14 ms·

What does it say about the world we live in where blogs do more basic journalism than CNN? All that one would have had to do is read the report actually provide

by c3534l 11y ago

What does it say about the world we live in where blogs do more basic journalism than CNN? All that one would have had to do is read the report actually provided. I don't think I'm being too extreme when I say that, apart from maybe PBS, there is no reputable source of news in America. If you don't believe me, pick a random story, watch it as it gets rewritten a million times through Reuters, then check back on the facts of the story one year later. A news story gets twisted to promote some narrative that will sell papers, and when the facts of the story are finally verified (usually not by the news themselves, but lawyers or courts or whoever), the story is dropped and never reported on again. Again, if the only thing a reporter had to do was read the report to find the facts of the case to verify what is and isn't true, what the fuck is even the point of a news agency?

adventured 11y ago
I think you're being too extreme. Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and to a lesser extent the NY Times are all still reputable, even if they all still produce occasional junk. I don't believe there is a single reputable news source on earth, if the qualification is never producing junk articles.
- e40 11y ago
  The Wall Street Journal is getting less so. Being a Murdock owned publication it was/is bound to happen. After the purchase, the political coverage has taken a decided more conservative leaning. I wouldn't be surprised if it's also infected the financial reporting.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    People make the mistake of equating editorials with political news. They are not the same thing. The opinion section, the pages that have OPINION in big bold text at the top, are forthrightly conservative/libertarian, even though they have at least one regular liberal opinion columnist (William Galston) and constantly have guest articles written by politicians and business leaders of all stripes. The news sections are totally different and are pretty unbiased.
    - setpatchaddress 11y ago
      This is precisely what conservatives say about Fox News. Is the editorial firewall more effective at WSJ than at other News Corp properties? If not, you're being duped.
      - morgante 11y ago
        > Is the editorial firewall more effective at WSJ than at other News Corp properties? Yes, it is. I know a number of liberal journalists who work at the WSJ and would never work at Fox and definitely wouldn't give a conservative tilt to their stories.
      - brc 11y ago
        Yes. I know someone on staff at the Wsj, and know their political views. I have seen their reporting and it is generally balanced. Yes, the papers always have an editorial line they are following, but it's not necessarily biased to push a view, but more so to match their buyers. Running a newspaper is not a public service for the Wsj. The big surprise for most people is that people at institutions like Wsj and ny times try and be as professional as possible. They aren't acting like click bait interns at gawker.
    - lukeschlather 11y ago
      The news sections are always biased, if only by what they cover. For example, the New York Times, until the past month or so, was constantly running news stories about Hillary Clinton's chances in the general election against various Republicans. However, they obviously betray a bias since they considered all of the Republicans running, and only one of the Democrats. (Curiously, they started running more serious articles about Sanders only after it became clear he wasn't going to win the nomination.)
- scott_s 11y ago
  Curious - I would have flipped the Post and the Times in your sentence.
- heartbreak 11y ago
  The Washington Post was the paper that investigated and then wrote an article explaining that Bernie Sander's average campaign contribution is not actually the famous "Twenty-seven dollars", but in fact $27.88.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    That sounds about as serious as this article from Vice. It's just click-bait. The worst thing they found (as far as I can see) is that the government required Apple to have a recycling program. What a horrible thing the first article was hiding from us.
    - Symbiote 11y ago
      The point is, that every manufacturer in the USA has a recycling program, as required by law. Why does Apple's press release get published as news?
      - ktRolster 11y ago
        That's a fair point, but it's not a lie like the article asserts.
