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Every time I try and point out some media bias against Trump I have to preface it with the fact that I'm not a Trump supporter, but doing so when advocating for

Every time I try and point out some media bias against Trump I have to preface it with the fact that I'm not a Trump supporter, but doing so when advocating for press transparency is getting tiresome. I see lots of people having to add the same disclaimer when exposing the MSM obvious bias because we know that going against the main narrative is interpreted as supporting the 'other side' these days. I also keep seeing articles on HN and elsewhere talking about how Facebook or Google or whoever can fix the spread of Fake News or misinformation. The elephant in the room is that the problem lies with people, the majority of people, who do not care about facts or accuracy. I believe for most people the constant stream of "news" on Facebook is just a modern soap opera. Why watch Eastenders when you can have a live streamed 24/7 stream of drama in front of your very eyes. Facebook cannot fix peoples disposition towards their attraction to sensationalism. I don't even think this is a recent phenomenon, it's just taken a while for people who would usually take part in this offline to transfer it online and we as the people who grew up with the early internet are only now experiencing it in our space and thinking it is something new.

physicalist 10y ago
People don't believe you are honest, and frankly, neither do I. If anything, the media is not harsh enough with Trump.
- guilhas 10y ago
  I agree with him. They were biased before and continue to be. MSM is one of the reasons Trump was elected in the first place.
tmalsburg2 10y ago
Could you please elaborate on what you mean by bias against Trump? The media is very critical but I would say that 99% of it is fully deserved. What would you perceive as unbiased reporting in this context? Edit: Downvotes instead of responses? Very classy.
- OJFord 10y ago
  There have been things just outright made up, 'gone viral', and reported on by organs that clearly didn't conduct even the most rudimentary of fact-checking.
  - tmalsburg2 10y ago
    That may be true but it doesn't justify blanket statements about the media being generally biased specifically against Trump. First, untrue things have also been reported about other candidates. Second, the majority of things reported about Trump seem to be correct.
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      The majority of things reported about Trump are based on a single sentence he tweeted a year ago, the opinion of a random expert, or anonymous leaks, all surrounded by 5000 words of editorial. The current question being struggled over by the news media is about whether he is mentally ill, as you can tell by going to http://news.google.com http://news.google.com and searching for "mentally ill" (not "Trump mentally ill" just "mentally ill.") They've determined that he's not, although they've found half a dozen psychiatrists and experts who either say that he is, or that they can't say whether he is or isn't due to professional standards, or say that he suffers from a personality disorder, and that the Trump debate should move on to whether personality disorders are actually mental illness, or another class of disturbance. Nevertheless, it might be a positive step to install a psychiatrist to continually evaluate the president in order to remove from power if he shows signs of the illness of narcissism. So what they're reporting is probably true; Donald Trump is probably not mentally ill, and it's probably not appropriate for psychiatrists to say that he is. Why they needed 50 billion articles about it in the last 5 days? Probably just being thorough about it. Is it Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill? (Answer: No. But stay tuned for the follow-up, Is It Time To Call Trump a Pedophile Who Beats His Wife?) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/opinion/is-it-time-to-call-trump-mentally-ill.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/opinion/is-it-time-to-cal... President Trump is a 'world class narcissist,' but he's not mentally ill, says the psychiatrist who helped define narcissism http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-trump-psychiatrist-20170219-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-trump-p... Psychologist Asks Colleagues To Sign Petition For Trump's Removal http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2017/02/19/psychologist-calls-on-colleagues-to-sign-petition-for-trumps-removal/#4142eab14971 http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2017/02/19/psych... Trump's mental health debate: What is it about? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38991171 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38991171 Donald Trump Isn’t Mentally Ill. He’s Just Unpleasant, Psychiatrist Says http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/donald-trump-isn-t-mentally-ill-he-s-just-unpleasant-n721766 http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/donald-trump-isn-t... Democrats raise questions about Trump’s mental health http://thehill.com/homenews/house/320018-democrats-raise-questions-about-trumps-mental-health http://thehill.com/homenews/house/320018-democrats-raise-que... A Medical Theory for Donald Trump’s Bizarre Behavior (Subtitle: Many mental health professionals believe the president is ill. But what if the cause is an untreated STD?) https://newrepublic.com/article/140702/medical-theory-donald-trumps-bizarre-behavior https://newrepublic.com/article/140702/medical-theory-donald... Psychiatrists Debate Weighing in on Trump's Mental Health https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychiatrists-debate-weighing-in-on-trumps-mental-health/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychiatrists-deb... Trump May Be Very Flawed But That Doesn't Make Him Mentally Ill https://www.newscientist.com/article/2121552-trump-may-be-very-flawed-but-that-doesnt-make-him-mentally-ill/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2121552-trump-may-be-ve... An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump’s Mental State https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/an-eminent-psychiatrist-demurs-on-trumps-mental-state.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/an-eminent-psychi... ----- When Trump announces that journalism will be licensed, and selects Bannon as the head of the new Department of Truth, housed in the old EPA offices, the public will see is as a shame, but necessary.
ubernostrum 10y ago
Well, first of all the idea that news media should be neutral and objective is a fairly recent, and mostly America-only, notion. The history of newspapers, for example, is full of publications which were openly and viciously partisan to a degree that offends modern American sensibilities. And even within my lifetime that's been true to a certain degree: as I was growing up, the largest nearby city supported two daily newspapers, and everyone knew and openly admitted that you either subscribed to the Republican newspaper or the Democratic newspaper, and did so based solely on your own partisan affiliation. So if the news media is currently significantly more partisan than it had been in the previous few years, it's unclear whether that would be something new and unprecedented, or just a regression to historical mean. Second, I don't necessarily think we're seeing a rise in overt organized partisanship by major/"mainstream" outlets, so much as a combination of several factors: 1. Many journalists now feel that they were an unwilling part of Trump's campaign, in the sense that they were played in order to give Trump free media coverage that other candidates never got, which in turn gave Trump broad nationwide exposure at a time when his campaign was struggling to get off the ground. This is not something that feels good to them, and since they were so late on recognizing the playbook (regardless of anyone's personal opinion on the ethics of that playbook) they now are -- not surprisingly -- looking for a way to cover Trump that doesn't just repeat the debacle of the campaign. 2. But an interesting corollary to this is that Trump is almost the perfect person for them to cover in the modes they'd been used to. The way he operates produces a never-ending stream of outrage, scandals and "breaking news" to breathlessly report on, and he seems to thrive on it, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. His campaign recognized very early on that outrage works as a strategy, but the problem with being a continual source of outrage is that it makes you look outrageous. 3. Trump seems to be having a lot of trouble making the transition from candidate to officeholder. Historically this is something that does cause trouble for populist "outsider" candidates when they get elected: as long as they're on the campaign trail they can drum up support for themselves and against the system they say they'll fix. But what happens when they're no longer the outsiders, when they are the system? That's where Trump is right now: he's still largely running the campaign playbook, but the campaign has been over for months. And the result is he's in trouble. When the coverage was Trump versus someone else, when it was about him unloading on opposing candidates, he could make it work in his favor, because that's just how elections work. But now that he's sole winner and serving President, it looks a lot worse: people like a bully in the campaign but not so much in the Oval Office. 