63 ms·

How U.S. media lost the trust of the public

• kiba 6y ago
  It seems that humans are always barreling to the next crisis with no strategic plans in mind. We are always making it up as we go along.
  • oblio 6y ago
    Well, except for some extreme cases (climate change being one), it seems to work. Strategic plans involve some rigidity, so they're not without drawbacks.
    • hh3k0 6y ago
      > Well, except for some extreme cases (climate change being one), it seems to work. Does it, though? It sure seems to me as if our solutions tend to introduce ever more drastic problems which dwarf the original problem.
      • oblio 6y ago
        What are our solutions, though? We're attacking this problem from a million disjointed fronts. The blessing (and peril) of not following a rigid strategy. Though I think we should have some red lines, some big picture initiatives that do need to be planned at a higher level. The US dropped the ball on this for a while, for example.
  • luxuryballs 6y ago
    Somewhere I heard it said that if you give a government emergency powers you will find that there are more often emergencies, or something like that.
  • pessimizer 6y ago
    That may just be how it looks to people who are not involved in the decisionmaking, except as observers of what has been reported to them by actual decisionmakers. The consensus reality agreed to between major media outlets may well be an epiphenomenon.
• GavinMcG 6y ago
  Short answer: after the revocation of the fairness doctrine, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes/Fox News found a profitable strategy in focusing on a specific demographic and telling them what they want to hear. Fox led the way, and the polarized template took off with Crossfire (on CNN) and further self-sorting by audiences. (This was content in the embedded video—gestured at in the text.)
  • tjs8rj 6y ago
    I’ve heard the argument on the right that the fairness doctrine was in name only, as in it gave the news media monopolistic power while they showed a skewed perspective of what the other side actually believed. Consequently, Rush Limbaugh grow so big so quickly because someone was finally representing this audience
    • willis936 6y ago
      We are all eventually in service to the truth. Misinformation can cause real damage. A surge of misinformation calls for more aggressive appeals to free speech to keep society stable. What would have protected free speech in the first place? Not allowing the dangerous fantasies supplant fact.
      • wincy 6y ago
        Dangerous fantasies like “thalidomide is perfectly safe” or “smoking is good for your health”? How about “fat makes you fat”? There’s plenty of statements that the mainstream media supported that were either flat out wrong and harmful to the American public. We’re still feeling the repercussions of a government hellbent against saturated fats. At least allowing people to indulge in “dangerous fantasies” lets some of the people be right some of the time, instead of the entire monoculture being dangerously wrong.
        • tayo42 6y ago
          Not all misinformation is the same, there's a difference between science got it wrong and society eventually corrected it self and being wrong on purpose or misleading to pander to an audience.
• GavinMcG 6y ago
  Side note: it's bizarre to me that Fox News gets a pass on being part of "the media". The article says that "73 percent of Republicans say news media don't understand people like them." But Fox News has been the most-watched news source in the United States for nearly two decades!
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    > But Fox News has been the most-watched news source in the United States for nearly two decades! Why does watching a news channel necessarily mean that you think that the news channel understands you? Maybe they're watching it and from that deciding it doesn't understand them. In fact... if they didn't watch it they wouldn't know that it doesn't understand them so they must be watching it...
    • Grim-444 6y ago
      Even if it's an awful news source, which it is, it's the only place to receive the other side of stories, or alternative viewpoints, as biased as they are. Fox News and CNN are the same in my book. You can disagree with that, which is fine, to each their own, but I see them both as insanely biased, politicized, monetized, having given up on actual journalism long ago. I watch them both just to see what the extremes of both sides are up to, with the truth being a combination of bits and pieces from both sides. I literally have to incorporate Fox News in, as horrible as it is, because it's the only way to be exposed to any other data. So yes, I watch it, and yes, I don't think it's good or understands me, but there's no other choice; the alternative is to be awash in one ideology's propaganda 24/7, to only ever receive information from sources that are horribly biased one way.
      • chillwaves 6y ago
        Here is an alternative idea: don't watch any of these "horribly biased" news sources.
        • chrisseaton 6y ago
• alacombe 6y ago
  Rather funny coming from CBC which is really nothing but a mouthpiece for the Canadian woke-left given the billions received in public funding from the current government to stay relevant...
  • phone8675309 6y ago
    Nothing says "objective reporting" like a government-funded news publisher. That's why I always get my news from Russia Today, so I know it's objective. (Word to the literalnet: I thought we were all adults here and we didn't need a /s. Apparently I was wrong.)
    • alacombe 6y ago
      This sure will never be a headlines on western media: https://www.rt.com/usa/519414-cnn-carjacking-death-accident/ https://www.rt.com/usa/519414-cnn-carjacking-death-accident/ But of course, black female teen can not commit felonies, it would be racist to think otherwise, and even if they did, it would certain be linked to their ancestor being forced into slavery by evil white people (omitting the mention they were likely first sold by blacks in Africa)... or this: https://www.rt.com/news/519412-makassar-catholic-church-bombing/ https://www.rt.com/news/519412-makassar-catholic-church-bomb... If it's a mosque in NZ, it's western news worthy, but nobody gives a rat fuck about a catholic church being bombed.
      • rhodozelia 6y ago
        I read the CBC regularly and listen to the radio as well and agree it is not objective and is always pushing a social objective. If you could remove the inflammatory tone from your posts and just state the facts there might be an interesting discussion to have. If the CBC is someone’s only source of news it is a handicap to them as there is very little business reporting except from the point of view that some people having some success is bad because others didn’t have any. At least the old newspapers had a business section that celebrated success and gave one a window in to that world. If all you consume is CBC you aren’t shown a path in to markets but are shown that they exclude you and there is nothing you can do about it. CBC creates victims.
