5 ms·
Meh -- they've done themselves such harm in recent years by embracing activism and deliberate bias that it's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry. That
by eplanit 5y ago
Meh -- they've done themselves such harm in recent years by embracing activism and deliberate bias that it's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry.
That said, I'll applaud whichever journalists are brave enough to start pushing their industry/art back towards objectivity and diversity of perspective.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoEmbracing activism isn't necessarily a shooting oneself in the foot, it can be a way of trying to ensure greater profitability. A case in point is The Guardian which took a huge turn in the last decade ago from traditional British working-class themes to trans issues and the specific kind of race debates originating from the US. By doing so, the newspaper could, firstly, win the allegiance of self-identified "woke" readers (who are often affluent and thus a target for advertisers). But even for other readers, culture-war-related reporting can get people all fired up and thus generate views and ad impressions.
- fossuser 5y agoSure and that's why they do it, but it's feels like cutting off your nose to spite your face. I think the future will mostly be the best writers being directly supported by people interested in their beat. I'm not sure how generic media orgs will continue on, but I'd expect the quality to continue to degrade.
- michaelt 5y agoInteresting idea. What do you imagine would happen to the global health correspondent when there's not a pandemic going on, or the war correspondent when there's not a war going on?
- CalRobert 5y agoI pay for the Guardian mostly because it's the only paper I know that covers global stories and gives climate breakdown anything resembling the degree of coverage it deserves. For a while I subscribed to The Times, but felt dirty supporting a Murdoch-owned paper.
- hardlianotion 5y agoI used to get the Guardian paper delivered - that makes me feel sad.
- usbline 5y agoFaux-objective journalism is such a soulless drag. Everyone has biases, attempting to hide them is just gutless.
- chmod600 5y agoThe presence of bias in an individual jounalist as a human is expected. But being a professional means having some standards that boost trust in the profession overall. Clearly you wouldn't say that judges and police and prosecutors should just follow their biases and go after whoever they want or protect whoever they want. Journalists don't have any legal obligation to follow standards, but they do have a professional obligation.
- nmz 5y agoWeird thing to say for a dying industry that's basically whoring itself for the highest bidder. You want objectivity and unbias? Those are not cheap, and until the whole journalism industry is fixed, you're going to keep getting what we have.
- tablespoon 5y ago> Meh -- they've done themselves such harm in recent years by embracing activism and deliberate bias that it's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry. Journalism's financial problems predate "recent years," and perhaps those problems have actually lead to or exacerbated the problems you're complaining about. E.g. investigative journalism is hard, time-consuming, and expensive; an underfunded, short-staffed newspaper may turn to other, cheaper things to fill its pages and attract readers.
- jzb 5y agoThis is a particularly naive viewpoint on journalism / the publishing industry. Journalists may be the face of the industry, but they're not the primary deciders. They don't control the business decisions, or indeed many of the individual editorial decisions. Just like one little nugget of anecdata. I used to work at a radio station in a small market that was 1/3 stations run out of the same building by the same owner, an older conservative woman who inherited the business. One station was all-talk (AM) one was country (FM) and the other was classic rock (FM). All. Three. Stations. Had to carry Rush Limbaugh over the objections of FM program managers. Why? Because Alvina liked Rush. She wanted to blanket the airwaves with his show. And she didn't have to deal with any competition in the little corner of the world where the stations aired. People don't see those decisions, though. Granted this is a particular egregious example, but by and large TV/radio/cable/etc. programming is at a macro level dictated by upper echelons of the business, not by the front-line reporters or editors. Print publishing has been gutted over the past 20+ years by a lot of factors. (Radio even longer, see Clear Channel, et al.) Consolidation. A move from print publishing to web publishing that has required more and more intrusive tracking and obsession with clicks -- not quality, just "how many page views?" and then "how many uniques?" or whatever the metric du jour happens to be. I've been on the publishing side and corporate side, and I've never once heard a company factor quality of content into its advertising decisions. Which means it's a race to the bottom -- not in terms of bias, but in terms of "what gets eyeballs?" People love to bitch about the quality of journalism, etc. but yet... they keep consuming it. They certainly don't want to pay for good journalism. Not as individuals, not with corporate marketing dollars. If an ad buyer can get 10x the clicks and leads with crap than they can get with well-reasoned and well-researched content? They'll buy crap every time. And blame the journalists/press/publications for the quality and then do it all over again. Not to mention the effects of Google and Facebook, which are hard to understate. Google has done a huge number on publications that initially managed to navigate the print -> online model. Its dominance on online ads has done a lot to harm publications, and not only monetarily. Facebook has trained people to expect their information funneled through their feeds and has inserted itself between the audience and publications. Traffic that used to come directly to the publication now funnels through Facebook -- or never actually arrives at the publication at all. Hard to make a buck that way. This isn't even getting into consolidation of local newspapers by conglomerates and private equity[1]. If front-line journalists are biased one way, I assure you the upper management through ownership are biased in the other direction by and large, excepting (perhaps) some social issues where bean-counters have seen that the winds have changed and it's more profitable to be visibly progressive vs. visibly conservative. I went corporate a number of years ago because the writing was on the wall. If I'd stayed in publishing as a freelancer / writer / editor it would be years of paddling faster to make the same money. Companies didn't give two shits about quality, just shove something out the door that would play on social and/or SEO. If you think the people doing the work are deciding to embrace that, you're sorely mistaken. [1] https://prospect.org/health/saving-free-press-private-equity/ https://prospect.org/health/saving-free-press-private-equity...
