." or you have a
| bad, bad time.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| You give them too much credit, I am afraid.
|
| I was in 2 tv interviews so far and both of them have
| released footage that totally and entirelly distorted the
| message to an infuriating degree. This was in a top tier
| European country, once state tv , once a major private
| station.
|
| Do not trust them blindly is all I can say.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Not directly related, but I've come to really appreciate the
| idea that a drug cartel is the ultimate example of a
| conspiracy, because not does it fit the definition really
| well, but it demonstrates what one actually looks like.
| There's no shadowy boardroom of hooded figures meeting in
| some underground bunker, but rather playboys loudly
| broadcasting their wealth & power with only the barest
| minimum of deniability maintained at the legal perspective,
| with the general populace fully aware but powerless to really
| do anything about it. And yet, it still is a multi-national
| network of coordinated logistics and execution for multiple
| tons of product that both the official powers & general
| public would really prefer to not to be there.
| zmxz wrote:
| > There is no master plan
|
| This.
|
| I have problem organizing 2 intelligent people to place dirty
| laundry in the laundry box or to do their homework on time or
| to place dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
|
| But there's a mastermind somewhere who can organize something
| so complex, with so many variables where each depends on a
| human being of varying intellect and skillset and the plan is
| so intricate that out of 100,000 possibilities - all of them
| play in the hand of the mastermind. And the plan includes the
| two from above, who can barely get a cup of water when
| they're thirsty!
|
| If such mastermind existed, I wouldn't even be angry for
| being manipulated - in fact, I would like to continue to be
| manipulated because if such a person (or group) existed -
| please, continue! Creating order out of chaos is a divine
| ability.
| yonaguska wrote:
| > Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.
|
| Religion shaping culture, and thus the decisions of
| countless people to go out and actually kill each other is
| a thing. Divine? I think so.
|
| Culture is programming for the masses. Is culture a
| conspiracy? Our intel agencies have caught onto this, color
| revolutions are a conspiracies, but the victims of such
| revolutions would hardly consider their own deeply held
| beliefs and subsequent actions to be conspiratorial.
|
| Culture shaping happens now at an insane speed with
| everything from the search engines we use, to the radio,
| tv, music, advertisements, and so on. If you can pull those
| levers, people will act accordingly. Pfizer has advertising
| dollars everywhere. Is it a conspiracy that people will
| literally stake their professions on defending Pfizer
| vaccines?
| RandomTisk wrote:
| Imagine for a moment if you made $100 Billion in profits in
| 2.5 years.
| zmxz wrote:
| Why wouldn't I imagine first that there exists a
| mastermind capable of weaving order out of chaos using
| divine ability granted to them by the Excalibur Fairy
| after praying at the Stonehenge?
|
| The story you're portraying doesn't need any kind of
| imagination, Hanlon's razor works perfectly well there
| and doesn't require any kind of special ability granted
| by smoking weed while doing nothing besides looking for
| conspiracies.
| [deleted]
| kcplate wrote:
| > I've worked in a newsroom.
|
| So have I
|
| > The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are
| controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity
|
| It's not controlling, but there is little doubt that
| reporter's and politicians partipate in quid pro quo
| KyeRussell wrote:
| There's misleading snd there's misleading. I've never worked
| in a newsroom. However it seem natural to me that changed
| incentivises (i.e. clicks / engagement) would change how
| content is written.
|
| I'm fairly distrusting in even my preferred primary news
| source, not because I suspect that there's some grand
| conspiracy, but because the system under which modern
| journalists (seem to) operate encourages very subtly but very
| consistently stretching the truth. The KPIs are the puppet
| master.
| wankle wrote:
| The most reliable major news source in my view (and no, we're
| not on cable, cordcutters for years now), is Fox News.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| America believes in in conspiracies with superhuman
| coordination and execution capabilities because they've done
| those themselves multiple times. - nuclear bombs - the man on
| the moon - darpa's internet
|
| Superhuman coordination and execution abilities along with
| extreme secrecy as needed.