      - awinder 11y ago
        Because one way of making new things is to take two existing things and combining them into some new arrangement. It's pretty much humanity in a nutshell. So they took "the us govt requires companies of a certain size to set up recycling programs", combine it with "Apple sells a lot of stuff", and bingo, you've got "apple recycles a ton of stuff" as a new story. It's kinda lazy, but it's low hanging fruit.
        Symbiote 11y ago
        So, can we expect "Dell recycles a lot of stuff" next week, and HP the week after, followed by Sony? Dell have an equivalent page: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/id/corp-comm/us-goodwill-reconnect?c=us&l=en&s=corp&cs=id http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/id/corp-comm/us-goodwill-rec...
- the0nly0ne 11y ago
  >the washington post their agenda and the political leanings of their new master is clear http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/ http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...
Aelinsaar 11y ago
It says what has always been true, but what we're only now having the ability to regularly publish: FOLLOW THE MONEY.
malchow 11y ago
WSJ has floors of smart, trained, inquisitive journalists who assemble real original data and break real original stories, and who try hard–through single, double, and triple verification–to ensure the accuracy of every single figure and fact they report. Which is why it's sometimes annoying to see people treat paywalls as though they were moral disgraces. Source: I help invest for the chairman of the company.
- wolf550e 11y ago
  WSJ also has a political agenda, which requires a second source for any story in there, from the other point of view.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    What about Reuters and Associated Press?
    - dmoy 11y ago
      Reuters is not US. AP is pretty good for big news, yea.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        AP has its biases, in particular they are seen as anti-Israel with the whole saga of changing a headline from "Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem." to finally "Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station." being one of the better know headlines. The original headline remained on many sites.
        dmoy 11y ago
        Yea, some qualifiers about big news. Also, there's roughly 0 unbiased coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict at this point. You kinda have to just read multiple sides from different news outlets and try to sift through the bias yourself. E.g. most recently, it's hard to tell from a headline about an IDF executing an unarmed guy lying on the ground with a headshot whether or not it's a fair interpretation of the situation.
afarrell 11y ago
Information wants to be free, so it isn't worth paying journalists for the time to do this.
- oblio 11y ago
  I hope you're ironic, because that statement doesn't make any sense.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    To state things explicitly: "It is commonly believed that 'information wants to be free, therefore I should not pay for it', and so people are opposed to paying for journalism. As a consequence, organizations that exist to do the sort of vetting that the parent talks about find it harder and harder to get revenue from that activity. Therefore, they not only have no incentive to pay people to do that, they in fact risk going bankrupt if they do that."
TorKlingberg 11y ago
Unfortunately it is very difficult to know which blogs have good journalism. Social media aggregators tried to collect the best from around the internet, but ended up even more sensationalist and biased than traditional media.
- specialist 11y ago
  Any outlet providing citations, sources, verifiable data is a good start.
jasonpeacock 11y ago
There was Al Jazeera America, but it couldn't make itself profitable. But we still have Al Jazeera English: http://www.aljazeera.com/ http://www.aljazeera.com/
- djsumdog 11y ago
  Al Jazeera use to be a reliable source of news, back when Donald Rumsfeld called it a propaganda network. Today it's pretty much just another part of the US/EU propaganda network. People like to think NPR or BBC are different, but they're not. They spit out whatever is handed to the in government/company press releases.
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  > There was Al Jazeera America, but it couldn't make itself profitable. But we still have Al Jazeera English: Al Jazeera is a non-profit ran by the Qatari government. It was never meant to be profitable. It did shut down because oil prices went down and the Qatari government had to make some cuts.
