7 ms·

Slouching Toward Post-Journalism

25 points by nkurz 6y ago

mrzimmerman 6y ago
This article only seems accurate if you’ve never met any average journalists. Your run of the mill reporter is looking to tell an accurate story, nothing more dramatic or interesting then that. The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  Your run of the mill journalist is a dying breed that's viewed as a cost center for the publisher and is not getting the soapbox. Newspapers have long past turned into media, news is commodified and the value add of the news outlet is opinion. It is inevitable that publishers turn to opinion in an age where facts are free, widely disseminated, and not subject to copyright. The line between reporting facts and stating opinions has been blurred so much that you've seen revolts in journalism schools (e.g. ASU's Walter Cronkite school) to oust deans that discourage confessional style opinion journalism as they vainly advocate for professionality and objectivity over activism. Activism and emotion is what generates clicks as younger reporters view themselves as crusaders "standing up" for justice in a world of iniquity rather than delivering information about events to the public. The public already can access all the information they need whenever they want. There just isn't that much room for value add in the current age of ubiquitous information.
- burnthrow 6y ago
  I've worked in newsrooms and disagree with this saintly image of truth-seekers. Yes, the rank and file reporters are not looking to grind an axe; even if they were, they'd be too busy to do it. The well-known writers have huge egos and strong opinions. The editors are even worse. Also, please don't cast aspersions like "only seems accurate" and "conspiracy theories." There is no conjecture in this editorial: It's somebody's opinion about recent, real developments in major newspapers.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- threwawasy1228 6y ago
  I don't think it is a conspiracy to say that there is a large self-selection process going on in news that starts with ideology. A person has to pick whether they want to report for HuffingtonPost, Slate, or Breitbart. There isn't a conspiracy because there doesn't have to be one, people self select into their respective hive minds essentially. On your other point, the idea that the average person in news is an unbiased accurate reporter is laughable. That kind of reporting is almost a niche genre at this point outside of small town papers. Everyone now seems to have a very obvious agenda, and the consumers seem to mainly want news that fits their own agenda. Again this isn't a conspiracy this is just the direction that the market forces took news into. A polarized ideological consumerbase, wants news that matches their polarized politics.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > That kind of reporting is almost a niche genre at this point outside of small town papers Oh but it’s so glorious! Here in Annapolis we’re a small city (under 50k) but as a state capital we’re able to support a pretty good local newspaper (the capital gazette). It’s so refreshing to read articles by journalists that don’t wear their politics on their sleeves.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I think you're misreading the article. The thesis is that the journalists are seeking to push their own messages; that the leadership of most news organizations still favors objectivity, but the rank and file (and the readers) increasingly believe that journalists have a duty to take a stand and deliver the right messages. The article references a moderately well-known incident where many journalists issued loud public objections to a NYT headline, not because the headline was factually inaccurate (it simply summarized a statement a politician made), but because it painted that politician in an insufficiently negative light.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  I've worked for a news outlet(pretty much smack dab in the newsroom) and I have friends and family who have either worked for other news outlets or are journalists; while I agree that they are generally well-intentioned, their motivations aren't as simple as telling an accurate story. There's a growing number of young journalists who believe that objectivity is wrong and, because of that, choose to be overtly biased in what they report. In the broader sense, it's extremely common for news outlets to pass over stories that don't fit the narrative of their political affiliation. Even otherwise good journalists may pass on a story if they know it will result in them being seen unfavorably by leadership. Even leadership at these companies may steer the newsroom in certain directions if they seem favorable to their parent media company, whether they agree with it or not, because they know they have a chance of getting axed if their publication or broadcast says the wrong thing. > The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories. Have you had any actual experience inside a newsroom? In my experience, there's tons of groupthink that happens among journalists. There's nothing that makes journalists any different from average people, whom have a tendency to form cohorts with likeminded people. At one news outlet I worked for, a certain person in leadership(whose name and title I will leave nameless) mentioned in a meeting that there happen to be some journalists at the company who lean conservative; people in the meeting couldn't believe it and nearly flipped out, like it's a bad thing that someone is conservative, or that it's a given that all journalists identify as liberal. Lots of thought and communication among journalists occurs over Twitter, which helped facilitate an echo chamber rather than diffuse it. I simply don't agree that notions that there are hive minded groups of journalists are "all conspiracy theories". I'm sure there are some good groups of journalists out there but, from where I'm standing, they seem few and far between. There's nothing farfetched about a company having its own culture and unique hiring practices; it's human nature that happens all the time in and outside the media. It doesn't necessarily have to be driven by overt plans to manipulate anyone. Rather, what a news organization publishes is often influenced by whatever the incentive structure is. For journalism, the incentive structure that governs it promotes low-grade reports on news that hasn't been fully fleshed out combined with some carefully disguised opinion material intended to keep people reading. Currently there's little to no enforcement of efficiently informing readers since the desire for profit and prestige has overtaken the desire for integrity. None of this is new, though. It's just been accelerated recently. Look up the history of "yellow journalism". American journalism has a long history of publishing tripe to sway the public at the behest of media titans.
caseysoftware 6y ago
> To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity. This completely ignores the fact that - in the US at least - many newspapers started as organs of the local political parties. They always wanted to get their news out to their people. Then it went into full fledged "yellow journalism" that was all about the headline and engaging emotions vs objectivity.. which should sound familiar. And that was the late 1800s! Around 50-60 years ago, as "mass market" became a thing and ad revenue exploded, newspapers and journalism as a whole veered towards objectivity because the local furniture store wanted to advertise to everyone not just one party. But if you read interviews, memoirs, notes, and the like of the journalists for that era, their stated goal for being a journalist was "to change the world." We can debate the specifics of what that means but it's not interchangeable with "neutral observer and reporter of facts." Like many things, this appears to be a pendulum and it's swung from neutrality/objectivity back towards the opinion-based, light on facts approach for now. How long we stay there and the consequences are yet to be determined..