4. It is absolutely true that trust in media, and in experts and intellectuals of all types, has declined precipitously in recent years, but it's also true that promoting this decline has been actively cultivated as a strategy by certain political entities, many of them on the conservative/reactionary part of the ideological spectrum. It's unsurprising, and in fact completely expected, that one of the consequences would be increased media scrutiny of those entities, even if only out of self-defense.
graycat 10y ago
A related comment is that the "press" borrows heavily from formula fiction which the ancient Greeks discovered was a sure-fire way to get and keep the attention of an audience. But, formula fiction, novels, short stories, plays, poems, operas, ballets, the press, etc. rarely include a disclaimer that the content is not necessarily factually true. Maybe now with the Internet with many more sources and the ability easily to look up details that have some credibility, for serious decision making people will raise their standards, ask for solid, well supported, information, keep fiction, fantasy, etc. as light entertainment or maybe some conjectures about reality, and otherwise set fiction aside in favor of solid information. E.g., fantasy about computing, robots, etc. is not taken at all seriously here at HN but was taken seriously by much of the US population in the famous radio broadcast of the H. G. Wells story, IIRC War of the Worlds, about an invasion of robots from Mars. Net, now, with the Internet, we have much more information. E.g., for me, since I have no dead fish heads to wrap, my kitty cat has plenty of cat litter, and I don't get the NYT or WaPo printed on paper, I have no use for the mainstream media (MSM) and flatly just ignore it. I can still enjoy fantasy, indeed, last night on YouTube watched the Kirov performance of The Nutcracker, also at YouTube recently watched several performances of "Wotan's Farewell" (it did well communicating the emotions I felt when I was 15 and had a misunderstanding with my girlfriend of 13 I was genuinely in love with), etc. But, for facts, etc. about politics, I can get directly from Trump, Paul Ryan, Chuck Schumer, etc. exactly what they said in full, word for word, and form my own opinions. I can keep copies and links and often do. So, nearly always, to heck with what the clearly unreliable MSM says about what the politicians said. Or, the MSM has just had a big collision with the Internet and better sources of facts and the truth. Good. Progress. Hopefully the Internet is letting us move ahead of what Jefferson saw 200+ years ago. The 200+ year old rot and nonsense of the MSM would not be the first or last weeds killed off in the struggling garden of civilization.
Chathamization 10y ago
Not sure that's true. It was the media that was telling people there was a sudden bombshell that was upending the campaign regarding Clinton's e-mail just a week before the election, and talking about 650,000 new pieces of e-mail that were discovered and being investigated. In reality this ended up being nothing, but it dominated headlines in the week before the election. Here's a word cloud Gallup did about what people heard about Clinton and what people heard about Trump: http://www.gallup.com/poll/195596/email-dominates-americans-heard-clinton.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/195596/email-dominates-americans-...
- have_faith 10y ago
  Although I mentioned Trump specifically I only use him as a recent target. The MSM's reporting over the course of the election for all candidates was embarrassing from all perspectives. I don't mean to insinuate that the MSM only reports with bias against Trump, far from it. Trump's situation is unfortunate because I both disagree with him on nearly all issues while also finding the media's reporting about him highly disagreeable, it makes objective discussion difficult with partisans. The word cloud is interesting because it is obvious that everyone was pestered about Trump's scandals incessantly and would be very aware of them but people decided that they weren't important (relative to the issues they thought Trump was solving).