erikpukinskis 11y ago
> What does it say about the world we live in where blogs do more basic journalism than CNN? To me it says that people who thought the Internet would kill journalism were wrong.
- dap 11y ago
  But that doesn't follow at all. Others have pointed out (in this thread) it's possible that old-media outlets have become sloppy _because_ the sloppy new-media outlets are out-producing them and gaining a major share of attention. I don't think this data point supports either conclusion more than the other.
  - eru 11y ago
    Why? erikpukinskis didn't say the Internet helped journalism, merely that it didn't kill journalism.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Really? To me it says they were right.
walrus01 11y ago
> more basic journalism than CNN? CNN has been a joke for a long time.
joemi 11y ago
As I understand it, the sloppiness of "old media" sources is due (at least in part) to the need to compete with "new media" sources. When people started turning to blogs and twitter and such sources because they were quicker to break stories and/or more entertaining, the "old media" sources had to try to break stories quicker than their processes currently did in order to catch up, which in general means less verification and proofreading and such than they used to do. So now you get things like this where Vice corrects a CNN story. This is exactly the type of correction that the old media places would do to the new media stories, and then new media (and those who looked to them for news) would just call them sore losers. Please don't mistake this one instance (or even the few instances that are probably already jumping to mind) as being indicative that CNN and its ilk are less reliable than Vice and its ilk. I'd be willing to wager that on average, the old media places are still quite a bit more reliable than the new media places. Things may indeed be changing, but I don't think we're there yet. Edit: I just wanted to say: All that said, I still don't think CNN is necessarily a good source of news. It was a lower rung even before any changes due to new media's rise.
agumonkey 11y ago
I had this reflex to stop reading anything but Mailing Lists or 'close to the work' sources only. Way too much noise and fluff floating around.
I_HALF_CATS 11y ago
Just to be clear: most the media outlets that misreported this story typically issue corrections more frequently than Vice/Motherboard. The credit of this article goes the the writer and not Vice. Vice has a long history of history of making up stories for content.
happyslobro 11y ago
CBC is pretty good, especially Peter Mansbridge. He hosts a good roast, when the powers that be bring the pork.
WalterBright 11y ago
I'm wondering when there ever was a golden age of journalism. In the 80's, I was working in an office building that had a natural gas leak for hours and then blew the roof off. I taped the news broadcasts that evening on multiple channels. Each TV news anchor recounted a different set of facts, all them wrong. It was an eye-opener for me. And it wasn't even a case of any agenda, it was just laziness and doing as little work as possible. It makes me wonder how much we think we know about history from the history books is completely wrong.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  (For example, one reporter called it a "warehouse", when you could see it was an office building.)
- ctthill 11y ago
  Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  In the early 90s there was an incident that happened to my house that ended up in the local news. The details reported in the news seemed like they were totally made up from someone who happened to be driving by and then told someone else what they thought might have happened. They reported the house was vacant rather than interviewing my family or the other tenants of the not at all vacant 6 family house! We were home the whole time! We didn't see a single reporter or news station even do a drive by of the house before running the story. They would not even have had to knock to ask us what happened - we were outside cleaning up for most of the day as the incident caused a huge mess. It shocked me that such little effort was made to actually find out what happened before reporting it as fact to the public. I actually think that they would be less likely to do that today with social media.
- Intermernet 11y ago