• underseacables 6y ago
  Journalists inserting their personal opinions and passing it off as fact, while working to manipulate public opinion of hot button issues for the sake of clicks.
  • Spivak 6y ago
    So I know what you mean but the issue is more complicated than that. The implication is that if only journalists would stop doing inserting their opinions that the problem would go away. This is technically true but also misses the point by a mile. The dry work of journalists hasn’t at all changed. News is just as boring and impartial as it always has been but nobody consumes it. It’s been there the whole time and hasn’t gone away. But television radically disrupted what we call news and proved that what people wanted wasn’t actually news but storytellers who consume the news and present it as a cohesive narrative that has the benefit of context (historical, cultural, political). This is totally rational. It’s why reading news reports and case files about criminals is niche but true crime podcasts are hugely popular. These aren’t and can’t be apolitical in nature but that isn’t the same thing as “injecting opinion into fact” which is something that doesn’t really happen all that often. It’s very rare that you know a journalist’s opinion on a topic (outside of their personal Twitter) but how they assemble a narrative is ultimately informed by their views as an individual.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • donmcronald 6y ago
    Yeah, and everyone is guilty of it IMO. I would love to see an analysis of news articles over the last few decades where someone counts the adjectives.
• lettergram 6y ago
  It's clear that everything from NPR to Fox News is a propaganda machine - plain and simple. Anyone who spends any time investigating any story will quickly find the truth. Take the Capital's mostly peaceful protest on January 6 (sarcasm), where the 7 people who died. Did you know the only two who died violently that day were protestors and many news agencies retracted the death of the police officer "hit with a fire extinguisher"? https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/02/23/nolte-politifact-finally-admits-brian-sicknick-not-killed-by-fire-extinguisher/ https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/02/23/nolte-politif... Two people died from "medial emergencies" and don't appear to have done anything besides attend trumps rally: https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/who-are-the-four-who-died-in-the-dc-protest-at-the-capitol/ https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/who-are-the-four-who-died-in-t... Officer Brian Sicknick died the following day and there have been arrests, supposedly he died of a stroke, but to-date no medical report has been released: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/15/politics/brian-sicknick-capitol-riot-charges/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/15/politics/brian-sicknick-capit... Estimates vary, but based on reporting on the ground, it appears there were at least 500,000 people there, so it's not super surprising that there would be quite a few natural deaths. Further, it has to be the only armed insurrection in history where the insurrectionists primarily left their weapons at home. Not saying what was done was moral, correct, etc (it wasn't), but after watching my own city burn in the BLM "mostly peaceful protests" I can't help but recognize the unadulterated falsehoods being propagated. https://twitter.com/JoeConchaTV/status/1298863702272344064?s=20 https://twitter.com/JoeConchaTV/status/1298863702272344064?s... Both are bad, both were riots, and all you have to do is look to see how bad it is. We don't need to make the death count worse or ignore other riots / crimes. The general point, if the media would focus on reporting as opposed to pandering it would have trust. As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership. However, as soon as people realize they're being sold something, they forever lose that viewer. I tend to trust journalists a bit more, such as Glenn Greenwald: https://twitter.com/GGreenwald https://twitter.com/GGreenwald They appear to be truly investigating.
  • Itsdijital 6y ago
    >Calls NPR and Fox news propaganda machines >Talks about finding the truth >Links to Breitbart. C'mon man...
• WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  The press's extra constitutional protections imply a duty to act as an adversary to the powerful and to inform the public of what they learn. In as much as news orgs fail to challenge those in power, they are abdicating their primary responsibilities - they are earning a loss of trust. Publishing press releases by Gov/LEO/Biz verbatim, without vetting the info or adding historical context, is a polar opposite of what 1A protections imply. As far as informing the public: One news org publishing 7 headlines is informing us. Dozens of others who publish those same stories, w/o meaningfully different content, is not. Bounded, local markets have been gone for a generation. It seems delusional to disseminate news as if it were still 30-300 years ago.
  • galaxyLogic 6y ago
    I think there should be a government agency that counters mis-information in the media just like we have agencies that inspect food to be poison-free. Such an agency should be independent in the way that Federal reserve or Bank of England are independent of the current government.
    • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      > I think there should be a government agency that counters mis-information in the media This would in effect have that Gov overseeing itself. I would offer that the powerful are exactly who should not oversee news orgs.
      • galaxyLogic 6y ago
        > This would in effect have that Gov overseeing itself. Gov is not the Media or is it. So Government overseeing Media is not the same thing as Government overseeing itself. I think it should in fact work quite well. Government should oversee Media and Media should oversee the Government.
    • barry-cotter 6y ago
      It could be called the Ministry of Truth.
• chinathrow1029 6y ago
  Relevant: ” For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts.” [1] [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  The All Sides blog has been an eye opener when it comes to examining biases that permeate virtually all news media (even the tenured giants like NYT), understanding how narratives are engineered, and how public perceptions are shaped. For example they had a recent write up on plug and play journalism (https://www.allsides.com/blog/rise-plug-and-play-journalism https://www.allsides.com/blog/rise-plug-and-play-journalism) and media bias regarding violence against Asian Americans (https://www.allsides.com/blog/unpacking-media-bias-and-narratives-around-asian-american-violence https://www.allsides.com/blog/unpacking-media-bias-and-narra...).
  • luxuryballs 6y ago
    NPR got a C rating instead of an L?
  • lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    ground.news is even better imo
    • throwawaysea 6y ago
      I use them too. I love their aggregation and display of news articles across the spectrum. An interesting tool they built is their “Blindspotter”, which lets you see the bias of who a particular Twitter account follows (their news diet). Interestingly a lot of the left leaning popular media accounts like Trevor Noah’s operate in a complete echo chamber whereas many popular right leaning accounts like Megyn Kelly are actually very balanced. And as you might expect, extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are very biased in their news diet: https://ground.news/blindspotter https://ground.news/blindspotter
• sydney6 6y ago
  I understand that this is just the title of the post, but this is by far not a U.S. specific issue.
• keiferski 6y ago
  I think this is sort of like asking why the Catholic Church lost the trust of Northern Christians. Yeah, there were some specific actions taken by the Church that led to the seeds of the Reformation...but ultimately the printing press and a long-growing trend of secular power is what actually caused and maintained the larger historical process. In other words, in a world where the Internet exists, it was inevitable that established media powers would eventually erode away and lose their position as sole arbiters of information.
  • threatofrain 6y ago
    I’m not sure because most people don’t consider fake reviews or sponsored Reddit posts or YT people to be part of story, thus I feel they will underestimate the degree to which narrative is manipulated.
  • galaxyLogic 6y ago
    Except there is no Pope of Media. There is no single party controlling it all. A real problem however is monopolies. That is why we need laws that stop companies from becoming monopolies. That is why we need regulation. Personally I think the lawsuit against Fox about mis-information they spread about voting machine manufacturers is a great remedy and will help restore public's faith in the system. It is not that all media are equally bad in spreading mis-information. Some are clearly worse than others. How do we know that? Lawsuit(s) will prove that, beyond reasonable doubt.
    • keiferski 6y ago
      I’m talking about the diffusion of technology undermining established information sources. The outcomes of lawsuits are not really relevant to the average person.
      • galaxyLogic 6y ago
        If Fox News is ordered to pay billion(s) in damages that is big news which should reach even the "average person". Yet maybe not the average consumer of Fox news. Such news would be highly relevant to the average Fox News customer because it would tell them that Fox has done something quite bad, caused damages worth billion(s) by spreading misinformation. It is relevant to the "average person" because it clearly tells them something about the trustworthiness of the news they get from Fox every day. But whether that news will reach them is a different question. Therefore I think part of the remedy should be to order Fox News to tell their viewers about the outcome of the lawsuit more than once to make sure it reaches all their customers.
• hackeraccount 6y ago
  People shouldn't trust the media. It's filled with people who go into it because they want to change the world. There's nothing wrong with that but if you consume it thinking that shouldn't be or isn't the case you're going to come away feeling betrayed. The thing that annoys me is people who go into careers that are explicitly premised on describing the world only because they think they can use the trust that comes from that to change the world. Those people aren't in media though.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    There's differnt types of journalism though. Newscasters should absolutely be impartial and just a delivery mechanism of news. Investigative journalists are supposed to dig deep and get to the answers. You can't really be impartial. You're either going to prove or disprove something. Once that is done, the newscasters can do an impartial coverage of the facts that were discovered. >The thing that annoys me is people who go into careers because they want to be famous. These people we see on "news" programs don't give a rat's ass about the news, and only want to be the one people are watching.
  • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    > People shouldn't trust the media. The reasons you offer may be good arguments against unliked news but do not seem to follow a path to effectively false news. I would restate the assertion to read: People shouldn't trust any news source implicitly - until trust is carefully nurtured thru the reader's regular and independent vetting of stories.
  • hackyhacky 6y ago
    Presenting the truth honestly and without bias sounds like a great way to change the world.
    • jackcosgrove 6y ago
      Historically presenting the truth honestly and without bias was a great way to lose your head. I think you overestimate the market for truth.
• Animats 6y ago
  Less news, more opinion. Try to find out what's happening with the ship stuck in the Suez Canal. The amount of punditry and opinion far exceeds the actual info. One of the few useful reports today is from Al-arabiya.[1] They probably have people on site. [1] https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2021/03/28/Tugs-dredgers-continuing-efforts-to-free-ship-stranded-in-Suez-Canal-Authority https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2021/03/28/Tu... [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/28/tugs-dredgers-still-work-to-refloat-ship-blocking-suez-canal https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/28/tugs-dredgers-still...
  • inglor_cz 6y ago
    Opinion would be OK if it did not pose as news. People can see the attempt at cloaking subjective opinion as objective news and do not like it.
    • fermienrico 6y ago
      It needs to go in the reverse direction to correct. We need less opinions than ever.
      • inglor_cz 6y ago
        Opinions are fine in places like Substack, where people actually pay to read them. Out in the ad-supported world of supposedly free content, yes, fewer opinions would be a boon.
        • noxer 6y ago
          Opinions backed by facts would be fine. If someone explains why he has the opinion he has then I can agree/disagree/provide a better reasoning for another opinion etc. But most of the opinions voiced are either not backed by anything or backed by one of the most common logical fallacy.
          • parineum 6y ago
• sobriquet9 6y ago
  I think this is good in the long run. People in the US have not been exposed to much propaganda from the media before, so tended to trust the news. That's why fake news and biased reporting had such an adverse effect. Now this is changing, as more people realize that New York Times or Fox News are not much different from Pravda, and that it's not a good idea to blindly trust talking heads on TV.
  • galaxyLogic 6y ago
    That is a false equivalency. NYT is biased but it is biased towards factual information. Fox is not. Pravda is clearly government controlled. The issue is that if media outlets provide only news their viewership wants to hear then it can go very wrong. But there is a difference. Some people want to hear accurate information while other prefer information that only supports their worldview. This is different from the issue of trust. If you trust a media outlet because it always gives you news you want to hear then the problem is with you not with media that provides accurate information. Note also that it is in the interests of those who want to spread misinformation that the public indeed loses its trust in the media. When that happens then anybody's opinion is as good as anybody else's.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      Note that it is also in the interests of those who want to spread misinformation that the public trusts the media that they publish, and ascribes its "failures" to incompetence rather than intentional manipulation of public opinion.