physicalist 10y ago

People don't believe you are honest, and frankly, neither do I. If anything, the media is not harsh enough with Trump.

guilhas 10y ago
I agree with him. They were biased before and continue to be. MSM is one of the reasons Trump was elected in the first place.

tmalsburg2 10y ago

Could you please elaborate on what you mean by bias against Trump? The media is very critical but I would say that 99% of it is fully deserved. What would you perceive as unbiased reporting in this context? Edit: Downvotes instead of responses? Very classy.

OJFord 10y ago
There have been things just outright made up, 'gone viral', and reported on by organs that clearly didn't conduct even the most rudimentary of fact-checking.
- tmalsburg2 10y ago
  That may be true but it doesn't justify blanket statements about the media being generally biased specifically against Trump. First, untrue things have also been reported about other candidates. Second, the majority of things reported about Trump seem to be correct.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    The majority of things reported about Trump are based on a single sentence he tweeted a year ago, the opinion of a random expert, or anonymous leaks, all surrounded by 5000 words of editorial. The current question being struggled over by the news media is about whether he is mentally ill, as you can tell by going to http://news.google.com http://news.google.com and searching for "mentally ill" (not "Trump mentally ill" just "mentally ill.") They've determined that he's not, although they've found half a dozen psychiatrists and experts who either say that he is, or that they can't say whether he is or isn't due to professional standards, or say that he suffers from a personality disorder, and that the Trump debate should move on to whether personality disorders are actually mental illness, or another class of disturbance. Nevertheless, it might be a positive step to install a psychiatrist to continually evaluate the president in order to remove from power if he shows signs of the illness of narcissism. So what they're reporting is probably true; Donald Trump is probably not mentally ill, and it's probably not appropriate for psychiatrists to say that he is. Why they needed 50 billion articles about it in the last 5 days? Probably just being thorough about it. Is it Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill? (Answer: No. But stay tuned for the follow-up, Is It Time To Call Trump a Pedophile Who Beats His Wife?) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/opinion/is-it-time-to-call-trump-mentally-ill.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/opinion/is-it-time-to-cal... President Trump is a 'world class narcissist,' but he's not mentally ill, says the psychiatrist who helped define narcissism http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-trump-psychiatrist-20170219-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-trump-p... Psychologist Asks Colleagues To Sign Petition For Trump's Removal http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2017/02/19/psychologist-calls-on-colleagues-to-sign-petition-for-trumps-removal/#4142eab14971 http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2017/02/19/psych... Trump's mental health debate: What is it about? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38991171 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38991171 Donald Trump Isn’t Mentally Ill. He’s Just Unpleasant, Psychiatrist Says http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/donald-trump-isn-t-mentally-ill-he-s-just-unpleasant-n721766 http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/donald-trump-isn-t... Democrats raise questions about Trump’s mental health http://thehill.com/homenews/house/320018-democrats-raise-questions-about-trumps-mental-health http://thehill.com/homenews/house/320018-democrats-raise-que... A Medical Theory for Donald Trump’s Bizarre Behavior (Subtitle: Many mental health professionals believe the president is ill. But what if the cause is an untreated STD?) https://newrepublic.com/article/140702/medical-theory-donald-trumps-bizarre-behavior https://newrepublic.com/article/140702/medical-theory-donald... Psychiatrists Debate Weighing in on Trump's Mental Health https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychiatrists-debate-weighing-in-on-trumps-mental-health/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychiatrists-deb... Trump May Be Very Flawed But That Doesn't Make Him Mentally Ill https://www.newscientist.com/article/2121552-trump-may-be-very-flawed-but-that-doesnt-make-him-mentally-ill/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2121552-trump-may-be-ve... An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump’s Mental State https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/an-eminent-psychiatrist-demurs-on-trumps-mental-state.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/an-eminent-psychi... ----- When Trump announces that journalism will be licensed, and selects Bannon as the head of the new Department of Truth, housed in the old EPA offices, the public will see is as a shame, but necessary.

ubernostrum 10y ago

Well, first of all the idea that news media should be neutral and objective is a fairly recent, and mostly America-only, notion. The history of newspapers, for example, is full of publications which were openly and viciously partisan to a degree that offends modern American sensibilities. And even within my lifetime that's been true to a certain degree: as I was growing up, the largest nearby city supported two daily newspapers, and everyone knew and openly admitted that you either subscribed to the Republican newspaper or the Democratic newspaper, and did so based solely on your own partisan affiliation. So if the news media is currently significantly more partisan than it had been in the previous few years, it's unclear whether that would be something new and unprecedented, or just a regression to historical mean. Second, I don't necessarily think we're seeing a rise in overt organized partisanship by major/"mainstream" outlets, so much as a combination of several factors: 1. Many journalists now feel that they were an unwilling part of Trump's campaign, in the sense that they were played in order to give Trump free media coverage that other candidates never got, which in turn gave Trump broad nationwide exposure at a time when his campaign was struggling to get off the ground. This is not something that feels good to them, and since they were so late on recognizing the playbook (regardless of anyone's personal opinion on the ethics of that playbook) they now are -- not surprisingly -- looking for a way to cover Trump that doesn't just repeat the debacle of the campaign. 2. But an interesting corollary to this is that Trump is almost the perfect person for them to cover in the modes they'd been used to. The way he operates produces a never-ending stream of outrage, scandals and "breaking news" to breathlessly report on, and he seems to thrive on it, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. His campaign recognized very early on that outrage works as a strategy, but the problem with being a continual source of outrage is that it makes you look outrageous. 3. Trump seems to be having a lot of trouble making the transition from candidate to officeholder. Historically this is something that does cause trouble for populist "outsider" candidates when they get elected: as long as they're on the campaign trail they can drum up support for themselves and against the system they say they'll fix. But what happens when they're no longer the outsiders, when they are the system? That's where Trump is right now: he's still largely running the campaign playbook, but the campaign has been over for months. And the result is he's in trouble. When the coverage was Trump versus someone else, when it was about him unloading on opposing candidates, he could make it work in his favor, because that's just how elections work. But now that he's sole winner and serving President, it looks a lot worse: people like a bully in the campaign but not so much in the Oval Office. 4. It is absolutely true that trust in media, and in experts and intellectuals of all types, has declined precipitously in recent years, but it's also true that promoting this decline has been actively cultivated as a strategy by certain political entities, many of them on the conservative/reactionary part of the ideological spectrum. It's unsurprising, and in fact completely expected, that one of the consequences would be increased media scrutiny of those entities, even if only out of self-defense.