  I was once a member of a canyoning trip that had a bunch of young teenagers on it (13 - 15 years old). We encountered horrendous weather on the climb out of the canyon and decided to spend the night in an overhanging shelter rather than continue to climb the 300+ meters of cliff face in torrential rain. The next day we successfully (and safely) made it back to the campsite from which we'd started only to be met with reporters and cameras looking for the story. Basically, they wanted some quote, from somebody, that they could use to pin-point the delay onto a single person, and exaggerate the danger that we were in. The fact was that we decided to take the least risky option in the face of unpredictable, extreme weather. The reporters didn't think this was enough and there was a multi-week long witch-hunt to try to blame it on trip leaders, despite the fact that no-one was harmed (if we'd chosen to continue the climb out in the horrible conditions we faced, then someone would have very likely been harmed). This was my eye-opener to how the media operate. Instead of "Group of young adventurers safe from freak storm" it became "Irresponsible trip leaders cause near-death of youths". If it won't sell, it's not news.
gnarbarian 11y ago
Even PBS and NPR while very good, push narratives these days. Same goes for wikipedia. Journalism is dead and nobody seems to care about facts anymore.
narrator 11y ago
Do you ever notice how the news media will pick someone totally at random to represent how a whole nation feels about a problem? For example: "One <Inhabitant of Area Experiencing Controversial Situation> said....". Except, it's not totally at random, it's whatever interpretation of events that they want to push. Do you think they just print whatever the first person they talked to said? Same goes for what news stories they cover. It has to align with the narrative that the editors are trying to push. It's arguably a necessary part of the news media because they have to choose which stories to put in front of you and which people to quote given limited space. Pretending that we can experience everything that goes on in the world from reading a paragraph or two on a situation involving hundreds if not more is not entirely realistic.
danielrhodes 11y ago
When it comes to news bias, our expectations are totally out of whack. I don't think there ever was a time when news sources were unbiased. In fact, I think in the past journalists were just much less worried about being perceived as biased. A good post by Aaron Swartz on this subject: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/newobjectivity http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/newobjectivity
habitue 11y ago
Check out who won the pulitzers in news this year: http://www.poynter.org/2016/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2016-pulitzer-prizes/407340/ http://www.poynter.org/2016/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2016... Best investigative journalism: Tampa Bay Times & Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Ever heard of them? This is availability bias. Good journalism is all over the place. If you're looking at CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and lamenting the state of journalism vs. fluff in the modern era, you're looking in the wrong places! You're literally singling out the shitty news and assuming that represents everything. I guarantee if you go to your local paper or local news station and check out their investigative journalists, you'll find some incredibly talented, passionate people who report on real stories. Yes, the economics are such that for every in-depth investigative piece, you have a ton of press release reports, and fluff. But that's true on blogs as well.
- nerdponx 11y ago
  But that's just the problem. Who goes and seeks it out? Most of the country does not, but at the same time does not share ( or doesn't have the wherewithal to follow through on) the skepticism in this thread.
philliphaydon 11y ago
We seem to not care about science anymore for more or less the same reasons. Media outlets report a single study or conclude something and all of a sudden the world decides the science is done there's no reason to discuss things anymore. Then the moment someone says something differing from this opinion he is wrong. Even tho he may be proving something factual. Mass media has ruined a lot of things :(
vtlynch 11y ago
CNN, MSNBC, and the other "network news" companies rarely do reporting. There are literally thousands of reputable articles published by US outlets yearly - from The Atlantic to the Washington Post. Not everything they publish is good - quality correlates more with the author than anything else.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
adolph 11y ago
Recycled click bait travels a score of furlongs before basic journalism has its boots on. Investigative journalism is still sleeping in.

