5 ms·

The mass media had all the power, for some time, they controlled all the information. They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths, etc. People

The mass media had all the power, for some time, they controlled all the information. They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths, etc. People got tired of that, and therefore, started distrusting the mass media. And now the mass media says "this hurricane of fake news, this has to be stopped!" The mass media forgets: this is all your fault. This monster, you created it. In this past election, most newspapers decided to side with Clinton. Why would you do that? Now all Trump supporters and even some Clinton supporters hate you and won't trust you again for a long time. You had the power and the responsibility to tell the truth. You decided to publish half truths because you had certain interests. Money, power. People got tired and they went for the ONLY alternative that there is: the tabloids, the liars. It's ALL your fault. You are shameless scoundrels, writing a title that says that "media literacy backfired". No, your strategy of manipulating the public backfired. Now deal with it.

bostand 10y ago
What do you think about InfoWars & co?
- akjainaj 10y ago
  They are rubbish. There are no serious conservative news outlets that I know of. I usually read the news on liberal websites (such as the NYT) but I take everything with a pinch of salt... or a fistful of salt :-) Could I do the same with conservative websites? No. Breitbart for example looks like a parody website. Also, being a conservative, I think I'd be more inclined to believe their lies, which is something I'd rather not do.
  - alva 10y ago
    Is there an equivalent to The Spectator http://www.spectator.co.uk/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/ in the US? It is a conservative publication that has been running for nearly 200 years. Any ambitious conservative writers seem to have quite an opportunity at the moment.
    - luckydata 10y ago
      I don't think so, there isn't much of a market for smart, well informed conservative writing at the moment in the USA. The Republican audience is quite anti-intellectual.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    How about WSJ? Some articles in the Economist tend rightward.
  - cloakandswagger 10y ago
    Drudge Report is actually quite good, if you can parse out the obvious conservative bias. Drudge is the undisputed king of independent media, and in my experience stories get broken and fleshed out on Drudge faster than any other source.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    The WSJ is as much to the right as the NYT is to the left, which in actual terms is "not that much, as long as you understand that newspapers have an opinion section that is separate from the newsroom. There's a sort of "from first principle" theory of journalism currently going around that I can only assume is a misunderstanding of some middle-school civics class. In that world view, any mention of "cars" is evidence of bias in favour of those who believe cars exist.
    - ktRolster 10y ago
      I try to remember that the most value from newspapers comes not from their political coverage, but the fact that they cover basically everything else (although politics is certainly flashy). WSJ and NYT both do an admirable job on the other stuff.
- vowelless 10y ago
  I personally don't blame InfoWars or Breitbart [0]. They don't have the institutional backing nor the legacy that the main stream media has. I blame the main stream media for virtually forcing a segment of the population to tune themselves out and exclusively follow these far-right sources. I'll give you my own example. Typing "c" on my address bar and pressing enter was a very common thing for me. It would take me to CNN. It was muscle memory. Same for "ny". But in 2016, most of these websites were becoming insufferable and I just started tuning them out. Even I, as someone who disliked Trump, could see the absolute blatant bias and I had the feeling that this was going to backfire very strongly [1]. Some people took it to the other extreme. They got disillusioned by the main stream media but then ended up elevating fringe far-right groups like Breitbart, InfoWars. Those groups didn't become big by spending VC money on ads... they were elevated by a new readership after the dismissal of MSM. Think Digg->Reddit. [0] It's sad that I even have to say this: I abhor what they publish and the crazy radio host at infowars. [1] I actually took out a bet in Trump's favor in Jan 2016 to validate my criticism with my friends.
- ihaveahadron 10y ago
  the only worth of infowars is the talk show when Alex Jones is on. For the disinformation that you sometimes hear, the info you don't hear anywhere else, makes it one of an the best news sources.
potatosoup 10y ago
Myself (a liberal, NYT reader for decades), was upset when I realized that the publication was pushing Clinton so hard without telling the other side of the story. And then leaks confirmed that the press was, err, too friendly with the candidate (sharing articles before they were published, passing on debate questions, staging interviews...) Sigh.
- jordanb 10y ago
  Remember that the New York Times published fake news that helped the Government launch the War in Iraq, costing the country trillions of dollars and thousands of combat causalities, tens of thousands of more deaths Iraq, destabilizing the middle east, helping the rise of ISIS and the current wave of terror. This is something the New York Times did. They own it. http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/26/dick-cheney-the-new-york-times-and-the-myth-of-the-iraq-connection-to-9-11/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/26/dick-cheney-the-new-y...
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Please don't conflate poor journalism with fake news. Reporting what the government said with no deeper context is poor journalism. The government really did say there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The New York Times reported those statements, not faked evidence of the weapons. Fake news is just making shit up, like inventing a dead body and saying it was killed by Clinton.
    - potatosoup 10y ago
      There's a question of journalistic integrity. If you read NYT as I do you expect to be told "the whole story" and not be reading a glorified crafted PR statement. I think that's irresponsible and as good as fake
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        The institutional failure of much of mass media is a problem. Trading on access, parroting PR, things like that. But it's a different problem than the one where people literally completely make up click bait articles and present them as news. Not hastily written, fact light articles about real events, articles about things that simply never happened. We do ourselves a favor when we treat them as separate issues.
ant6n 10y ago
The Media were playing along with the narrative that Clinton was the most corrupt politician ever, maybe in an effort to appease the right? They also gave Trump way too much air time. The Overton window moved so much during the campaign.
- akjainaj 10y ago
  They gave Trump lots of air time because ppl were interested in watching him act like a clown, and that's $$$ for those websites. Those editors, writers, etc only care about money and power. The exposure they gave Trump is something that also backfired. :-)
- potatosoup 10y ago
