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Journalistic neutrality, or "the middle" as you refer to it, as it is practiced in American media has some serious flaws. Sadly, it still has cachet with a siza

Journalistic neutrality, or "the middle" as you refer to it, as it is practiced in American media has some serious flaws. Sadly, it still has cachet with a sizable portion of what has been sneeringly referred to as the "mainstream media" for the last few decades. I highly recommend reading Jay Rosen, a Professor of Journalism at NYU, talk about the "View from Nowhere." There was one link posted above, and I'll post another. http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/ http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-question...

tyingq 9y ago
Appreciate it. Am I off in thinking this used to exist decades ago? Reading, for example, the history of Watergate, it seems like there used to be more emphasis on neutrality. Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  Regarding Watergate, there's a really fantastic podcast series entitled "Slow Burn" that just ended. It's 9 or 10 episodes long, and gives a great 'behind the scenes' look at the entire affair. I can't speak too much to the media's approach to Watergate. > Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social. This article from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has some context on what happened: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/covering-america-journalism-professor-christopher-daly https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/c... One clipping from it: One problem was the drive toward monopoly — or if not monopoly, then what economists call “concentration...” In the news business, this pattern threatens the very existence of diverse, and local, points of view. Clear Channel replaced more than one thousand individual owners, with different aspirations, different ideas about their civic roles, and different ideologies. The number of U.S. cities with healthy, competing daily newspapers, once in the hundreds, fell to about a dozen. By the year 2000, in American cities that had a daily newspaper, 99 percent had only one management in town. The fifteen biggest newspaper chains account for more than half the nation’s total circulation. In all, there were about 1,500 daily newspapers remaining in America. Of those, only about 350 were independently owned, and most of those were very small. The whole industry was heading in a direction that was at odds with the journalistic values of independence, localism, and competition. The article also talks about the vast reduction in budgets for news outlets. This disadvantages organizations that do legitimate news gathering and reporting and advantages organizations that simply have an axe to grind (it's cheaper to spew your opinions than it is to put boots on the ground and see what's up). There's more, but I'm probably getting excessively long for a comment.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    That's helpful. I'm being a little flippant in print vs online, but there are obvious changes in the same time frame for other reasons, as you point out.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social. No, we lost it in the long period of print media consolidation and newsroom slashing from the 1970s through the 1990s; the effects were already palpable and the subject of much discussion in the 1980s. Things have probably gotten better since the turn of the millenium (possibly even since the mid-1980s or earlier) in terms of available high-quality news (OTOH, they've gotten worse in terms of the volume of low-quality, widely-distributed "news" that the high-quality stuff is surrounded by, and the availability of signals which let the average news consumer distinguish the former from the latter.)
- shaki-dora 9y ago
  I believe the top publications today (NYT, Economist, WSJ,...) are far better than they ever used to be. There was an article recently (no link because I'm on mobile, sorry) showing some of the factual errors that were published regarding Watergate at the time. None of the minor mistakes made by the major outlets with regard to the current Trump/Russia affair gets even close. The practice of prominently correcting errors when they are found has also markedly improved. The internet is obviously a far better medium than print for corrections, as well. It seems that people are expecting some sort of idealised "neutrality" from journalism today that is simply impossible. Journalism starts being subjective when decisions are made on what stories to cover. They have never been "phonebooks", simply listing facts, and journalists have always been more than typists: they are expected to call a spade a spade when they see it. There's also a lot of criticism of "anonymous sources". If you're feeling nostalgic, I shall remind you that all of Watergate was build on an anonymous source. People seem to think of "anonymous sources" as a license for journalists to just invent facts. But that's completely wrong: the journalist's reputation is on the line every time they use such sources. If they are ever shown to have invented such a source, they would lose their job immediately. (As an exercise: read article from a year ago and see how many of those sources proved to be accurate). The right measure for journalism is a sort of "good faith": there were untold numbers of editorials calling Trump out for claiming credit for the stock market's rise over the last year. And, sure enough, when the markets crashed last week, quality publications made a point of mentioning that Trump was just as irrelevant for the crash as he was for the rally before.
- ams6110 9y ago
  The history of Watergate, nearly 50 years later, might read neutral. The reporting at the time was hardly that. The press hated Nixon about as much as they hated Reagan and Bush and Trump. At the time there was no popular alternative to NBC, ABC, CBS so as an average TV news viewer you wern't aware of other points of view unless you actively sought them.
vpribish 9y ago
I can make an argument that the neutral news media ideal from the golden age of mid-century reporting is what has led to the populist disaster we are experiencing -- and that it's really just a return to an old normal. outside of the major news agencies neutrality got cargo-culted. the easiest way to be 'unbiased' is tell both sides, right? well, if one side is reasonable you have to go and find that opposing view to meet that (fair and) balanced standard. this gave a platform to and legitimized a host of formerly fringe ideas. all that noise and conflict sure helps meet the advertising numbers... and now we have fox news. thing is, this polarized, biased, sensational media is what media has always been! with a rose-colored exception in conformist middle america starting in the long boom after the second world war. It's been gradually fading back to the old ways since the 70's.
- ams6110 9y ago
  I think that you're right about a return to the old normal. The press in past centuries was often unabashedly partisan. But I don't think that unbiased reporting is simply telling both sides. It's simply reporting the facts. No "sides." The problem with that is that reading the news is like reading meeting minutes. It's dry and boring. It doesn't sell.