- federona 6y ago
  Philosophically even truth is an opinion. There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from. Say you cover news about a certain group but don't cover news from another group. Or you report the facts only in the rhetoric of commonly held norms, like so and so nation committed atrocities, while our nation bombed insurgents backed by so and so and accidentally killed a bunch of children. You always report in frame even if done objectively, otherwise your journalism would be considered inflammatory and you would find yourself without a job. So yes there is pure propaganda, etc, but in general news is propaganda of stuff as they, whoever they may be, want you to know it. If you want real news, then go to the country they are talking about and observe it for yourself. You will find things a lot more mundane than they are made out to be for the vast majority of people living there, until that passive propaganda gets them bombed or economic sanctions destroy their livelihoods. The justification of which is made in the objective reporting, even if journalists don't want to change they do so every time they report something. It's in the nature of the frame and the rhetoric they are writing from.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 6y ago
> Two weeks after the Cotton controversy, the Times published an essay by Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize–winning black reporter, titled “A Reckoning over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists.” Equating objectivity with “whiteness,” Lowery called for “moral clarity, which will require both editors and reporters to stop doing things like reflexively hiding behind euphemisms to obfuscate the truth.” The Trump administration and the Republican Party, Lowery urged, should be labeled as what they are: a “refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies.” In the post-Bennet moment of post-journalism, editors at the paper were inclined to agree. Traditional liberals that think it’s just Republican ideas that will be denounced as pernicious “whiteness” are in for a rude surprise. I saw this quite starkly this summer. Liberal city dwellers in Chicago and Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods, but being too afraid to say anything openly. It seems to have passed, but for a spell, near-universal beliefs about the necessity for order in a civil society became something many were too afraid to support for fear of being lumped together with Trump supporters.
- mc32 6y ago
  Much of the rhetoric and power plays echo of the tactics used by socialists (communists) to divide populations (rural vs urban, intellectual vs illiterate, landed vs serf, etc) but to their credit they had a clear objective (to win at all costs) BUT they also had an endgame. They didn’t let this eat themselves (Mao did play with fire here). And once they won, all that nonsense went out the window, the dumb idealist ideologues got the hard boot and everyone else followed or pretended to follow the new realideology to survive. It’s like they don't read history.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    I'd encourage you to read my sibling post. It's common knowledge that the "objectivity" practiced by reporters is anything but; but as soon as someone dares to specify that the so-called objective perspective also happens to be white, all of a sudden they're being equated with Mao†. If that's not "white fragility", I don't know what is. †You're saying Mao played with fire, but you're not acknowledging the other differences between Mao (slaughtered millions of people) and these so-called socialists (who just want racism to end).
lazulicurio 6y ago
There's plenty to criticize about both the modern media landscape and modern "wokeness", but this piece seems more cultural grievance than productive critique. Personally, when it comes to political journalism, one of my favorite pieces is Jay Rosen's "Why Political Coverage is Broken"[1]. I think it covers specific problems with media coverage in more detail, and provides a better path to restoring trust in news than "be more objective". [1] https://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/ https://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-bro...
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Rosen's piece seems like it's taking the opposite position, no? Unless I'm missing something, he's arguing that the media is too neutral, too willing to just report what politicians do rather than taking a stance. One of his examples of bad reporting is describing a candidate's campaign strategies without discussing whether the candidate should win. (Although I suppose there's also no reason that 2011 Australia and 2021 USA would necessarily have comparable media landscapes.)
  - lazulicurio 6y ago
    Yes and no. If you read other pieces of his, he goes into more detail about how there's a difference between objectivity and partisan neutrality. He calls partisan neutrality the "view from nowhere"---a framing device that divorces politics from its real-world effects.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      A good rejoinder to that is from theories of procedural democracy. A press that is neutral as to partisanship is perceived within the overall political framework as being fair, which has the very positive effect of engendering trust in the institution. It’s the same reason why judges and courts strive to avoid the perception of substantive bias. Politics must be divorced from “its real-world effects” because people of different political persuasions disagree about what real-world effects policies will have (or whether some effects outweigh other effects). A liberal reporting neutral facts about say a proposed immigration policy is still useful to a conservative. A liberal’s take on what they think will be “the real-world effects” of a proposed policy (at least, the ones they care about) will not be useful.
losvedir 6y ago
> Traditional newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers. Hey, it's HN's favorite (if tired) maxim about "if you're not the customer you're the product". I usually think of that applied to Google or startups, not sure why I never made the connection with non-paywalled news sites.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
“Post modern journalism”. Hard to say that out-loud without gagging a little. But you can’t let the state handle news either. And you can’t keep the free market from corrupting it. Not sure what the answer is.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  That's what makes the problem so bedeviling. Journalism has been afflicted with the same maximalist, parasitic ideology as every other institution. But other institutions have a couple of paths out: the profit motive has the advantage of being insensitive to ideology, and government has builtin safeguards against lunatic populists like trumpists or the woke. But journalism can't really take advantage of either of these. The market doesn't steer it towards the socially optimal objective, and independence from the state is a core part of its value.