    • sobriquet9 6y ago
      Biased towards factual information would be unbiased. Do you really need examples of NYT's bias?
      • galaxyLogic 6y ago
        I don't really need them but would be interesting to hear what you think are some of the worst examples of that
• chroem- 6y ago
  There's a lot of focus on recent events, but surely I'm not the only one that remembers when the New York Times almost singlehandedly started the Iraq War based on false reporting, right?
  • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    I think your example helps illustrate how ineptitude is the problem that bias is perceived to be.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      The NYT's involvement in the Iraq War was not ineptitude, but the intentional passing on of administration claims not only without criticism, but while also excluding and attacking critical voices as borderline seditious. It was also editorially consistent with the NYT's positions before and after the fact. Painting Judith Miller and her coworkers as a hapless accident is defaulting to excusing an outlet you identify with. The NYT was not doing good, badly. The NYT was doing bad, knowingly.
      • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
        > the intentional passing on of administration claims not only without criticism This is ineptitude. > excluding and attacking critical voices as borderline seditious This is also ineptitude.
        • anigbrowl 6y ago
          Most people read ineptitude to mean lack of capacity/skill rather than cynicism. If you knowingly do something that leads to a (generally) unwanted result, that's quite different from wanting to do something else but clumsily failing.
          • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
            > Most people read ineptitude to mean lack of capacity/skill That's good because that's what it means.
• tracer4201 6y ago
  I’m going to off on a tangent here, but what I find amusing is the theater circus the American Congress has been putting on with CEOs of big tech and social media companies. Suddenly these people care about misinformation? Really? I mean, to an outside observer Fox News and CNN are propaganda machines from two different sides of the spectrum. And they push these politicians political agenda. But now we have social media where America’s elite can’t just kill a news story, and suddenly that’s so wrong? I think back to 2003. I was in Asia and flipping between CNN and Fox News as Saddams statue was being toppled in Iraq. These media organizations peddled lies and were an important cog in the machine to reshape the Middle East, which only led to hundreds of thousands of deaths or people becoming refugees. Social media has its own problems, but it’s quite insane that the same people who peddle lies each and every day have the audacity to act like they’re on some moral pedestal questioning tech CEOs. In fact they’re just mad they can’t control them. I saw this last week and couldn’t help but wonder that America can’t afford healthcare and had homelessness in most metropolitan cities... yet your leaders put on theater.
  • pessimizer 6y ago
    Congress and tech CEOs are dancing together. Congress agrees not to make any actionable accusations, and tech CEOs agree to make a concerned face and promise to do better if given the legal tools.
• coliveira 6y ago
  Nowadays it is much clearer that media is pushing the goals of some interest groups. It is obvious in the case of Fox News, but similarly for more traditional newspapers and TVs. They're pushing the agenda of big business and wealthy individuals, with secondary views on popular topics that don't threaten big interests. Another important issue that you'll figure out in mainstream media is that they're always pushing the idea of us against other countries. They're promoting the underlying notion that we should always be at war (or close to that) with countries that are not aligned with the current interests of the elites. There is always some "enemy" that is a threat to "civilization" and that we desperately need to contain or destroy. Not only this benefits the big interest groups, but this also creates a fictional narrative of reality that keeps viewers interested in learning about the latest developments of this "holy crusade for civilization".
  • LB232323 6y ago
    It has always been this way, there is nothing new under the sun. Even the Spanish War was fueled by newspapers. The media business is a business, it has always been about what's profitable. It's not a public service, even hard hitting journalism must sell copies. The closest thing to news media that serves public interest are worker owned media companies and socialist magazines.
  • will4274 6y ago
    Alexander Hamilton founded the NY Post in 1801 to trash his political opponents. It's always been this way.
    • refurb 6y ago
      The major media organizations happily conspired to suppress stories about FDR’s health and JFK’s numerous affairs. Are those topics news worthy? Who knows, but the fact the media decided that was for them to decide alone is somewhat worrisome.
      • TameAntelope 6y ago
        Who does get to decide? I think the easy answer is, "the people" but when you dig deeper into that, a representative group collectively making and enforcing decisions is... a government. So I don't think there really is a right answer here. "Not this" may be a start, but it's hardly a solution.
• pluc 6y ago
  This should be a really short article: Because US media is legally allowed to lie on air. Make lying, or knowingly propagating information you know to be wrong illegal - as it is in civilized countries - and the problem goes away. But you'd rather have guns and lies.
  • nostromo 6y ago
    This isn’t true. Media orgs get sued all the time for defamation and libel.
    • buu700 6y ago
      Defamation only applies when the lie is causing harm to a specific person. It's just a special case of lying. As far as I'm aware, there's no existing law in the US that would penalize lies (from the media or otherwise) in general. I don't see this as a particularly problematic idea. Assuming a high burden of proof, why shouldn't a deliberate hoax from a news organization be treated as a kind of fraud or "malpractice"? An alternate implementation would be for the FCC to regulate this and unilaterally issue fines for broadcasting fake news, but that seems ripe for abuse and more against the spirit of 1A. Instead, I like the idea that anyone (either the state or a private citizen) could sue any news outlet for publication of a hoax; not necessarily claiming any direct or personal harm caused, but just to defend the principle of truth. The process would be as fair as possible — requiring evidence of willful intent to the standards of a court of law, allowing appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, etc. — but in return the consequences would actually have teeth. Offhand, I'd say fines roughly comparable to securities fraud and a journalistic equivalent of disbarment for individuals responsible.