  The DNC strategy was to amplify Trump because they thought he'd be an easy-lose candidate, and so they did. http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/ http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign... And the DNC/Clinton campaign worked closely with a number of outlets (like NYT) to publish various stories. https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak-reveals-clinton-campaigns-cozy-press-relationship/ https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak... This comes from the leaked e-mails, not hearsay.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  More that Clinton stories of little consequence were dragged out forever because of her inability to give a straight answer or admit any mistakes without burying them in weasel words. Those Goldman speeches were a constant hum throughout a year of campaigning, and when they were finally released against her will, they were a no-op. If she had released them the minute they were asked for, and apologized for anything in them that didn't agree with her current stances, they would have been gone in one news cycle. The emails went on forever, because instead of saying sorry and claiming technical ignorance, she blamed everyone but herself. Every time she blamed someone or something else - that's a new story that has to be written. edit: The main feature of these two stories? Nobody is even claiming that Russians had anything to do with either of them. The leaked emails that the usual suspects are blaming on the Russians just had the effect of confirming Sanders supporters' suspicions; she lost their votes when she characterized them all as privileged white male children.
justinlaster 10y ago
>They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths, etc. No they didn't. They just didn't post what people wanted. >started distrusting the mass media. People were told to distrust the media, and they followed through because it tickles people's ego's.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  The Post wasn't great before Bezos, now they're building 5000 word editorials from single tweets, putting them in the news section, and giving them headlines that would shame Buzzfeed.
- fdsaaf 10y ago
  > >They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths, etc. > No they didn't. They just didn't post what people wanted. What about the Rolling Stone Jackie scandal? What about the constant demonization of men?
  - justinlaster 10y ago
    Are you seriously going to try to treat a blip from one publisher and act like it's characteristic of the whole ecosystem? For your information, other publishers that are apart of the "MSM" called out the Rolling Stone article.
tps5 10y ago
I don't think there's such a thing as "truth" in the idealistic way you mean it. When you seek to describe something as complicated as the economy of a gigantic country or some event involving millions of people, you necessarily create abstractions that capture only a tiny fraction of "truth." And yes, which fraction you end up capturing probably depends on your own personal biases. You postulate conspiracy: that "[the media] decided to publish half truths because you had certain interests." I think these "half truths" (AKA inaccuracies) are a necessary result of any attempt to describe complex things. In my opinion, the rational way to live in a world like this is to read widely and take everything with a grain of salt. Or unplug completely. But don't expect or accept any single source of truth.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vowelless 10y ago
  > You postulate conspiracy Your use of the word "conspiracy" there has a larger consequence than you think / intended.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
shaki-dora 10y ago
Scoundrels, really? Most newspapers decided to call out Trump because – with any sense of perspective – he is unelectable to a degree that made further insistence on fake balance untenable. That is "the truth". You definition of "truth" would require journalists to reprint the phone book and nothing else – because even the decision what makes a story relevant requires a value judgement that you no longer see as legitimate. The article is really talking about that attitude, and much better than I can. Unfortunately, the US may be past the point of no return. There is now group of people that has turned their backs on the civil society build over generations. Even republicans are having trouble adjust to the new reality where you can blatantly lie, call for violence at your rallies and (I still can't believe this one) use a presidential debate to relitigate a 10-year-old feud where someone made fun of the size of your hands. But with 40%+ believing in #Pizzagate, they now feel emboldened to a point where they have almost officially given up even the pretence of acting with a coherent ideology that aims to improve anything. A society needs strong institutions, shared values, and a basic assumption of good faith. If you succeed with the current mission to tear down the NYT/WSJ/WashPo and the two or three other remaining actual news organizations, you'll find yourself in a world of just Mother Jones and Infowars. Are people's lives really dramatically bad so as to justify a roll of the dice of that magnitude?
- alva 10y ago
  > decided to call out Trump because – with any sense of perspective – he is unelectable fake news
javajosh 10y ago
Good comment. I would only add the generalization that when institutions lose the value of self-restraint, they decay and die. Self-restraint is the key, and it must be used to maintain principle, even at the expense of loyalty. When you look at institutional problems today, the common thread is that they seem to value loyalty over principle. The most stark example are cops not "ratting" on each other. But scientists have done it too, by gaming the system instead of defending the system against gamesmanship. I speculate that one contributing factor to this decline is the focus on measurement. Objective measurement is particularly important to capitalists who ultimately fuel much of our institutional activity. This includes those positions in government that, for example, decide which departments to fund, which in turn decide where to put the grants. How do you measure the value of art? The value of research? The value of a piece of news? One measure is attention, which is the precursor to all other interactions, including the all-important transaction. Media has views, scientists have publications and cites. (Artists are perhaps the most honest of all, in that they rely entirely on a nebulous network of "experts" and "buzz" to drive demand.) News is interesting because you can characterize it as a moving attention dot across an enormously complex information space (a planet with 7.5B people doing all the things people do). If you include the fact that each individual is a primary dot, and they integrate different secondary dots, then each individual is easily combinatorially unique. News is inherently tribal (at least WRT values) because you'll want to know about things you want to change, and those are the things that displease you. Imagine a personal news service that only told you facts about the world that you personally care about, with a summary of reactions of people you respect (and perhaps disrespect), and an option to dig deeper. That's the kind of news service I'm waiting for!
shortformblog 10y ago
You are yelling at danah boyd, an academic and researcher, as if she's a journalist. She's not. She's someone who researches stuff like this for a living. Stop treating the mass media as a monolith and realize there are individuals making difficult decisions on a daily basis. And that not everyone who writes an article is a member of the mass media.