by c3534l 11y ago

adventured 11y ago

I think you're being too extreme. Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and to a lesser extent the NY Times are all still reputable, even if they all still produce occasional junk. I don't believe there is a single reputable news source on earth, if the qualification is never producing junk articles.

e40 11y ago
The Wall Street Journal is getting less so. Being a Murdock owned publication it was/is bound to happen. After the purchase, the political coverage has taken a decided more conservative leaning. I wouldn't be surprised if it's also infected the financial reporting.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  People make the mistake of equating editorials with political news. They are not the same thing. The opinion section, the pages that have OPINION in big bold text at the top, are forthrightly conservative/libertarian, even though they have at least one regular liberal opinion columnist (William Galston) and constantly have guest articles written by politicians and business leaders of all stripes. The news sections are totally different and are pretty unbiased.
  - setpatchaddress 11y ago
    This is precisely what conservatives say about Fox News. Is the editorial firewall more effective at WSJ than at other News Corp properties? If not, you're being duped.
    - morgante 11y ago
      > Is the editorial firewall more effective at WSJ than at other News Corp properties? Yes, it is. I know a number of liberal journalists who work at the WSJ and would never work at Fox and definitely wouldn't give a conservative tilt to their stories.
    - brc 11y ago
      Yes. I know someone on staff at the Wsj, and know their political views. I have seen their reporting and it is generally balanced. Yes, the papers always have an editorial line they are following, but it's not necessarily biased to push a view, but more so to match their buyers. Running a newspaper is not a public service for the Wsj. The big surprise for most people is that people at institutions like Wsj and ny times try and be as professional as possible. They aren't acting like click bait interns at gawker.
  - lukeschlather 11y ago
    The news sections are always biased, if only by what they cover. For example, the New York Times, until the past month or so, was constantly running news stories about Hillary Clinton's chances in the general election against various Republicans. However, they obviously betray a bias since they considered all of the Republicans running, and only one of the Democrats. (Curiously, they started running more serious articles about Sanders only after it became clear he wasn't going to win the nomination.)
scott_s 11y ago
Curious - I would have flipped the Post and the Times in your sentence.
heartbreak 11y ago
The Washington Post was the paper that investigated and then wrote an article explaining that Bernie Sander's average campaign contribution is not actually the famous "Twenty-seven dollars", but in fact $27.88.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  That sounds about as serious as this article from Vice. It's just click-bait. The worst thing they found (as far as I can see) is that the government required Apple to have a recycling program. What a horrible thing the first article was hiding from us.
  - Symbiote 11y ago
    The point is, that every manufacturer in the USA has a recycling program, as required by law. Why does Apple's press release get published as news?
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      That's a fair point, but it's not a lie like the article asserts.
    - awinder 11y ago
      Because one way of making new things is to take two existing things and combining them into some new arrangement. It's pretty much humanity in a nutshell. So they took "the us govt requires companies of a certain size to set up recycling programs", combine it with "Apple sells a lot of stuff", and bingo, you've got "apple recycles a ton of stuff" as a new story. It's kinda lazy, but it's low hanging fruit.
      - Symbiote 11y ago
        So, can we expect "Dell recycles a lot of stuff" next week, and HP the week after, followed by Sony? Dell have an equivalent page: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/id/corp-comm/us-goodwill-reconnect?c=us&l=en&s=corp&cs=id http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/id/corp-comm/us-goodwill-rec...
the0nly0ne 11y ago
>the washington post their agenda and the political leanings of their new master is clear http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/ http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...

Aelinsaar 11y ago

It says what has always been true, but what we're only now having the ability to regularly publish: FOLLOW THE MONEY.

malchow 11y ago

WSJ has floors of smart, trained, inquisitive journalists who assemble real original data and break real original stories, and who try hard–through single, double, and triple verification–to ensure the accuracy of every single figure and fact they report. Which is why it's sometimes annoying to see people treat paywalls as though they were moral disgraces. Source: I help invest for the chairman of the company.

wolf550e 11y ago
WSJ also has a political agenda, which requires a second source for any story in there, from the other point of view.
- bduerst 11y ago
  What about Reuters and Associated Press?
  - dmoy 11y ago
    Reuters is not US. AP is pretty good for big news, yea.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      AP has its biases, in particular they are seen as anti-Israel with the whole saga of changing a headline from "Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem." to finally "Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station." being one of the better know headlines. The original headline remained on many sites.
      - dmoy 11y ago
        Yea, some qualifiers about big news. Also, there's roughly 0 unbiased coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict at this point. You kinda have to just read multiple sides from different news outlets and try to sift through the bias yourself. E.g. most recently, it's hard to tell from a headline about an IDF executing an unarmed guy lying on the ground with a headshot whether or not it's a fair interpretation of the situation.

afarrell 11y ago

Information wants to be free, so it isn't worth paying journalists for the time to do this.

oblio 11y ago
I hope you're ironic, because that statement doesn't make any sense.
- afarrell 11y ago
  To state things explicitly: "It is commonly believed that 'information wants to be free, therefore I should not pay for it', and so people are opposed to paying for journalism. As a consequence, organizations that exist to do the sort of vetting that the parent talks about find it harder and harder to get revenue from that activity. Therefore, they not only have no incentive to pay people to do that, they in fact risk going bankrupt if they do that."

