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That's what journalism has always been like, save for a few decades in one specific country (the US). The past few decades of supposed "objectivity" and "neutra

• slibhb 6y ago
  I watched a classic movie from the 50s recently, Sweet Smell of Success. In the movie columnists are portrayed as almost exclusively venal and engaged in corrupt influence-peddling (except for one guy who refuses to compromise in the face of blackmail). It was an interesting counterpoint to the "journalists used to be objective" stuff.
• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Anti-discrimination laws, human rights, and democracy are also historical aberrations. But I think they're kind of worth keeping around. Perhaps getting accurate facts about the world is also important?
  • bhupy 6y ago
    > Anti-discrimination laws, human rights, and democracy are also historical aberrations. But I think they're kind of worth keeping around. Nazism was also a historical aberration, but that's certainly not worth keeping around. Just because some "good" things were historical aberrations, doesn't mean that all historical aberrations are "good". > Perhaps getting accurate facts about the world is also important? I don't think anybody disagrees with this. The central question is: is journalism the institution that should be responsible for getting accurate facts about the world? That's almost never been the case, and even today, isn't the case in most countries (including Western Europe). We typically use other institutions to suss out facts, including academia and peer-reviewed research. News articles published by mainstream outlets aren't peer-reviewed, and bias has existed in journalism since time immemorial. That was the point of my original response. Substack isn't "good" or "bad" for the future of journalism, it's "neutral", since it doesn't change the status quo all that much.
  • adolph 6y ago
    Were people getting accurate facts about the world previously? Wen it came out in 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent rattled the accepted view in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America that journalists’ relationship to power was essentially adversarial. Instead, they argued, the institutional structure of American media — its dependence on corporate advertising and sources in the upper ranks of government and business — created a role for the press as creators of propaganda. Without any direct press censorship, with full freedom of speech, the media narrowed the political debate to exclude anything that offended the interests of the market or the state. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/matt-taibbi-interview-fairway-manufacturing-consent https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/matt-taibbi-interview-fai...
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism And were neither objective nor neutral, just a close alignment of elite interests reflected in homogeneity.