bostand 10y ago

What do you think about InfoWars & co?

akjainaj 10y ago
They are rubbish. There are no serious conservative news outlets that I know of. I usually read the news on liberal websites (such as the NYT) but I take everything with a pinch of salt... or a fistful of salt :-) Could I do the same with conservative websites? No. Breitbart for example looks like a parody website. Also, being a conservative, I think I'd be more inclined to believe their lies, which is something I'd rather not do.
- alva 10y ago
  Is there an equivalent to The Spectator http://www.spectator.co.uk/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/ in the US? It is a conservative publication that has been running for nearly 200 years. Any ambitious conservative writers seem to have quite an opportunity at the moment.
  - luckydata 10y ago
    I don't think so, there isn't much of a market for smart, well informed conservative writing at the moment in the USA. The Republican audience is quite anti-intellectual.
- noobermin 10y ago
  How about WSJ? Some articles in the Economist tend rightward.
- cloakandswagger 10y ago
  Drudge Report is actually quite good, if you can parse out the obvious conservative bias. Drudge is the undisputed king of independent media, and in my experience stories get broken and fleshed out on Drudge faster than any other source.
- matt4077 10y ago
  The WSJ is as much to the right as the NYT is to the left, which in actual terms is "not that much, as long as you understand that newspapers have an opinion section that is separate from the newsroom. There's a sort of "from first principle" theory of journalism currently going around that I can only assume is a misunderstanding of some middle-school civics class. In that world view, any mention of "cars" is evidence of bias in favour of those who believe cars exist.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    I try to remember that the most value from newspapers comes not from their political coverage, but the fact that they cover basically everything else (although politics is certainly flashy). WSJ and NYT both do an admirable job on the other stuff.
vowelless 10y ago
I personally don't blame InfoWars or Breitbart [0]. They don't have the institutional backing nor the legacy that the main stream media has. I blame the main stream media for virtually forcing a segment of the population to tune themselves out and exclusively follow these far-right sources. I'll give you my own example. Typing "c" on my address bar and pressing enter was a very common thing for me. It would take me to CNN. It was muscle memory. Same for "ny". But in 2016, most of these websites were becoming insufferable and I just started tuning them out. Even I, as someone who disliked Trump, could see the absolute blatant bias and I had the feeling that this was going to backfire very strongly [1]. Some people took it to the other extreme. They got disillusioned by the main stream media but then ended up elevating fringe far-right groups like Breitbart, InfoWars. Those groups didn't become big by spending VC money on ads... they were elevated by a new readership after the dismissal of MSM. Think Digg->Reddit. [0] It's sad that I even have to say this: I abhor what they publish and the crazy radio host at infowars. [1] I actually took out a bet in Trump's favor in Jan 2016 to validate my criticism with my friends.
ihaveahadron 10y ago
the only worth of infowars is the talk show when Alex Jones is on. For the disinformation that you sometimes hear, the info you don't hear anywhere else, makes it one of an the best news sources.