| kneebonian wrote:
| That same line of reasoning was used to dismiss the Tuskegee
| experiments, MKULTRA and a host of other things that later
| turned out to be true.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| MrMan wrote:
| and 2/3 of the angry programer dudes on HN
| EricE wrote:
| I'm shocked that the number isn't a lot higher, especially based
| on what has been going on in the past 5 years with the continual
| blatant propaganda that routinely gets shot down. Heck there are
| "news" organizations acting like Russiagate was real and not a
| paid political operation.
| epakai wrote:
| Then there are people dismissing it despite the evidence...
|
| Trump's campaign staff activity stands on its own. They
| actively courted Russian influence even if they didn't go so
| far as to "collude".
| EricE wrote:
| Funny, the Mueller report didn't find what you obviously did?
| frankreyes wrote:
| https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10693146/cnn-settles-nick-sand...
|
| >CNN settles $275million suit from MAGA hat-wearing Covington
| Catholic student after stand-off vid
|
| I'll always remember this moment as a statement of fact that news
| organizations deliberately mislead us.
| c3534l wrote:
| Its true, though. Pick half a dozen news articles from 2+ years
| ago, then find the current state of information we have on what
| happened. Its pretty obvious that journalists lie, embellish,
| misrepresent what their sources tell them, or simply never did
| basic fact-checking. I realized this a long time ago and its only
| gotten worse. No one wants to pay for news, and they certainly
| don't want to pay for news that consistently causes them
| cognitive dissonance on top of being boring. But thats exactly
| what the world is: uncomfortable and technical.
| aliqot wrote:
| Not one news org agrees on any one thing, so as they say "one of
| you motherfuckers is lying"
| silent_cal wrote:
| American propaganda is so sophisticated that people think it's
| news. At least the Soviets knew it was fake.
| miroljub wrote:
| Honestly, I'm surprised only half of Americans thinks that the
| media misleads them. That's the whole purpose of those media.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| I certainly agree with that sentiment. It is my belief that the
| modern American press is the enemy of the people, as they rarely
| do anything but cause strife.
| now__what wrote:
| 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.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| now__what wrote:
| 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).
| null0ranje wrote:
| 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.
| dokem wrote:
| We gotta pump those numbers up ..
| robswc wrote:
| Seems it will be an ever rotating 50%, lol. During the war in
| Iraq, it was primarily leftists distrusting the mainstream media.
| Now ~20 years later it seems to have completely flipped.
|
| IMO, they simply mislead when it works in their favor. That makes
| it a minefield though and the best way to handle it I've found is
| to simply turn it off. If something is important, somehow that
| information will filter up to you.
| bts327 wrote:
| As evidenced by: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fzYj11qWb-M
| claytongulick wrote:
| "It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could
| not more completely deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is
| done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now
| be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes
| suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real
| extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who
| are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with
| the lies of the day."
|
| -Thomas Jefferson
| foo92691 wrote:
| Only half?
| fuckyah wrote:
| [dead]
| clavalle wrote:
| Are there any journalism democratization efforts we should be
| aware of?
|
| An organization who has incentives aligned with providing
| journalism for the people?
| nivenkos wrote:
| They do. The only real investigative journalists these days -
| Edward Snowden and Julian Assange - face life in prison and
| exile.
|
| Even Seymour Hersh has been smeared to discredit him now he dared
| speak against the establishment.
|
| It is not journalists' role to be a mouthpiece for the
| government, but to challenge it.
| tootie wrote:
| Hersh was extolled for speaking against the establishment. He
| was smeared for promoting outlandish claims with extremely thin
| sourcing.
|
| And neither Snowden nor Assange are journalists at all. Snowden
| stole some docs and Assange runs a wiki. Assange also
| collaborated with Russian intelligence.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Assange also collaborated with Russian intelligence.
|
| If you have no evidence of this, you're spreading
| misinformation.
| nerdix wrote:
| He had a TV show on RT which meant that he was literally on
| the Kremlin's payroll.
|
| Its sort of interesting to me that in this thread there are
| a lot of people trying very hard to make indirect
| connections between Western journalists and Western
| governments. Here we have a direct connection between a
| "journalist" and a government and its dismissed as
| "misinformation".