TorKlingberg 11y ago

Unfortunately it is very difficult to know which blogs have good journalism. Social media aggregators tried to collect the best from around the internet, but ended up even more sensationalist and biased than traditional media.

specialist 11y ago
Any outlet providing citations, sources, verifiable data is a good start.

jasonpeacock 11y ago

There was Al Jazeera America, but it couldn't make itself profitable. But we still have Al Jazeera English: http://www.aljazeera.com/ http://www.aljazeera.com/

djsumdog 11y ago
Al Jazeera use to be a reliable source of news, back when Donald Rumsfeld called it a propaganda network. Today it's pretty much just another part of the US/EU propaganda network. People like to think NPR or BBC are different, but they're not. They spit out whatever is handed to the in government/company press releases.
patrickaljord 11y ago
> There was Al Jazeera America, but it couldn't make itself profitable. But we still have Al Jazeera English: Al Jazeera is a non-profit ran by the Qatari government. It was never meant to be profitable. It did shut down because oil prices went down and the Qatari government had to make some cuts.

erikpukinskis 11y ago

> What does it say about the world we live in where blogs do more basic journalism than CNN? To me it says that people who thought the Internet would kill journalism were wrong.

dap 11y ago
But that doesn't follow at all. Others have pointed out (in this thread) it's possible that old-media outlets have become sloppy _because_ the sloppy new-media outlets are out-producing them and gaining a major share of attention. I don't think this data point supports either conclusion more than the other.
- eru 11y ago
  Why? erikpukinskis didn't say the Internet helped journalism, merely that it didn't kill journalism.
CamperBob2 11y ago
Really? To me it says they were right.

walrus01 11y ago

> more basic journalism than CNN? CNN has been a joke for a long time.

joemi 11y ago

As I understand it, the sloppiness of "old media" sources is due (at least in part) to the need to compete with "new media" sources. When people started turning to blogs and twitter and such sources because they were quicker to break stories and/or more entertaining, the "old media" sources had to try to break stories quicker than their processes currently did in order to catch up, which in general means less verification and proofreading and such than they used to do. So now you get things like this where Vice corrects a CNN story. This is exactly the type of correction that the old media places would do to the new media stories, and then new media (and those who looked to them for news) would just call them sore losers. Please don't mistake this one instance (or even the few instances that are probably already jumping to mind) as being indicative that CNN and its ilk are less reliable than Vice and its ilk. I'd be willing to wager that on average, the old media places are still quite a bit more reliable than the new media places. Things may indeed be changing, but I don't think we're there yet. Edit: I just wanted to say: All that said, I still don't think CNN is necessarily a good source of news. It was a lower rung even before any changes due to new media's rise.

agumonkey 11y ago

I had this reflex to stop reading anything but Mailing Lists or 'close to the work' sources only. Way too much noise and fluff floating around.

I_HALF_CATS 11y ago

Just to be clear: most the media outlets that misreported this story typically issue corrections more frequently than Vice/Motherboard. The credit of this article goes the the writer and not Vice. Vice has a long history of history of making up stories for content.

happyslobro 11y ago

CBC is pretty good, especially Peter Mansbridge. He hosts a good roast, when the powers that be bring the pork.

WalterBright 11y ago

I'm wondering when there ever was a golden age of journalism. In the 80's, I was working in an office building that had a natural gas leak for hours and then blew the roof off. I taped the news broadcasts that evening on multiple channels. Each TV news anchor recounted a different set of facts, all them wrong. It was an eye-opener for me. And it wasn't even a case of any agenda, it was just laziness and doing as little work as possible. It makes me wonder how much we think we know about history from the history books is completely wrong.