potatosoup 10y ago

Myself (a liberal, NYT reader for decades), was upset when I realized that the publication was pushing Clinton so hard without telling the other side of the story. And then leaks confirmed that the press was, err, too friendly with the candidate (sharing articles before they were published, passing on debate questions, staging interviews...) Sigh.

jordanb 10y ago
Remember that the New York Times published fake news that helped the Government launch the War in Iraq, costing the country trillions of dollars and thousands of combat causalities, tens of thousands of more deaths Iraq, destabilizing the middle east, helping the rise of ISIS and the current wave of terror. This is something the New York Times did. They own it. http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/26/dick-cheney-the-new-york-times-and-the-myth-of-the-iraq-connection-to-9-11/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/26/dick-cheney-the-new-y...
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Please don't conflate poor journalism with fake news. Reporting what the government said with no deeper context is poor journalism. The government really did say there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The New York Times reported those statements, not faked evidence of the weapons. Fake news is just making shit up, like inventing a dead body and saying it was killed by Clinton.
  - potatosoup 10y ago
    There's a question of journalistic integrity. If you read NYT as I do you expect to be told "the whole story" and not be reading a glorified crafted PR statement. I think that's irresponsible and as good as fake
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      The institutional failure of much of mass media is a problem. Trading on access, parroting PR, things like that. But it's a different problem than the one where people literally completely make up click bait articles and present them as news. Not hastily written, fact light articles about real events, articles about things that simply never happened. We do ourselves a favor when we treat them as separate issues.

ant6n 10y ago

The Media were playing along with the narrative that Clinton was the most corrupt politician ever, maybe in an effort to appease the right? They also gave Trump way too much air time. The Overton window moved so much during the campaign.

akjainaj 10y ago
They gave Trump lots of air time because ppl were interested in watching him act like a clown, and that's $$$ for those websites. Those editors, writers, etc only care about money and power. The exposure they gave Trump is something that also backfired. :-)
potatosoup 10y ago
The DNC strategy was to amplify Trump because they thought he'd be an easy-lose candidate, and so they did. http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/ http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign... And the DNC/Clinton campaign worked closely with a number of outlets (like NYT) to publish various stories. https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak-reveals-clinton-campaigns-cozy-press-relationship/ https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak... This comes from the leaked e-mails, not hearsay.
pessimizer 10y ago
More that Clinton stories of little consequence were dragged out forever because of her inability to give a straight answer or admit any mistakes without burying them in weasel words. Those Goldman speeches were a constant hum throughout a year of campaigning, and when they were finally released against her will, they were a no-op. If she had released them the minute they were asked for, and apologized for anything in them that didn't agree with her current stances, they would have been gone in one news cycle. The emails went on forever, because instead of saying sorry and claiming technical ignorance, she blamed everyone but herself. Every time she blamed someone or something else - that's a new story that has to be written. edit: The main feature of these two stories? Nobody is even claiming that Russians had anything to do with either of them. The leaked emails that the usual suspects are blaming on the Russians just had the effect of confirming Sanders supporters' suspicions; she lost their votes when she characterized them all as privileged white male children.

justinlaster 10y ago

>They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths, etc. No they didn't. They just didn't post what people wanted. >started distrusting the mass media. People were told to distrust the media, and they followed through because it tickles people's ego's.