| tootie wrote:
| It was literally in the Mueller report:
|
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-report-julian-
| assange-...
|
| He published the DNC hacks which he acquired from GRU which
| he deliberately obscured by pointing to Seth Rich.
| tallanvor wrote:
| Edward Snowden was not, nor as far as I know did he ever claim
| to be, a journalist. He was at best a whistleblower, although
| given where he now lives and the citizenship he holds, it's
| clear that nothing he says or does can be trusted.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Reading this kind of garbage comments on HN is disappointing.
| loufe wrote:
| There are likely a lot of social-media agents in the
| comments. This, like any hot button political issue brings
| out lots of shills. Check this comment thread, the amount
| of downvoted comments speaks volumes about the quality of
| the community voting and the apparent importance of this
| site for political agents.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803779
| goodpoint wrote:
| The Internet is full of bots and paid commenters but if
| you look at statistics on americans being interview
| regarding Snowden you'll find that a whole lot are buying
| into the propaganda. It's just an easy thing to do and
| it's socially acceptable, especially in very
| nationalistic country.
| [deleted]
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| You mean in exile?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Being forced to seek asylum in Russia after multiple
| attempts to go elsewhere that were thwarted by the US (at
| the risk of major diplomatic incidents) makes you
| suspicious actually.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I mean it's like people completely forgot that the plane
| of a head of state was grounded by US allies in Europe
| because they suspected he might be smuggling Edward
| Snowden on board.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Edward Snowden has not been exiled in any non-misleading
| use of the term. He had many opportunities to return to the
| United States, and could do so today if his current hosts
| allowed it.
| not_a_shill wrote:
| Are you kidding me? You honest to God would trust the US
| government if you were in his situation?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I would have used legal avenues afforded to
| whistleblowers.
|
| > Contrary to his public claims that he notified numerous
| NSA officials about what he believed to be illegal
| intelligence collection, the Committee found no evidence
| that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns
| about U.S. intelligence activities - legal, moral, or
| otherwise - to any oversight officials within the U.S.
| government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so.
| Snowden was aware of these avenues. His only attempt to
| contact an NSA attorney revolved around a question about
| the legal precedence of executive orders, and his only
| contact to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
| Inspector General (IG) revolved around his disagreements
| with his managers about training and retention of
| information technology specialists.
|
| > Despite Snowden's later public claim that he would have
| faced retribution for voicing concerns about intelligence
| activities, the Committee found that laws and regulations
| in effect at the time of Snowden's actions afforded him
| protection. The Committee routinely receives disclosures
| from IC contractors pursuant to the Intelligence
| Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (IC WPA).
| If Snowden had been worried about possible retaliation
| for voicing concerns about NSA activities, he could have
| made a disclosure to the Committee. He did not.
|
| https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowde
| n_r...
| goodpoint wrote:
| And you believe this stuff?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Tell me why I shouldn't. What evidence do you have that
| refutes their findings?
| goodpoint wrote:
| Are you kidding me? One of most powerful organizations in
| the world specialized on handling secrets and you want
| evidence?
|
| They violate the US constitution and you expect them to
| hand out evidence?
|
| There has been previous episodes of people (proved and
| documented) of people attempting to speak up and being
| silenced, imprisoned etc. Any person threatening to go to
| the press can be arrested for treason.
|
| And if you look at similar organizations starting from
| 100 years ago you'll see the same patterns again and
| again: people who try to speak up are silenced in a way
| or another.
| randcraw wrote:
| Yes, assuming he was willing to spend the rest of his
| life in a US prison, if not Khashoggied en-route.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Right, but that's not definitionally distinct from an
| accused murderer who skips the country. No one would use
| the term "exiled" in that case, even if they believe the
| accusation unjust.
|
| The only reason to use "exiled" is to imply that Snowden
| is in Russia (or at least outside of the US) by someone's
| choice other than his own. That's what's misleading about
| it.