25 points by nkurz 6y ago

This article only seems accurate if you’ve never met any average journalists. Your run of the mill reporter is looking to tell an accurate story, nothing more dramatic or interesting then that. The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories.

rsj_hn 6y ago
Your run of the mill journalist is a dying breed that's viewed as a cost center for the publisher and is not getting the soapbox. Newspapers have long past turned into media, news is commodified and the value add of the news outlet is opinion. It is inevitable that publishers turn to opinion in an age where facts are free, widely disseminated, and not subject to copyright. The line between reporting facts and stating opinions has been blurred so much that you've seen revolts in journalism schools (e.g. ASU's Walter Cronkite school) to oust deans that discourage confessional style opinion journalism as they vainly advocate for professionality and objectivity over activism. Activism and emotion is what generates clicks as younger reporters view themselves as crusaders "standing up" for justice in a world of iniquity rather than delivering information about events to the public. The public already can access all the information they need whenever they want. There just isn't that much room for value add in the current age of ubiquitous information.
burnthrow 6y ago
I've worked in newsrooms and disagree with this saintly image of truth-seekers. Yes, the rank and file reporters are not looking to grind an axe; even if they were, they'd be too busy to do it. The well-known writers have huge egos and strong opinions. The editors are even worse. Also, please don't cast aspersions like "only seems accurate" and "conspiracy theories." There is no conjecture in this editorial: It's somebody's opinion about recent, real developments in major newspapers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
threwawasy1228 6y ago
I don't think it is a conspiracy to say that there is a large self-selection process going on in news that starts with ideology. A person has to pick whether they want to report for HuffingtonPost, Slate, or Breitbart. There isn't a conspiracy because there doesn't have to be one, people self select into their respective hive minds essentially. On your other point, the idea that the average person in news is an unbiased accurate reporter is laughable. That kind of reporting is almost a niche genre at this point outside of small town papers. Everyone now seems to have a very obvious agenda, and the consumers seem to mainly want news that fits their own agenda. Again this isn't a conspiracy this is just the direction that the market forces took news into. A polarized ideological consumerbase, wants news that matches their polarized politics.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > That kind of reporting is almost a niche genre at this point outside of small town papers Oh but it’s so glorious! Here in Annapolis we’re a small city (under 50k) but as a state capital we’re able to support a pretty good local newspaper (the capital gazette). It’s so refreshing to read articles by journalists that don’t wear their politics on their sleeves.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I think you're misreading the article. The thesis is that the journalists are seeking to push their own messages; that the leadership of most news organizations still favors objectivity, but the rank and file (and the readers) increasingly believe that journalists have a duty to take a stand and deliver the right messages. The article references a moderately well-known incident where many journalists issued loud public objections to a NYT headline, not because the headline was factually inaccurate (it simply summarized a statement a politician made), but because it painted that politician in an insufficiently negative light.
ravenstine 6y ago
I've worked for a news outlet(pretty much smack dab in the newsroom) and I have friends and family who have either worked for other news outlets or are journalists; while I agree that they are generally well-intentioned, their motivations aren't as simple as telling an accurate story. There's a growing number of young journalists who believe that objectivity is wrong and, because of that, choose to be overtly biased in what they report. In the broader sense, it's extremely common for news outlets to pass over stories that don't fit the narrative of their political affiliation. Even otherwise good journalists may pass on a story if they know it will result in them being seen unfavorably by leadership. Even leadership at these companies may steer the newsroom in certain directions if they