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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

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
pessimizer 6y ago
The problem with this is that there is no alternative. There's a theory that QAnon-types are too shrewd about the motivations of media, leading them to not trust anything that comes off as reasonable. We interpret world events entirely through the lens of massive, politically-embedded corporations. To avoid that lens, we'd have to visit those places ourselves and investigate, which, to say the absolute least, is not scalable. The oddest aspect of modern media is that when it comes to foreign coverage, the smaller the outlet, the more likely that they are actually on the ground where they are reporting from. Representatives of large outlets clump together in hotels attending press conferences from government representatives and interviewing designated sources whose names were passed to the journalists by intelligence services. Journalists with no money just travel to countries and go to where the action is happening.
- sobriquet9 6y ago
  But there are alternatives. Even in the Soviet Union where the government controlled all press and TV, it was possible to find other sources of information: short wave broadcasts, samizdat, word of mouth, etc. The most important thing is the habit of not trusting any sources, official or not, and ability to recognize propaganda.

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

pessimizer 6y ago

The problem with this is that there is no alternative. There's a theory that QAnon-types are too shrewd about the motivations of media, leading them to not trust anything that comes off as reasonable. We interpret world events entirely through the lens of massive, politically-embedded corporations. To avoid that lens, we'd have to visit those places ourselves and investigate, which, to say the absolute least, is not scalable. The oddest aspect of modern media is that when it comes to foreign coverage, the smaller the outlet, the more likely that they are actually on the ground where they are reporting from. Representatives of large outlets clump together in hotels attending press conferences from government representatives and interviewing designated sources whose names were passed to the journalists by intelligence services. Journalists with no money just travel to countries and go to where the action is happening.

sobriquet9 6y ago
But there are alternatives. Even in the Soviet Union where the government controlled all press and TV, it was possible to find other sources of information: short wave broadcasts, samizdat, word of mouth, etc. The most important thing is the habit of not trusting any sources, official or not, and ability to recognize propaganda.