7 ms·

Journalisms biggest Achilles Heel is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism and the idea that normal people care and especially care enough to pay

Journalisms biggest Achilles Heel is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism and the idea that normal people care and especially care enough to pay for it. Let's not forget that fundamentally, journalism is little more than verified gossip (Have you heard that the UN Secretary is involved in a scandal) and its primary value is not in how it's written but the revelation of the piece of information in itself. Sure we have investigative journalism, but most people aren't going to pay for that. So at the end of the day, the only people who really care about journalism are journalists themselves. The biggest change in journalism IMO is that it's finally become clear that the postmodernist was correct. Context and perspective define truth. And so all transparency in journalism will ever do is attract the people who already agree with the context and perspective of the individual journalist as loyal readers. Helping journalism it wont.

aalleavitch 9y ago
We generally perceive peer-reviewed science as being capable of approaching objectivity. Why can this not be true for the reporting of events as they occur as well?
- ams6110 9y ago
  Peer-reviewed science is targeted at other scientists. Journalism is targeted at the general public, who (accepting the premise of the GP) don't care.
- colatkinson 9y ago
  The goal of science is for experiments to be repeatable. If I were to build a copy of the LHC under my house, presumably I would be able to verify any of CERN's results. But I can't verify anything in journalism. If two reporters watched something happen and their accounts differ, who is right? No one knows, and both will be accused of bias.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Is water wet? Maybe! The point being that there are plenty of journalistic enterprises that are not especially sensitive to bias.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      Yes when they are void of anything to do with journalism (Plane goes down) The second you add journalism to the mix you are getting into bias land no matter how you turn it around.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        I think when you say 'journalism' what you mean 'analysis' vs 'reportage'.
        ThomPete 9y ago
        No, "Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation (professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        This seems at odds with your earlier statement: Yes when they are void of anything to do with journalism (Plane goes down) I can't really figure out what point you're trying to make but that's OK, doubtless it will be clearer in some other context.
    - viridian 9y ago
      Funnily enough, by at least one scientific definition of wet, water is very, very not wet. Water has an extremely low wettability, and in fact will even wet most other liquids. I always find that phrase when used as an example of common sense funny in that regard.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  With journalism (and propaganda) truth and falsehood are not as important as what you leave in and what you leave out and how you present it. When it comes to propaganda it is always better to deceive people with truth than with lies because lies can be disproven. The art lies in framing snippets of truth in the correct way, leaving larger truths out, to achieve your desired goal of perception manipulation. Objective journalism can be just as powerful as a tool of deception as it is as a tool of enlightenment.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    There is no such thing as objective journalism.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  If that was so, there wouldn't be such a thing as the replication crisis. Some scientific fields, math and physics, are pretty objective , but those that have been wide political interests or have fallen to post-modernism do not.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Saying they have fallen to postmodernism implies that that is somehow wrong. I think a more precise interpretation is that we live in a post-modern world where there is no objective truth and that this rubs a lot of people the wrong way because they don't want it to be a question of interpretation. The good news is that we don't need objective truth to establish solid models.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Because then it's not journalism. "Plane goes down" is to some extent objectively true (disregarding philosophy for a while here) but reporting on it becomes highly subjective as the journalist in order to add more than the basic observation will be biased on what they choose to describe the event.
Spooky23 9y ago
The other people who care are the people getting gossiped about. I don’t think it’s coincidental that WSJ columnists and editorial board hacks are suddenly yakking about this topic on Twitter, at least as it pertains to The NY Times.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Yeah, but there is hardly enough of them to make a market on their own or to rival everyone else.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    The public wants what the public gets. It's not the lack of a market. It's a lack of pride and effort on the part of the Fourth Estate to fulfill its duty to the democracy. Put another way, why be a legit journalist when you can put in half the effort to be a hack and get paid nearly as well.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      You are disagreeing with yourself and agreeing with me.
      - chiefalchemist 9y ago
        Not at all. The public wants what the public gets translates to: if you stop feeding the public shite they'll want that as well. So to say "there's no market" is not at all accurate. If you need a reference look at Top 40 radio. It's on. It plays. The masses consume it. If you swappes out any 10 songs for example - which btw naturally happens - no one would notice. They wouldn't change the station. The "there's no market" excuse was created by the media to cover their lazy asses. The Truth is they can't even analyze themselves. How are they going to properly serve the rest of us?
        ThomPete 9y ago
chiefalchemist 9y ago
What you describe is reporting, or perhaps creative non-fiction writing. Whatever you want to call it, it's not journalism. The problem is simple: the definition of the word journalism has become kicked, bent, dented and corrupted. And no one questions it. Certainly the "journalist" don't. Yanking tweets off Twitter - as if someone or some bot hasn't said somwthing at one time or another - is considered journalism. Having a blog (somehow) makes you a journalist. Positioning yourself as a serious and respectable journalist but then covering NYE in NYC's Time's Square - hello Anderson Cooper - is completely acceptable. Etc. Etc. Etc. Most of what gets passed off as jounalism barely qualifies as appropriate for a grade school newspaper. Journalism is a verb. It's what you do in the pursuit of the perfection of your craft (i.e., The Truth). It's not where you work. It's not that your work is published on the internet. No, excuse me for repeating this, journalism is a verb.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  I describe both journalism and reporting. Reporting is (plane went down) journalism is all the perspectives put around it to create a story that is more than the simple generic observation.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    But they are two different things. Not synonyms. The issue is, they are being used as synonyms. It's so bad it's Orwellian.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      They are part of the same continuum. Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation (professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism
Angostura 9y ago
Did you perhaps mean to write: > Journalism's biggest strength is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism and the idea that normal people care and especially care enough to pay for it.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  No.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    One suspects that was a clumsy attempt at irony in response to your reference to postmodernism.
cornyNetHandle 9y ago
I hardly think that you have identified journalism's biggest achilles heel. Journalism as a business and the journalists who work within it, by and large, do not insist on the concept of quality journalism, or think that most people care, let alone that they care enough to pay for it. If they did then they would mainly be producing meticulously researched and in depth content with no advertising and paywalls as default. While this does exist, it is the periphery of journalism. The mainstream within the industry being the concept of presenting news as team sports to capture market segments for advertisers. Also, context and perspective do not define truth. Logically, the whole truth regarding an event must contain the perspectives and contexts relating to it, rather than being defined by them.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  "Quality journalism" cost money. If you go into any debate about the future of journalism you will find the same thing as I have found.
  - cornyNetHandle 9y ago
    I don't know, in the UK the discussions about the future of journalism centre more around press regulation and what are the acceptable limits of tabloid excess.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      The discussion about the future of journalism is based on the idea of quality journalism and the fact that in order for journalism and medias to survive quality needs to be improved. That's the same in the UK, the US or Denmark for that matter as all of them are struggling with the same issues.
      - cornyNetHandle 9y ago
        Perhaps I hang around with very different journalists than you do.
jjie2221 9y ago
> Let's not forget that fundamentally, journalism is little more than verified gossip No it's not. "California Wildfire Spreads" and "USA Withdraws from Paris Agreement" are not gossip. Sure, the NYTimes will report gossip from anonymous trump aides, but that's not most journalism. > Journalisms biggest Achilles Heel is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism This sounds to me like "Truth is hard! Let's give up." Failing at quality journalism is better than succeeding at cynical, schlock journalism. The former harms society.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  "No it's not. "California Wildfire Spreads" and "USA Withdraws from Paris Agreement" are not gossip." I didn't write it was just gossip. Read again. "This sounds to me like "Truth is hard! Let's give up." Failing at quality journalism is better than succeeding at cynical, schlock journalism. The former harms society." You aren't harming society any less if you treat perspectives as if it's objective truth.