- ineedasername 5y agoit's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry It's important to understand the causal direction here. As the industry took hit after hit while the internet gained dominance, media outlet like Fox News pioneered highly opinionated reporting & commentary, and it worked. Viewers & readers were more attracted to content that raised an emotional response. There's blame to put on the industry, but I can't separate that from the how the internet changed the economics of news media & how that mixed with human nature. Incidentally, if you're looking for a good source of non-opinionated reporting, Reuters is probably one of the best. It tends to be more straightforward factual reporting, and I can't find any media ratings that place it outside the center/minimal-bias zone.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoHumans give greater credence to those expressing negative opinions. The media and politicians take advantage of this to get attention and votes. In the past the limited competition in the media allowed the voice of reason to prevail. Now the race to the bottom has made that a losing proposition for running a business selling information.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago"Journalists are pushing their own viewpoints and no longer being objective" is a complaint that's been with us since as long as there's been journalism, though. The Nixon administration famously toyed with the idea of creating their own news service because they believed the news organizations of the day were biased against them. Hell, the phrase "yellow journalism" goes back to the late 1800s and the often sensationalist New York World, a paper whose publisher declared it as "dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse-potentates." That activist publisher was Joseph Pulitzer. (His battles with equally sensationalist rival publisher Hearst led to the "yellow journalism" charges.)
- ALittleLight 5y agoThey didn't choose activism because they are lazy or ideologues (although the industry may increasingly populated by lazy ideologues). The journalism industry chose activism because it sells better than objective journalism. I could start an online paper about my local town and write purely objective stories. "Town council meeting today went as expected, complicated issue without clear solution continued unsolved". That probably won't get very many readers though. For one thing, relatively few people live in my town so few people will care. For another, the internet has conditioned people to get news for free, so the only way to monetize results in getting very little money (e.g. ads) from each reader, and, as just established, we'll have few readers because the town is small. The revealed preference of news readers is to look at outrageous stuff and polemics. Get involved in a culture war about who did what why and what it means - that could attract millions of readers who you can slightly monetize to earn enough to get by. Do real journalism and few people will read it and they won't pay you won't for it... So... I'm not saying this in a judgmental way. I don't pay for news either. I read what comes up on twitter, hackernews, linked to by friends, etc. I have an ad-blocker and I skip whatever content has a paywall that I can't bypass. I realize I'm part of the problem, but in a "tragedy of the commons" way. That is, the world would be better if everyone paid for and paid attention to primarily local and "hard-hitting" fair journalism, but there would be zero perceptible positive change if I switched to that model and perceptible negative costs for me for doing so.
- XorNot 5y agoJournalism is not "reporting exactly what happened" - journalism is supposed to be investigation, and to draw conclusions. Obviously there's bias, but that's the point: journalism has never and should not be "this person said 1 thing, someone else said a different thing". It's the path of "should you drink bleach? Scientists say no, this random nutbag says yes."
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoDonald Trump probably saved the New York Times...
- WalterBright 5y agoI'm bemused at newspapers that want to "save the free press" by getting government funding. (Whoever pays the bills decides the content.)