pessimizer 10y ago
The Post wasn't great before Bezos, now they're building 5000 word editorials from single tweets, putting them in the news section, and giving them headlines that would shame Buzzfeed.
fdsaaf 10y ago
> >They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths, etc. > No they didn't. They just didn't post what people wanted. What about the Rolling Stone Jackie scandal? What about the constant demonization of men?
- justinlaster 10y ago
  Are you seriously going to try to treat a blip from one publisher and act like it's characteristic of the whole ecosystem? For your information, other publishers that are apart of the "MSM" called out the Rolling Stone article.

tps5 10y ago

I don't think there's such a thing as "truth" in the idealistic way you mean it. When you seek to describe something as complicated as the economy of a gigantic country or some event involving millions of people, you necessarily create abstractions that capture only a tiny fraction of "truth." And yes, which fraction you end up capturing probably depends on your own personal biases. You postulate conspiracy: that "[the media] decided to publish half truths because you had certain interests." I think these "half truths" (AKA inaccuracies) are a necessary result of any attempt to describe complex things. In my opinion, the rational way to live in a world like this is to read widely and take everything with a grain of salt. Or unplug completely. But don't expect or accept any single source of truth.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vowelless 10y ago
> You postulate conspiracy Your use of the word "conspiracy" there has a larger consequence than you think / intended.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

shaki-dora 10y ago

Scoundrels, really? Most newspapers decided to call out Trump because – with any sense of perspective – he is unelectable to a degree that made further insistence on fake balance untenable. That is "the truth". You definition of "truth" would require journalists to reprint the phone book and nothing else – because even the decision what makes a story relevant requires a value judgement that you no longer see as legitimate. The article is really talking about that attitude, and much better than I can. Unfortunately, the US may be past the point of no return. There is now group of people that has turned their backs on the civil society build over generations. Even republicans are having trouble adjust to the new reality where you can blatantly lie, call for violence at your rallies and (I still can't believe this one) use a presidential debate to relitigate a 10-year-old feud where someone made fun of the size of your hands. But with 40%+ believing in #Pizzagate, they now feel emboldened to a point where they have almost officially given up even the pretence of acting with a coherent ideology that aims to improve anything. A society needs strong institutions, shared values, and a basic assumption of good faith. If you succeed with the current mission to tear down the NYT/WSJ/WashPo and the two or three other remaining actual news organizations, you'll find yourself in a world of just Mother Jones and Infowars. Are people's lives really dramatically bad so as to justify a roll of the dice of that magnitude?

alva 10y ago
> decided to call out Trump because – with any sense of perspective – he is unelectable fake news

javajosh 10y ago

Good comment. I would only add the generalization that when institutions lose the value of self-restraint, they decay and die. Self-restraint is the key, and it must be used to maintain principle, even at the expense of loyalty. When you look at institutional problems today, the common thread is that they seem to value loyalty over principle. The most stark example are cops not "ratting" on each other. But scientists have done it too, by gaming the system instead of defending the system against gamesmanship. I speculate that one contributing factor to this decline is the focus on measurement. Objective measurement is particularly important to capitalists who ultimately fuel much of our institutional activity. This includes those positions in government that, for example, decide which departments to fund, which in turn decide where to put the grants. How do you measure the value of art? The value of research? The value of a piece of news? One measure is attention, which is the precursor to all other interactions, including the all-important transaction. Media has views, scientists have publications and cites. (Artists are perhaps the most honest of all, in that they rely entirely on a nebulous network of "experts" and "buzz" to drive demand.) News is interesting because you can characterize it as a moving attention dot across an enormously complex information space (a planet with 7.5B people doing all the things people do). If you include the fact that each individual is a primary dot, and they integrate different secondary dots, then each individual is easily combinatorially unique. News is inherently tribal (at least WRT values) because you'll want to know about things you want to change, and those are the things that displease you. Imagine a personal news service that only told you facts about the world that you personally care about, with a summary of reactions of people you respect (and perhaps disrespect), and an option to dig deeper. That's the kind of news service I'm waiting for!

shortformblog 10y ago

You are yelling at danah boyd, an academic and researcher, as if she's a journalist. She's not. She's someone who researches stuff like this for a living. Stop treating the mass media as a monolith and realize there are individuals making difficult decisions on a daily basis. And that not everyone who writes an article is a member of the mass media.