aalleavitch 9y ago

We generally perceive peer-reviewed science as being capable of approaching objectivity. Why can this not be true for the reporting of events as they occur as well?

ams6110 9y ago
Peer-reviewed science is targeted at other scientists. Journalism is targeted at the general public, who (accepting the premise of the GP) don't care.
colatkinson 9y ago
The goal of science is for experiments to be repeatable. If I were to build a copy of the LHC under my house, presumably I would be able to verify any of CERN's results. But I can't verify anything in journalism. If two reporters watched something happen and their accounts differ, who is right? No one knows, and both will be accused of bias.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Is water wet? Maybe! The point being that there are plenty of journalistic enterprises that are not especially sensitive to bias.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Yes when they are void of anything to do with journalism (Plane goes down) The second you add journalism to the mix you are getting into bias land no matter how you turn it around.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      I think when you say 'journalism' what you mean 'analysis' vs 'reportage'.
      - ThomPete 9y ago
        No, "Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation (professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        This seems at odds with your earlier statement: Yes when they are void of anything to do with journalism (Plane goes down) I can't really figure out what point you're trying to make but that's OK, doubtless it will be clearer in some other context.
  - viridian 9y ago
    Funnily enough, by at least one scientific definition of wet, water is very, very not wet. Water has an extremely low wettability, and in fact will even wet most other liquids. I always find that phrase when used as an example of common sense funny in that regard.
saas_co_de 9y ago
With journalism (and propaganda) truth and falsehood are not as important as what you leave in and what you leave out and how you present it. When it comes to propaganda it is always better to deceive people with truth than with lies because lies can be disproven. The art lies in framing snippets of truth in the correct way, leaving larger truths out, to achieve your desired goal of perception manipulation. Objective journalism can be just as powerful as a tool of deception as it is as a tool of enlightenment.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  There is no such thing as objective journalism.
tomjen3 9y ago
If that was so, there wouldn't be such a thing as the replication crisis. Some scientific fields, math and physics, are pretty objective , but those that have been wide political interests or have fallen to post-modernism do not.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Saying they have fallen to postmodernism implies that that is somehow wrong. I think a more precise interpretation is that we live in a post-modern world where there is no objective truth and that this rubs a lot of people the wrong way because they don't want it to be a question of interpretation. The good news is that we don't need objective truth to establish solid models.
ThomPete 9y ago
Because then it's not journalism. "Plane goes down" is to some extent objectively true (disregarding philosophy for a while here) but reporting on it becomes highly subjective as the journalist in order to add more than the basic observation will be biased on what they choose to describe the event.