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| pessimizer wrote:
| Forget Hersh, who is used to operating on the edge. How about
| Jeff Gerth and the Columbia Journalism Review being totally
| ignored?
| nivenkos wrote:
| For reference - https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-
| up-press-versus-p...
| docdeek wrote:
| I'm not sure I would classify Edward Snowden as a journalist.
| haskellandchill wrote:
| > only real investigative journalists these days - Edward
| Snowden and Julian Assange
|
| That's insulting. There are thousands of investigative
| journalists doing real work every day. Do some research:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_journalism
|
| > Seymour Hersh
|
| His recent story was very sketchy, but he has always spoken
| against the establishment. The government has been smearing him
| since 1969.
| nivenkos wrote:
| My point was that in the past journalists in general
| supported him and were against the establishment.
|
| Whereas if Watergate happened today they'd just say it's
| justified against Russian spies or something.
| haskellandchill wrote:
| Should journalists just blindly accept his work? There are
| numerous flaws that he won't respond to https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Nord_Stream_sabo....
|
| There are better examples of what you're saying, not saying
| your point doesn't have merit, just that Hersh is a bad
| example.
| ErikCorry wrote:
| Compare Seymour Hersh's codswallop on the Skripal affair with
| the excellent work done by Bellingcat. It's clear that in this
| case the mainstream media got it mostly right and Hersh made a
| dog's breakfast of it.
|
| This colours my attitude to his Nordstream "revelations".
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| [dead]
| count wrote:
| https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113
| Funny you say that...
| nivenkos wrote:
| It's not unthinkable that they'd move the transponders for
| a secret mission, no?
|
| Also Hersh's point about the NATO head being an asset in
| his late teens is definitely feasible, as that was exactly
| what the Norwegian government did at the time -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lund_Report
| ErikCorry wrote:
| According to Hersh the bombs were planted during joint
| naval exercises. That's a time when lots of people would
| be surprised to see a ship sailing around with its
| transponders off.
|
| Your link is about illegal electronic surveillance and
| contains nothing related to recruiting random Norwegian
| teenagers as agents in the hope that they would become
| General Secretaries of NATO 40 years later, and thus
| somehow (?) able to direct clandestine missions of the
| Norwegian Navy.
|
| Let's turn it around: Is there something Hersh's source
| told him that was surprising and could be verified
| independently?
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Compare Seymour Hersh's codswallop on the Skripal affair
| with the excellent work done by Bellingcat.
|
| Done. Bellingcat exists as a parallel construction for US and
| British intelligence agencies and its only other purpose is
| to smear non-state controlled journalistic outlets. There was
| a leaked email from another source that indicates that even
| internally, US intelligence agencies don't think that
| Bellingcat is still a good way to spread information because
| normal people don't believe it any more.
|
| On the other side, Hersh is a journalist with a long track
| record who wrote a story that is likely true, although we
| won't know until if and until comes out. Won't stop
| nationalists from pretending that they know something that
| they don't. They love a traitor.
| ErikCorry wrote:
| You didn't engage with the truth of their respective
| Skripal affair output at all.
|
| I could have mentioned Hersh's account of the killing of
| Bin Laden too. At this point his track record is a lot
| longer than it is good. I can't keep giving him free passes
| based on good work done almost 50 years ago
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Julian Assange is not a journalist
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-ass...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| He has to come from the Journal region of France, otherwise
| he's just a sparkling whistleblower. /s
|
| From the tone of the article it seems like the author simply
| detests Julian Assange and Weiss puts forward no standard for
| who can rightly be called 'a journalist'.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| They say that a journalist knows not to assist people in
| committing crimes.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Au contraire - https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-the-
| western-media-is...
| 8943gG4f wrote:
| On why only half of Americans believe this in 2023:
|
| It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they
| have been fooled. -Mark Twain
| [deleted]
| rhacker wrote:
| The left/right divide is really bad for our country. The profit
| motives behind maintaining the divide only encourages it to get
| worse. CNN wants to shock you with whatever the GOP is doing to
| put a gun in your baby's crib. FOX wants to shock you with
| whatever crime is under reported.
|
| To make things worse, the mechanisms and new types of media (YT,
| social media, etc...) make it so that you essentially cannot
| escape the media grasp any more. So we're thinking 24/7 on how
| the left or right is going to ruin the country.