      • makomk 6y ago
        Yeah, and even when the lie is causing harm to a specific person, the U.S. media are mostly immune from libel lawsuits when that person is a public figure like a politician or business owner they're opposed to. Also when they turn that person into a public figure via their campaign of lying, I believe.
  • 6y ago
• motohagiography 6y ago
  This is a bit rich coming from the CBC. They're institutionally incapable of understanding the problem because they can't comprehend how their perception of themselves as an elite is illegitimate, imo.
  • danbolt 6y ago
    Funny enough, I’ve never considered the CBC an “elite” source of media and didn’t get that impression from the CBC itself. Maybe you could explain a little? I want up understand what you mean better.
    • vkou 6y ago
      I have heard that idea expressed frequently, and it roughly translates to "The CBC craps on the Tories too much, and not enough on the Libs."
      • danbolt 6y ago
        That’s interesting to hear, given I’ve just watched Ms Kapelos grill Ng on vaccine shipments and Garneau on Chinese-Canadian relations the per week.
    • motohagiography 6y ago
      You've asked a Canadian to air their complaints about the CBC. Indeed, the CBC isn't an actual elite that could be defined by achievement, performance, accountability, history, or other merit, but they do groom the lower slopes of it. It's possible they have become more balanced as I tuned them out almost 10 years ago, and perhaps in the mean time they've investigated public service corruption, major party financing and election integrity, foreign influence operations, value for money in spending, threats to Canada's sovereignty and place in the world, challenged dominant narratives, and provided valuable and neutral insight into the culture conflicts of the day, but I'm willing to bet I haven't missed that much. If you are in the U.S., CBC news is like if a Portland NPR affiliate had the budget of CNBC. Lots of very concerned and appropriately unattractive white people with cameras, descending from billion dollar office towers to hover around mystified minorities (who, quite reasonably, just shrug and go with it) demanding to know how they've been victimized by the Four Bads. (climate change, homophobia, racism, and sexism.) The CBC became the prosecutors in litigating for social justice, which I think many of them would be sincerely flattered to read, but to many Canadians, they are just activists posing as reporters. This is in addition to that they are the state broadcaster whose mandate was to popularize Canada's increasingly homogenized federalism and (now post-) national identity. Their mandate isn't even reporting, it's narrative, and from a federalist perspective. That view represents the consensus of a few neighbourhoods and schools, basically Queen's, McGill, and to a lesser extent, Carlton, and the international NGOs they all did their gap years at. It is widely regarded as an arm of the LPC. Their content is a formula of patronizing concern about what should be done about people who don't work for the government, or aren't paid in public money, and it manufactures sentimental conflict over different minority interest groups toward that end. While most media panders to outrage, the CBC's editorial tone exalts victimhood as a kind of new state religion. I could just dismiss them as just another group of radicals with government jobs, but it's more complex than that in Canada. The CBC is something much weirder altogether.
• rabbitrecon 6y ago
  This coming from CBC, HA!!!
• dgudkov 6y ago
  This is actually good news. It means people are still capable of distinguishing between propaganda and real journalism even when the former disguises as the latter. Which means the market forces will soon do their job. The rapid rise of Substack only confirms that.
• WalterBright 6y ago
  CNN doesn't even report the news anymore. All they have are personalities that tell you what your opinion of the news should be. BTW, I regularly read both the WSJ and the NYT. Reading both gives one a good idea about how agenda driven the media is.
  • eternalban 6y ago
    Hierarchy of newspapers according to the headline and tone: - "These are the facts" - "This is what you need to know" - "This is what it means" - "Explainer: ..." - Everything you never wanted to know about British Royal Family - Women in bikinis - Men engaged in violent sports
    • justAnIdea 6y ago
      Here's why X is Y and why that's not OK.
    • AmericanChopper 6y ago
      Wouldn't you also expect journalists to scrutinize things? As in skeptically question basically everything that's reported to them, and leave the drawing of conclusions up to their viewers? I think the scrutiny steps seems to get skipped, and each news outlet just reports the conclusions they want their viewers/readers to be exposed to.
  • panny 6y ago
    >CNN doesn't even report the news anymore. I agree. I remember when news organizations had correspondents who travelled around the world to report on stories. People like Marie Colvin, who would risk their lives to get a story. Now it's all talking heads sitting around a table, telling you what to think. The stories aren't even real in many cases now, but made up hysteria like the nascar noose. >BTW, I regularly read both the WSJ and the NYT. Reading both gives one a good idea about how agenda driven the media is. May I suggest reading RT and the SCMP while you are at it. Maybe round it out with with some Al Jazeera.
    • 6y ago
• raarts 6y ago
  I'm convinced this happens all over the (Western?) world, not only in the US.
• chooseaname 6y ago
  It started with the 24 hour news introduced with cable. In order to fill 24 hours, they started adding more fluff and opinion. Then slowly opinion started getting treated like fact. Even broadcast news favors opinion over fact now[0]. [0] Or seems to at least.
  • le-mark 6y ago
    What strikes me how frequently obvious propaganda from China and/or North Korea, clearly meant for internal consumption are reported as “news”. Of course bellicose vitriol is printed against the US for example, but it’s clearly not official or policy in any way. I don’t have references but this has become much more common in recent years, imo.