tyingq 9y ago

Appreciate it. Am I off in thinking this used to exist decades ago? Reading, for example, the history of Watergate, it seems like there used to be more emphasis on neutrality. Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social.

aaronbrethorst 9y ago
Regarding Watergate, there's a really fantastic podcast series entitled "Slow Burn" that just ended. It's 9 or 10 episodes long, and gives a great 'behind the scenes' look at the entire affair. I can't speak too much to the media's approach to Watergate. > Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social. This article from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has some context on what happened: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/covering-america-journalism-professor-christopher-daly https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/c... One clipping from it: One problem was the drive toward monopoly — or if not monopoly, then what economists call “concentration...” In the news business, this pattern threatens the very existence of diverse, and local, points of view. Clear Channel replaced more than one thousand individual owners, with different aspirations, different ideas about their civic roles, and different ideologies. The number of U.S. cities with healthy, competing daily newspapers, once in the hundreds, fell to about a dozen. By the year 2000, in American cities that had a daily newspaper, 99 percent had only one management in town. The fifteen biggest newspaper chains account for more than half the nation’s total circulation. In all, there were about 1,500 daily newspapers remaining in America. Of those, only about 350 were independently owned, and most of those were very small. The whole industry was heading in a direction that was at odds with the journalistic values of independence, localism, and competition. The article also talks about the vast reduction in budgets for news outlets. This disadvantages organizations that do legitimate news gathering and reporting and advantages organizations that simply have an axe to grind (it's cheaper to spew your opinions than it is to put boots on the ground and see what's up). There's more, but I'm probably getting excessively long for a comment.
- tyingq 9y ago
  That's helpful. I'm being a little flippant in print vs online, but there are obvious changes in the same time frame for other reasons, as you point out.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social. No, we lost it in the long period of print media consolidation and newsroom slashing from the 1970s through the 1990s; the effects were already palpable and the subject of much discussion in the 1980s. Things have probably gotten better since the turn of the millenium (possibly even since the mid-1980s or earlier) in terms of available high-quality news (OTOH, they've gotten worse in terms of the volume of low-quality, widely-distributed "news" that the high-quality stuff is surrounded by, and the availability of signals which let the average news consumer distinguish the former from the latter.)
shaki-dora 9y ago
I believe the top publications today (NYT, Economist, WSJ,...) are far better than they ever used to be. There was an article recently (no link because I'm on mobile, sorry) showing some of the factual errors that were published regarding Watergate at the time. None of the minor mistakes made by the major outlets with regard to the current Trump/Russia affair gets even close. The practice of prominently correcting errors when they are found has also markedly improved. The internet is obviously a far better medium than print for corrections, as well. It seems that people are expecting some sort of idealised "neutrality" from journalism today that is simply impossible. Journalism starts being subjective when decisions are made on what stories to cover. They have never been "phonebooks", simply listing facts, and journalists have always been more than typists: they are expected to call a spade a spade when they see it. There's also a lot of criticism of "anonymous sources". If you're feeling nostalgic, I shall remind you that all of Watergate was build on an anonymous source. People seem to think of "anonymous sources" as a license for journalists to just invent facts. But that's completely wrong: the journalist's reputation is on the line every time they use such sources. If they are ever shown to have invented such a source, they would lose their job immediately. (As an exercise: read article from a year ago and see how many of those sources proved to be accurate). The right measure for journalism is a sort of "good faith": there were untold numbers of editorials calling Trump out for claiming credit for the stock market's rise over the last year. And, sure enough, when the markets crashed last week, quality publications made a point of mentioning that Trump was just as irrelevant for the crash as he was for the rally before.
ams6110 9y ago
The history of Watergate, nearly 50 years later, might read neutral. The reporting at the time was hardly that. The press hated Nixon about as much as they hated Reagan and Bush and Trump. At the time there was no popular alternative to NBC, ABC, CBS so as an average TV news viewer you wern't aware of other points of view unless you actively sought them.

vpribish 9y ago

I can make an argument that the neutral news media ideal from the golden age of mid-century reporting is what has led to the populist disaster we are experiencing -- and that it's really just a return to an old normal. outside of the major news agencies neutrality got cargo-culted. the easiest way to be 'unbiased' is tell both sides, right? well, if one side is reasonable you have to go and find that opposing view to meet that (fair and) balanced standard. this gave a platform to and legitimized a host of formerly fringe ideas. all that noise and conflict sure helps meet the advertising numbers... and now we have fox news. thing is, this polarized, biased, sensational media is what media has always been! with a rose-colored exception in conformist middle america starting in the long boom after the second world war. It's been gradually fading back to the old ways since the 70's.

ams6110 9y ago
I think that you're right about a return to the old normal. The press in past centuries was often unabashedly partisan. But I don't think that unbiased reporting is simply telling both sides. It's simply reporting the facts. No "sides." The problem with that is that reading the news is like reading meeting minutes. It's dry and boring. It doesn't sell.