|
| All of it is profit motivated.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Is anyone else concerned that this sentiment may ultimately lead
| to unshakable seeds of doubt in the general populace? That would
| be a real thread to our democratic institutions. We see this with
| all the attacks on voters, voting, and election results.
|
| News, while not a direct wing of the government (usually), is an
| important core to the social and political well being of a
| nation, yet in the US it seems there is no counter balance to
| this trend.
|
| I can't even say I blame people either, its not just "right wing
| nut jobs" or "out of touch leftists" that feel news organizations
| are untrustworthy or mislead the public. Its starting to become
| more common among moderate to slightly left leaning political
| normals. IE, the average population (in aggregate).
|
| That should really bother people more I feel like. This is a
| pretty serious problem in the modern age and there's no good
| answer on how to move forward to get real trust back. Having a
| government sponsored non partisan news source will immediately
| get rejected by pretty significant portion of the US citizenry,
| and private corporations and non profit foundations have their
| own issues, namely around how they get funded.
|
| Seems there is honestly scant little we can do here, I honestly
| don't see how you roll this back
| GeekyBear wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.benton.org/public_interest_obligations_of_dtv_br...
| MrMan wrote:
| 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.
| rendall wrote:
| I dunno. I suspect that the news was just as partisan and
| biased back then, but the public was less able to independently
| verify news reports.
| EricE wrote:
| 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.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| There was a time when journalism was seen as an expense in
| the public interest and not as a partisan entertainment
| profit center / propaganda outlet.
|
| 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.
| rendall wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Sure, but the Overton window was quite slim. Many things
| were simply never discussed. Homosexuality, interracial
| romance, adultery of politicians, as just a few examples.
|
| The "alternative perspective" gave the illusion of a full
| airing of views, but it simply wasn't so.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Early SNL (1970s) turned this into a bit on the news
| segment, with Chevy Chase introducing someone to respond to
| some (non-existent) editorial of theirs from a past
| program, to provide alternative viewpoints, as was their
| journalistic duty (which respondent invariably had mis-
| heard some word and so was responding, passionately, to
| entirely the wrong thing--that was the joke)
| wirthjason wrote:
| I remember being in an after school philosophy club and we were
| discussing truth. My teacher popped out of his office, blurted
| out then returned to his office: "all objectivity moves through
| subjectivity".
|
| We never discussed it in the context of new media but it feels
| quite relevant.
| mola wrote:
| Written in fortune.com where they sell their brand to anyone to
| publish their scam articles
|
| Gee, I wonder why ppl don't trust the news. I would say ppl don't
| trust anything anymore, because most businesses are about
| scamming and gaslighting their customers these days.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Yes, it is very true that "news organizations intend to mislead,
| misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of
| view through their reporting."
|
| But I contend that:
|
| 1. News organizations today are less biased than they have ever
| been.
|
| 2. They are better than every other alternative.
|
| 3. They are better than nothing.
|
| 1. People imagine we had a golden age of news reporting. Never
| happened. For example, the media sat on the juiciest of juicy
| stories (JFK's affairs) so that they wouldn't lose access to the
| White House. What other more subtle ways were they influenced?
|
| 2. Where else are you going to get your news from? Facebook,
| TikTok? People claim that independent sources on SubStack are
| better, but then they list examples that have obvious and massive
| biases...
|
| 3. Informed voting is a crucial aspect of democracy. If you don't
| explicitly seek out the news you're going to get it anyway, and
| those sources are things like ads or political parties that are
| very much trying to influence you.
|
| I think we have to throw in "news organizations" with "democracy"
| and "market economy" in the category of "awful things with
| obvious massive drawbacks, but better than any other
| alternative".
|
| Like democracy and capitalism, we should concentrate on making
| news organizations incrementally better rather than discarding
| them for a worse alternative.
| vlark wrote:
| The other half watches Fox and believes everything as gospel. (I
| kid, I kid).
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I noticed there's a lot of affirmation of this belief but very
| little citations. So I'm going to ask HN: What is the news
| journalism or reporting you rely on to believe that other news
| organizations mislead you, and why did you believe the first over
| the second?
|
| [This is also a way for me to discern news I should be listening
| to!]
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