graycat 10y ago

A related comment is that the "press" borrows heavily from formula fiction which the ancient Greeks discovered was a sure-fire way to get and keep the attention of an audience. But, formula fiction, novels, short stories, plays, poems, operas, ballets, the press, etc. rarely include a disclaimer that the content is not necessarily factually true. Maybe now with the Internet with many more sources and the ability easily to look up details that have some credibility, for serious decision making people will raise their standards, ask for solid, well supported, information, keep fiction, fantasy, etc. as light entertainment or maybe some conjectures about reality, and otherwise set fiction aside in favor of solid information. E.g., fantasy about computing, robots, etc. is not taken at all seriously here at HN but was taken seriously by much of the US population in the famous radio broadcast of the H. G. Wells story, IIRC War of the Worlds, about an invasion of robots from Mars. Net, now, with the Internet, we have much more information. E.g., for me, since I have no dead fish heads to wrap, my kitty cat has plenty of cat litter, and I don't get the NYT or WaPo printed on paper, I have no use for the mainstream media (MSM) and flatly just ignore it. I can still enjoy fantasy, indeed, last night on YouTube watched the Kirov performance of The Nutcracker, also at YouTube recently watched several performances of "Wotan's Farewell" (it did well communicating the emotions I felt when I was 15 and had a misunderstanding with my girlfriend of 13 I was genuinely in love with), etc. But, for facts, etc. about politics, I can get directly from Trump, Paul Ryan, Chuck Schumer, etc. exactly what they said in full, word for word, and form my own opinions. I can keep copies and links and often do. So, nearly always, to heck with what the clearly unreliable MSM says about what the politicians said. Or, the MSM has just had a big collision with the Internet and better sources of facts and the truth. Good. Progress. Hopefully the Internet is letting us move ahead of what Jefferson saw 200+ years ago. The 200+ year old rot and nonsense of the MSM would not be the first or last weeds killed off in the struggling garden of civilization.

Chathamization 10y ago

Not sure that's true. It was the media that was telling people there was a sudden bombshell that was upending the campaign regarding Clinton's e-mail just a week before the election, and talking about 650,000 new pieces of e-mail that were discovered and being investigated. In reality this ended up being nothing, but it dominated headlines in the week before the election. Here's a word cloud Gallup did about what people heard about Clinton and what people heard about Trump: http://www.gallup.com/poll/195596/email-dominates-americans-heard-clinton.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/195596/email-dominates-americans-...

have_faith 10y ago
Although I mentioned Trump specifically I only use him as a recent target. The MSM's reporting over the course of the election for all candidates was embarrassing from all perspectives. I don't mean to insinuate that the MSM only reports with bias against Trump, far from it. Trump's situation is unfortunate because I both disagree with him on nearly all issues while also finding the media's reporting about him highly disagreeable, it makes objective discussion difficult with partisans. The word cloud is interesting because it is obvious that everyone was pestered about Trump's scandals incessantly and would be very aware of them but people decided that they weren't important (relative to the issues they thought Trump was solving).