seem favorable to their parent media company, whether they agree with it or not, because they know they have a chance of getting axed if their publication or broadcast says the wrong thing. > The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories. Have you had any actual experience inside a newsroom? In my experience, there's tons of groupthink that happens among journalists. There's nothing that makes journalists any different from average people, whom have a tendency to form cohorts with likeminded people. At one news outlet I worked for, a certain person in leadership(whose name and title I will leave nameless) mentioned in a meeting that there happen to be some journalists at the company who lean conservative; people in the meeting couldn't believe it and nearly flipped out, like it's a bad thing that someone is conservative, or that it's a given that all journalists identify as liberal. Lots of thought and communication among journalists occurs over Twitter, which helped facilitate an echo chamber rather than diffuse it. I simply don't agree that notions that there are hive minded groups of journalists are "all conspiracy theories". I'm sure there are some good groups of journalists out there but, from where I'm standing, they seem few and far between. There's nothing farfetched about a company having its own culture and unique hiring practices; it's human nature that happens all the time in and outside the media. It doesn't necessarily have to be driven by overt plans to manipulate anyone. Rather, what a news organization publishes is often influenced by whatever the incentive structure is. For journalism, the incentive structure that governs it promotes low-grade reports on news that hasn't been fully fleshed out combined with some carefully disguised opinion material intended to keep people reading. Currently there's little to no enforcement of efficiently informing readers since the desire for profit and prestige has overtaken the desire for integrity. None of this is new, though. It's just been accelerated recently. Look up the history of "yellow journalism". American journalism has a long history of publishing tripe to sway the public at the behest of media titans.

caseysoftware 6y ago

> To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity. This completely ignores the fact that - in the US at least - many newspapers started as organs of the local political parties. They always wanted to get their news out to their people. Then it went into full fledged "yellow journalism" that was all about the headline and engaging emotions vs objectivity.. which should sound familiar. And that was the late 1800s! Around 50-60 years ago, as "mass market" became a thing and ad revenue exploded, newspapers and journalism as a whole veered towards objectivity because the local furniture store wanted to advertise to everyone not just one party. But if you read interviews, memoirs, notes, and the like of the journalists for that era, their stated goal for being a journalist was "to change the world." We can debate the specifics of what that means but it's not interchangeable with "neutral observer and reporter of facts." Like many things, this appears to be a pendulum and it's swung from neutrality/objectivity back towards the opinion-based, light on facts approach for now. How long we stay there and the consequences are yet to be determined..

federona 6y ago
Philosophically even truth is an opinion. There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from. Say you cover news about a certain group but don't cover news from another group. Or you report the facts only in the rhetoric of commonly held norms, like so and so nation committed atrocities, while our nation bombed insurgents backed by so and so and accidentally killed a bunch of children. You always report in frame even if done objectively, otherwise your journalism would be considered inflammatory and you would find yourself without a job. So yes there is pure propaganda, etc, but in general news is propaganda of stuff as they, whoever they may be, want you to know it. If you want real news, then go to the country they are talking about and observe it for yourself. You will find things a lot more mundane than they are made out to be for the vast majority of people living there, until that passive propaganda gets them bombed or economic sanctions destroy their livelihoods. The justification of which is made in the objective reporting, even if journalists don't want to change they do so every time they report something. It's in the nature of the frame and the rhetoric they are writing from.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 6y ago