Spooky23 9y ago

The other people who care are the people getting gossiped about. I don’t think it’s coincidental that WSJ columnists and editorial board hacks are suddenly yakking about this topic on Twitter, at least as it pertains to The NY Times.

ThomPete 9y ago
Yeah, but there is hardly enough of them to make a market on their own or to rival everyone else.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  The public wants what the public gets. It's not the lack of a market. It's a lack of pride and effort on the part of the Fourth Estate to fulfill its duty to the democracy. Put another way, why be a legit journalist when you can put in half the effort to be a hack and get paid nearly as well.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    You are disagreeing with yourself and agreeing with me.
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      Not at all. The public wants what the public gets translates to: if you stop feeding the public shite they'll want that as well. So to say "there's no market" is not at all accurate. If you need a reference look at Top 40 radio. It's on. It plays. The masses consume it. If you swappes out any 10 songs for example - which btw naturally happens - no one would notice. They wouldn't change the station. The "there's no market" excuse was created by the media to cover their lazy asses. The Truth is they can't even analyze themselves. How are they going to properly serve the rest of us?
      - ThomPete 9y ago

chiefalchemist 9y ago

What you describe is reporting, or perhaps creative non-fiction writing. Whatever you want to call it, it's not journalism. The problem is simple: the definition of the word journalism has become kicked, bent, dented and corrupted. And no one questions it. Certainly the "journalist" don't. Yanking tweets off Twitter - as if someone or some bot hasn't said somwthing at one time or another - is considered journalism. Having a blog (somehow) makes you a journalist. Positioning yourself as a serious and respectable journalist but then covering NYE in NYC's Time's Square - hello Anderson Cooper - is completely acceptable. Etc. Etc. Etc. Most of what gets passed off as jounalism barely qualifies as appropriate for a grade school newspaper. Journalism is a verb. It's what you do in the pursuit of the perfection of your craft (i.e., The Truth). It's not where you work. It's not that your work is published on the internet. No, excuse me for repeating this, journalism is a verb.

ThomPete 9y ago
I describe both journalism and reporting. Reporting is (plane went down) journalism is all the perspectives put around it to create a story that is more than the simple generic observation.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  But they are two different things. Not synonyms. The issue is, they are being used as synonyms. It's so bad it's Orwellian.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    They are part of the same continuum. Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation (professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism

Angostura 9y ago

Did you perhaps mean to write: > Journalism's biggest strength is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism and the idea that normal people care and especially care enough to pay for it.

ThomPete 9y ago
No.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  One suspects that was a clumsy attempt at irony in response to your reference to postmodernism.

cornyNetHandle 9y ago

I hardly think that you have identified journalism's biggest achilles heel. Journalism as a business and the journalists who work within it, by and large, do not insist on the concept of quality journalism, or think that most people care, let alone that they care enough to pay for it. If they did then they would mainly be producing meticulously researched and in depth content with no advertising and paywalls as default. While this does exist, it is the periphery of journalism. The mainstream within the industry being the concept of presenting news as team sports to capture market segments for advertisers. Also, context and perspective do not define truth. Logically, the whole truth regarding an event must contain the perspectives and contexts relating to it, rather than being defined by them.

ThomPete 9y ago
"Quality journalism" cost money. If you go into any debate about the future of journalism you will find the same thing as I have found.
- cornyNetHandle 9y ago
  I don't know, in the UK the discussions about the future of journalism centre more around press regulation and what are the acceptable limits of tabloid excess.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    The discussion about the future of journalism is based on the idea of quality journalism and the fact that in order for journalism and medias to survive quality needs to be improved. That's the same in the UK, the US or Denmark for that matter as all of them are struggling with the same issues.
    - cornyNetHandle 9y ago
      Perhaps I hang around with very different journalists than you do.

jjie2221 9y ago

> Let's not forget that fundamentally, journalism is little more than verified gossip No it's not. "California Wildfire Spreads" and "USA Withdraws from Paris Agreement" are not gossip. Sure, the NYTimes will report gossip from anonymous trump aides, but that's not most journalism. > Journalisms biggest Achilles Heel is its insistence on the concept of quality journalism This sounds to me like "Truth is hard! Let's give up." Failing at quality journalism is better than succeeding at cynical, schlock journalism. The former harms society.

ThomPete 9y ago
"No it's not. "California Wildfire Spreads" and "USA Withdraws from Paris Agreement" are not gossip." I didn't write it was just gossip. Read again. "This sounds to me like "Truth is hard! Let's give up." Failing at quality journalism is better than succeeding at cynical, schlock journalism. The former harms society." You aren't harming society any less if you treat perspectives as if it's objective truth.