• pengaru 6y ago
  The writing was already so clearly on the wall by the 70s that a cult classic satirical film [0] was made on exactly this subject. I'm mystified to not see any mention of it in TFA. Nay, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
• slibhb 6y ago
  If there's some event, you can often find a video of it. When you compare the video to whatever "the media" says, and you quickly notice that they don't match up. Either "the media" is lying or the event is not clear-cut and there are multiple valid interpretations. This only has to happen once for you to stop trusting "the media".
• amoorthy 6y ago
  There are a lot of good comments here on what's wrong with the media and why. A couple posts talk about solutions like AllSides or Ground News. Pardon the self-promotion but I'd like to add my company's solution: TheFactual.com. Hopefully a solution to help people complain less and consume better news :-) We use technology to rate how informative an article likely is: links & quotes analysis, lack of opinion in writing tone, author's topical expertise based on historical writing and site historical reputation. The result is you can find good articles in hundreds of sources without having to brand an entire source (Fox, NYT, CNN etc) as good or bad. And by curating a few highly rated stories across the political spectrum on each topic you see different framings of a story quickly so you get closer to the unbiased story. More here if you're curious: https://thefactual.com/how-it-works https://thefactual.com/how-it-works
  • visiblink 6y ago
    This looks like an interesting site. I've checked out All Sides and Ground News and a lot of what used to be considered center is now labelled as "left." I think that's because of the particularly skewed Overton window in the U.S. It would be nice to have a spectrum that could be set based on your country. I've been surfing around on your site. The article selection is very good. I'm unlikely to use it because I refuse to sign up for almost anything these days, and it's a requirement on the site, but it looks well done.
    • amoorthy 6y ago
      Thanks so much! Interesting idea to set the political leaning info based on country. I have heard many say that the US center is right of what most people consider center.
• sparker72678 6y ago
  The real problem is us, humans. We really struggle when all our coefficients and denominators go to 0 (cost) or ∞ (availability) The Internet is Pandora's box. It's been wide open for 20+ years, and we just don't know what do about it, or even if anything should be done about it. Infinite information is something humans have never had before, and its greatest strengths are its greatest weaknesses. This thread craps all over media (and with good reason), but the same force that makes that media available is the one that gives us hyper-local, unmediated information in near-realtime through Twitter, Facebook, et. al. You can't have the one without the other.
• darwingr 6y ago
  Keep in mind that this is an article of pre-suasion by the CBC which justifies Canada's current approach of funding government approved journalists and media companies. The argument is that if someone (government) doesn't fund and help maintain the old model of establishment media (with some left/right division) then the new economic forces will lead to its collapse. The framing being advanced here is that the collapse results in further left/right polarization as we move from objective news reporting towards self-rationalizing and subjective news analysis because that's what drives attention and clicks. This is a false framing in my opinion and only serves as a justification to protect establishment narratives using government money. Instead I would suggest that: is that the collapse of current media leaves us with a polarization between establishment/non-establishment media narratives also. It's also possible to argue (but that's not my goal here) that non/establishment polarization is greater or more threatening (to who) then the left/right polarization. The manifestation of this change is much more holistically represented in US politics by putting the typical voting blocs on a political compass map and plotting the line separating Rep/Dem for 2014 vs November 2020. Note that the shift is axial. I think this a more useful (productive) example than the proposed capitol riots (Jan6th) example or Antifa suggested by others. The axial shift is correlated with a different dimension of disagreement in the common zeitgeist. So some questions worth asking are: - Is this ok? The days of yellow journalism DID have some of the highest literacy rates in the USA. - Are you ok with a system where the government gives out financing at will to journalists/media and you may have to take them to court to get a press pass? ...like Canada? - Were we ever really objective? Should we still strive to distinguish the objective from the subjective? - Not everyone learns these words in school. Some learn (incorrectly, in my opinion) that there's a moral connotation to it. How can we do better at this? - Is it worse to lose "objectivity" in reporting or to purport to to be when we really aren't?
• Balgair 6y ago
  Aside: 1940's His Girl Friday is a great madcap comedy about the journalism business. Though I can't find the timestamp, there's a great scene in the first act where the reporters are sitting around their phones playing cards. Our heroine, Hildy (played excellently by Rosalind Russell), comes in and rouses the group with a hot story. The reporters then relay the story back to the newsrooms in increasingly dubious and truth-stretching headlines, all for the evening editions. It's a bit over the top, but the headlines they spout out sound just like Twitter posts and FB memes to my ears. Yellow Journalism has been around in the US for about a century now, so it's not 'news'. To see the path out of where we are now requires that we look back and see how it was done before https://archive.org/details/HisGirlFriday1940_201505 https://archive.org/details/HisGirlFriday1940_201505 Free Here
• jcadam 6y ago
  I don't normally read the Washington Post, but this old article [1] has one memorable quote from Ben Rhodes (whom I also don't like overly much, but that doesn't matter in this case), and I can fully believe what he is saying: “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/obama-official-says-he-pushed-a-narrative-to-media-to-sell-the-iran-nuclear-deal/2016/05/06/5b90d984-13a1-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/obama-officia...
  • chrischattin 6y ago
    This is my experience as well. If you've ever worked in a field that's reported on consistently, or a field you're an expert in, you'll see it is about 30% is accurate and 70% is completely made up. Many times it was like "I didn't say that" or "that didn't happen at all" while I was standing next to the person who wrote the story. The media in the US is in sorry shape. They definitely earned, and deserve, their place at the bottom of those 'most respected profession' surveys. Now, extrapolate that to reporting on fields you aren't an expert in and form your thoughts accordingly.