> Two weeks after the Cotton controversy, the Times published an essay by Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize–winning black reporter, titled “A Reckoning over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists.” Equating objectivity with “whiteness,” Lowery called for “moral clarity, which will require both editors and reporters to stop doing things like reflexively hiding behind euphemisms to obfuscate the truth.” The Trump administration and the Republican Party, Lowery urged, should be labeled as what they are: a “refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies.” In the post-Bennet moment of post-journalism, editors at the paper were inclined to agree. Traditional liberals that think it’s just Republican ideas that will be denounced as pernicious “whiteness” are in for a rude surprise. I saw this quite starkly this summer. Liberal city dwellers in Chicago and Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods, but being too afraid to say anything openly. It seems to have passed, but for a spell, near-universal beliefs about the necessity for order in a civil society became something many were too afraid to support for fear of being lumped together with Trump supporters.

mc32 6y ago
Much of the rhetoric and power plays echo of the tactics used by socialists (communists) to divide populations (rural vs urban, intellectual vs illiterate, landed vs serf, etc) but to their credit they had a clear objective (to win at all costs) BUT they also had an endgame. They didn’t let this eat themselves (Mao did play with fire here). And once they won, all that nonsense went out the window, the dumb idealist ideologues got the hard boot and everyone else followed or pretended to follow the new realideology to survive. It’s like they don't read history.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  I'd encourage you to read my sibling post. It's common knowledge that the "objectivity" practiced by reporters is anything but; but as soon as someone dares to specify that the so-called objective perspective also happens to be white, all of a sudden they're being equated with Mao†. If that's not "white fragility", I don't know what is. †You're saying Mao played with fire, but you're not acknowledging the other differences between Mao (slaughtered millions of people) and these so-called socialists (who just want racism to end).

lazulicurio 6y ago

There's plenty to criticize about both the modern media landscape and modern "wokeness", but this piece seems more cultural grievance than productive critique. Personally, when it comes to political journalism, one of my favorite pieces is Jay Rosen's "Why Political Coverage is Broken"[1]. I think it covers specific problems with media coverage in more detail, and provides a better path to restoring trust in news than "be more objective". [1] https://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/ https://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-bro...

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Rosen's piece seems like it's taking the opposite position, no? Unless I'm missing something, he's arguing that the media is too neutral, too willing to just report what politicians do rather than taking a stance. One of his examples of bad reporting is describing a candidate's campaign strategies without discussing whether the candidate should win. (Although I suppose there's also no reason that 2011 Australia and 2021 USA would necessarily have comparable media landscapes.)
- lazulicurio 6y ago
  Yes and no. If you read other pieces of his, he goes into more detail about how there's a difference between objectivity and partisan neutrality. He calls partisan neutrality the "view from nowhere"---a framing device that divorces politics from its real-world effects.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    A good rejoinder to that is from theories of procedural democracy. A press that is neutral as to partisanship is perceived within the overall political framework as being fair, which has the very positive effect of engendering trust in the institution. It’s the same reason why judges and courts strive to avoid the perception of substantive bias. Politics must be divorced from “its real-world effects” because people of different political persuasions disagree about what real-world effects policies will have (or whether some effects outweigh other effects). A liberal reporting neutral facts about say a proposed immigration policy is still useful to a conservative. A liberal’s take on what they think will be “the real-world effects” of a proposed policy (at least, the ones they care about) will not be useful.

losvedir 6y ago

> Traditional newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers. Hey, it's HN's favorite (if tired) maxim about "if you're not the customer you're the product". I usually think of that applied to Google or startups, not sure why I never made the connection with non-paywalled news sites.

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago

“Post modern journalism”. Hard to say that out-loud without gagging a little. But you can’t let the state handle news either. And you can’t keep the free market from corrupting it. Not sure what the answer is.

wutbrodo 6y ago
That's what makes the problem so bedeviling. Journalism has been afflicted with the same maximalist, parasitic ideology as every other institution. But other institutions have a couple of paths out: the profit motive has the advantage of being insensitive to ideology, and government has builtin safeguards against lunatic populists like trumpists or the woke. But journalism can't really take advantage of either of these. The market doesn't steer it towards the socially optimal objective, and independence from the state is a core part of its value.