WalterBright 11y ago
(For example, one reporter called it a "warehouse", when you could see it was an office building.)
ctthill 11y ago
Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll
nommm-nommm 11y ago
In the early 90s there was an incident that happened to my house that ended up in the local news. The details reported in the news seemed like they were totally made up from someone who happened to be driving by and then told someone else what they thought might have happened. They reported the house was vacant rather than interviewing my family or the other tenants of the not at all vacant 6 family house! We were home the whole time! We didn't see a single reporter or news station even do a drive by of the house before running the story. They would not even have had to knock to ask us what happened - we were outside cleaning up for most of the day as the incident caused a huge mess. It shocked me that such little effort was made to actually find out what happened before reporting it as fact to the public. I actually think that they would be less likely to do that today with social media.
Intermernet 11y ago
I was once a member of a canyoning trip that had a bunch of young teenagers on it (13 - 15 years old). We encountered horrendous weather on the climb out of the canyon and decided to spend the night in an overhanging shelter rather than continue to climb the 300+ meters of cliff face in torrential rain. The next day we successfully (and safely) made it back to the campsite from which we'd started only to be met with reporters and cameras looking for the story. Basically, they wanted some quote, from somebody, that they could use to pin-point the delay onto a single person, and exaggerate the danger that we were in. The fact was that we decided to take the least risky option in the face of unpredictable, extreme weather. The reporters didn't think this was enough and there was a multi-week long witch-hunt to try to blame it on trip leaders, despite the fact that no-one was harmed (if we'd chosen to continue the climb out in the horrible conditions we faced, then someone would have very likely been harmed). This was my eye-opener to how the media operate. Instead of "Group of young adventurers safe from freak storm" it became "Irresponsible trip leaders cause near-death of youths". If it won't sell, it's not news.

gnarbarian 11y ago

Even PBS and NPR while very good, push narratives these days. Same goes for wikipedia. Journalism is dead and nobody seems to care about facts anymore.

narrator 11y ago

Do you ever notice how the news media will pick someone totally at random to represent how a whole nation feels about a problem? For example: "One <Inhabitant of Area Experiencing Controversial Situation> said....". Except, it's not totally at random, it's whatever interpretation of events that they want to push. Do you think they just print whatever the first person they talked to said? Same goes for what news stories they cover. It has to align with the narrative that the editors are trying to push. It's arguably a necessary part of the news media because they have to choose which stories to put in front of you and which people to quote given limited space. Pretending that we can experience everything that goes on in the world from reading a paragraph or two on a situation involving hundreds if not more is not entirely realistic.

danielrhodes 11y ago

When it comes to news bias, our expectations are totally out of whack. I don't think there ever was a time when news sources were unbiased. In fact, I think in the past journalists were just much less worried about being perceived as biased. A good post by Aaron Swartz on this subject: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/newobjectivity http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/newobjectivity

habitue 11y ago

Check out who won the pulitzers in news this year: http://www.poynter.org/2016/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2016-pulitzer-prizes/407340/ http://www.poynter.org/2016/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2016... Best investigative journalism: Tampa Bay Times & Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Ever heard of them? This is availability bias. Good journalism is all over the place. If you're looking at CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and lamenting the state of journalism vs. fluff in the modern era, you're looking in the wrong places! You're literally singling out the shitty news and assuming that represents everything. I guarantee if you go to your local paper or local news station and check out their investigative journalists, you'll find some incredibly talented, passionate people who report on real stories. Yes, the economics are such that for every in-depth investigative piece, you have a ton of press release reports, and fluff. But that's true on blogs as well.

nerdponx 11y ago
But that's just the problem. Who goes and seeks it out? Most of the country does not, but at the same time does not share ( or doesn't have the wherewithal to follow through on) the skepticism in this thread.

philliphaydon 11y ago

We seem to not care about science anymore for more or less the same reasons. Media outlets report a single study or conclude something and all of a sudden the world decides the science is done there's no reason to discuss things anymore. Then the moment someone says something differing from this opinion he is wrong. Even tho he may be proving something factual. Mass media has ruined a lot of things :(

vtlynch 11y ago

CNN, MSNBC, and the other "network news" companies rarely do reporting. There are literally thousands of reputable articles published by US outlets yearly - from The Atlantic to the Washington Post. Not everything they publish is good - quality correlates more with the author than anything else.

deleted 11y ago

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adolph 11y ago

Recycled click bait travels a score of furlongs before basic journalism has its boots on. Investigative journalism is still sleeping in.