    • donw 6y ago
      Not sure why're you're being downvoted. The common name for this is Gell-Mann Amnesia[1], and is casually observable. Pick any field where you would be considered by the layperson to be a subject-matter expert. Then, go and consume popular media -- news, movies, fiction -- related to that field. How accurate would you say they are? Perhaps the downvoters would care to explain? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
      • klibertp 6y ago
• rawgabbit 6y ago
  Superficial analysis by the CBC. The only reason why the citizenry is heavily invested in the US media is because they are ANGRY. Americans have been laid off by the corporations, led to bankruptcy by a callous medical insurance system, told them they are dumb and untrainable by programs like H1b, and lied to repeatedly by politicians. Americans are looking for a savior. The politicians and the mainstream media are pandering to this groundswell of voter anger. For years now, the only remaining public institution that Americans "trust" is the military. If a junta of generals promise jobs and stability, I do not doubt that many Americans will acquiesce. For those who like to draw parallels with the Romans, this is how Rome became a monarchy. The average Roman was being exploited or enslaved by the wealthy optimates led by Pompey and they looked for salvation in Caesar and his nephew Augustus. https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_19-03-21_scienceconfidence_americans-trust-in-military/ https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_19-03-21_scienceconfidence_am...
  • rawgabbit 6y ago
    The brothers Gracchi, grandsons of Scipio Africanus who defeated Hannibal, championed the poor and were eventually murdered by their political opponents. A famous line by Tiberius Gracchus who commented on the fate of those who fought for Rome in her legions: "The savage beasts," said he, "in Italy, have their particular dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light and, having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to wander from place to place with their wives and children." [1] One of the unsavory facts of the Roman republic was tax farming. The rich paid huge sums to the Senate for the right to "tax" that is extort as much money as possible from freedmen as possible. If you can't pay, then your family could be enslaved. This was one of the reasons that led to the Second Servile War. Accordingly Marius sent to Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, requesting assistance. The king replied that the majority of the Bithynians had been seized by tax farmers and were now in slavery in the Roman provinces. The senate then issued a decree that no citizen of an allied state should be held in slavery in a Roman province, and that the praetors should provide for their liberation. [2] The effect of Rome's many wars was that freedmen and small farmers became impoverished. After the Punic wars, the rich bought up all the land and employed their newly conquered slaves. Livy and Polybius also tell of farms suffering physical destruction at the hands of rampaging armies, both Roman and foreign, especially during the Hannibalic War. Scores of veterans returned home only to behold the burnt remnants of their once-productive farms and were forced to sell or abandon their plots when they could afford neither the resources nor the time to restore them.[3] [1] http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/tiberius.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/tiberius.html [2] https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/3slaverevolttexts.asp https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/3slaverevolttexts.as... [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/intesociscierevi.92.1.01?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/intesociscierevi.92.1.01?seq=1 https://brewminate.com/praecipitia-in-ruinam-the-decline-of-the-small-roman-farmer-and-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic/ https://brewminate.com/praecipitia-in-ruinam-the-decline-of-...
• guscost 6y ago
  Meanwhile, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is still trusted all across the land. Yeah, sure.
• AzzieElbab 6y ago
  Says Canadian news outlet that reprints everything US msm prints to the letter, and only exists due to state sponsorship
• th0ma5 6y ago
  Why are these threads on HN always full of alt-right people crawling over themselves to spread cynicism and discord? Yes everything is opinion now... within the opinion shows or opinion articles... Yes Murdoch spent a lot of time sowing this antagonism while using it to justify their claim to be above it somehow... Yes the US media fell in lock-step to justify the Iraq War. But what no one is talking about on this thread is how this headline is the message. The message that trust is gone. How can we get it back? You can't... or so they want you to believe. In reality there are many forces trying hard to keep you confused because your attention is the commodity that they trade in. The truth is out there, and it isn't hard to find. People who had RSS readers through the 2000s already went through a kind of grieving process for the flow of information and learned how to cultivate their network. They made a lot of mistakes too, and found themselves in conspiratorial suspicion networks that spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and that's where the majority of people engaging with the news currently are, and the former majority, from the 2000s have moved on from this game. The eternal September will continue, and all of the current people bewildered by crank memes and "I'm just saying" types will be the ones in the future trying to talk about how all of this has been going on forever when in 5 years the amount of news consumers online makes another broad leap in size and complexity. We need a resurgence in the study of how we all come to know things, and we need to invest in why we decide to trust sources. This needs to be a public conversation and not just yet another kind of behavior where people can just argue and be like "well, if you believe the Associated Press" seriously screw that kind of thinking. Tell me why you don't believe that specific source and give me something more than just cynicism and doubt, show me something that has the same rigor from whatever you're trying to justify.
  • adolph 6y ago
    The "study of how we all come to know things" is a well developed area of study in philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology "Tell me why you don't believe that specific source" I don't believe Dan Rather's claims or excuses afterward for "unsubstantiated critical allegations about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973." In the resulting controversy "[a] former vice president of CBS News, Jonathan Klein, dismissed the allegations of bloggers, suggesting that the 'checks and balances' of a professional news organization were superior to those of individuals sitting at their home computers 'in their pajamas'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
• adolph 6y ago
  Strangely, the seminal 1988 work "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman and Chomsky is not mentioned. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to consent of the governed. . . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
  • adolph 6y ago
    Another big miss is not mentioning "The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority" by Martin Gurri first published in 2014 and republished by Stripe Press in 2018. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22451908-the-revolt-of-the-public-and-the-crisis-of-authority https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22451908-the-revolt-of-t...
• zz865 6y ago
  Has anyone actually got a good news source that reports useful detail? The ship in the Suez is a great example - how hard is it to say what the problem is? Its really hard to find anything. BBC can be good. NY times has a few articles but is increasingly one sided. Al Jazeera can be good for anything not in the middle East.
• ralph84 6y ago
  The US media was never trustworthy, i.e. worthy of trust. Pulitzer named prizes after himself but he was a propagandist for the democratic party and pioneered yellow journalism. It was just easier for them to get away with lies before mass adoption of the Internet allowed anyone to point out their lies.
• ncmncm 6y ago
  I know when the NYT lost me: it was the insane boosterism for invading Iraq. I keep track of who was and wasn't rabid for it. Tom Friedman and Ted Koppel stand out. The former still writes, and apparently is still actually read. To have been so thoroughly wrong would make anyone with any shred of remaining self respect give up writing. Most people at the time thought that voting to authorize W to invade Iraq was what cost Hillary the nomination, because Barrack voted against.
• anonytrary 6y ago
  As if cbc.ca probably doesn't suffer from whatever problems US media suffer from?
• uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y ago
  The tone here is too critical of the propaganda apparatus and FB would do well to down vote brigade it into a memory hole.
• u678u 6y ago
  I keep changing my mind on if we can replace the Media with Social Media. SM is great way for people who are actually there, involved or knowledgeable to report what is going on. On the other hand its an echo chamber amplifying the most batshit crazy conspiracy theories and even the knowledgable people turn out to be the people that just should the loudest or have the best clickbait hooks. We just need a good filter to keep the good. Like Curated Social Media, like a newspaper/TV should be.
• robomartin 6y ago
  The best explanation I found so far for what happened to US news media is in an article from Politico dating back to 2017. It's well worth reading. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  RT - Russian Today has the best reporting on America. Some might think their stories have a bias. But their facts are surprisingly accurate. They don't make things up to make America look bad. As some claim. America does it on its own. They just report it.
  • nxc18 6y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...
    • dukeofdoom 6y ago
      I can't read that because its paywalled. But I assume its a story how 5G is safe. Maybe. But I'm not sure I would fully buy that either. I've seen 5G towers/antennas on local apartment buildings, directly above people's bedrooms.
• spicyramen 6y ago
  Many obvious and already discussed topics, but my concern is losing Local news, most of the world's news are irrelevant to me as I know titles are sensationalist. But this lack of journalism really can screw up communities. Example: Irvine asphalt plant, no real journalism when is needed for the schools and communities around.
• willyt 6y ago
  ‘Journalist’ should be a regulated profession like ‘Doctor’ or ‘Structural engineer’ or ‘Airline pilot’ or ‘Architect’. It seems very likely that poor journalism has incited violence that has caused death and injury. Other proffessions that hold people’s lives in thier hands are regulated. Journalism should be too. Of course anyone can still say whatever they want on the internet just like I can give out homeopathic advice if I want to but they wouldn’t have the badge assuring quality control. Articles could be signed by the journalist and you could check the probity of the journalist in the same way you can check the safety record of a Pilot with the FAA. Complaints could be tried by a tribunal panel with findings of poor professional conduct published like they are for Doctors and Architects the ultimate sanction being struck off from the profession.
• kristopolous 6y ago
  News orgs should be able to register similar to 501c and reporters similar to any perennial certification system and get subsidization for dedicating some amount of coverage to the public interest, which you leave intentionally nebulous and allow for the public to challenge it through the courts if they feel there's a bad faith actor. The freedom of the press is sanctified to ensure functioning democracy but there needs to exist reasonably accessible tools to exercise that freedom otherwise it's just flowery language. It's not meant to cover all the costs but exist as an incentive so that the service is provided.
• einpoklum 6y ago
  > Media consumption was at record highs in 2020, but trust plummeted. 1. News media viewership and trust in the content are two very distinct things. 2. Referring to news as a "consumption" good already kind of answers the question of why it is not to be trusted. > But as people consumed more news, they also began to trust the media less No. Their low trust decreased even more. It was low before the 2020 elections as well. > A Pew survey suggests 95 per cent of MSNBC's audience are now Democrats while 93 per cent of the Fox News audience are Republicans. Well, those two sources are highly partisan: MSNBC is known as "MS-DNC" (for the Democratic National Committee) and Fox was created by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, with GOP man Roger Ailes at the helm from early on, to serve the Republican Party and a right-wing/"conservative" agenda from the get-go. These are not trustworthy bodies _structurally_, even before you examine their specific contents. What could be said to distinguish the recent few years - other than Covid-19 - is the fact that the established Republican and Democratic party have a sort of a modus operandi with the various large corporate news outlets, so that neither side points out inconsistencies and misconduct of the other beyond a certain point. Trump and many of his followers, however, were not in on this cultural norm, and lashed out against news media (mostly the Democratic-party-supporting outlets). Some of the complaints were justified, many/most weren't, but the point is that people were now hearing a prominent voice suggesting that they question mainstream news. This may not be the only factor - the prevalence of online news sources in recent years may have also had an effect, and probably some other factors - but this struck me as quite influential.
• futevolei 6y ago
  They did it to themselves. If the nyt was just giving us the straight truth then there wouldn’t have been any opening for Fox News to come in and do their thing. And now we are left with left news and right news and most people only listening to the side that confirms whatever biases they have while at the same time thinking the other side is crazy. Sad:(
• slowhand09 6y ago
  My comment will be way too late to be read, but I have to say it. When 4/5 of the major networks use identical wording when reporting on any politically polarizing subject, one cannot help but think they are told what to say.
• jl2718 6y ago
  > polarization ... competition ... misinformed viewers ... So says the journalist. Let me clear this up: You hate us, and you have no ethical boundaries. There’s a good reason not to trust you.
• giardini 6y ago
  I find that, except for local news, reading The Economist (based in London) is a good substitute for the (former, now absent) U.S. media.