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This will only continue to get worse. Journalism can never be truly objective. But as we move more and more along this line, where journalists seem content with
by ecshafer 5y ago
This will only continue to get worse. Journalism can never be truly objective. But as we move more and more along this line, where journalists seem content with moving away from the facts, and more towards yellow journalism, and see themselves more and more as activists changing the world, and less as people bringing the truth out. this will only accelerate. As the old guard retires and leaves the news room, we will have completely lost any sense of journalistic integrity.
- kingsuper20 5y agoLooking at newspapers from 1900, I'd say that an objective old guard, to the extent it really existed, was a temporary affair.
- bena 5y agoCompletely objective reporting has always been more aspirational than anything else.
- i_haz_rabies 5y agoI did my masters in journalism in 2015... you have no idea how right you are. It was more or less a masters in blogging about your feelings on a topic you just heard about.
- mc32 5y ago>” and see themselves more and more as activists changing the world...” That is the main problem. They no longer see themselves as a medium to disseminate events but rather shapers of opinions about events. Like laughtracks for situational comedies, they see themselves as having a responsibility to tell people how to think of an event. It’s like Pravda but worse. Pravda at least had the decency to not want to pit a population against itself.
- pydry 5y agoI'm less bothered by opinionated news than I am seeing Julian Assange thrown in prison for exposing state sanctioned murder.
- mc32 5y agoIt's this opinion shaping that convinces people not to care about the imprisonment of someone acting as a mere conduit to the dissemination of information.
- pydry 5y agotrue enough
- read_if_gay_ 5y agoYou should be just as bothered, if not more, by the news not making a huge deal out of this and instead reporting on FUD rape allgations against Assange.
- pydry 5y agoTo me it doesn't seem as bad. I don't like the lies and the slander but it's better than raw violence.
- read_if_gay_ 5y agoIt's not just lies and slander, but lies and slander in place of reporting this abuse. It's the media's job to make people aware of their government's wrongdoings.
- furgooswft13 5y ago> Pravda at least had the decency to not want to pit a population against itself. Not so sure about this, there were a lot of purges...
- mschuster91 5y ago> They no longer see themselves as a medium to disseminate events but rather shapers of opinions about events. Journalism has always been shaping opinions, alone by selection aka what gets reported in the evening news and what not. The only ones who manage to pass that mark are the huge news agencies with a worldwide presence, but no reasonable human can consume all of that content. Reporting about science is another ... hotly debated issue. It is scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and that the virus SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19, a disease that has caused the death of at least 600.000 people in the US and about 3.9 million people worldwide - but for some parts of the country, mostly on the right wing, simply the act of reporting these facts is already seen as "opinion shaping". And finally, even reporting on events can be seen as "shaping opinions" - think of events like mass or school shootings, where the 2nd amendment crowd complains that the victims or their relatives are being interviewed and calling for gun control. Or BLM and LGBT events - some people see the mere mention of these as "political".
- babesh 5y agoThe funny thing about this comment is that it is the perfect demonstration of how media/people omit or spin facts to control the narrative. Some missing facts: The CDC and Fauci recommended against masks to protect the mask supply for health providers. Media pushed this messaging. The vaccines seem to cause heart issues with some people dying from it. Only months later is the CDC admitting supposedly minor heart issues. Furthermore they are pushing people to take it (even those who stand to lose more than to benefit from it). Media pushes this narrative. The vaccines do seem to work for most people and seem effective against the variants of COVID-19. Many BLM protests were peaceful but some were taken advantage of and just became opportunities to loot. Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime.
- Steltek 5y agoOmitting and spinning facts indeed. You're simply pushing your own narrative here so aren't you making yourself part of the problem?
- 5y ago
- dagw 5y agoThey no longer see themselves as a medium to disseminate events but rather shapers of opinions about events. When was the golden age of journalism when this wasn't the case?
- minikites 5y agoIt's always been the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)#Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)#Yellow_journa...
- mc32 5y agoI have a problem with the qualifier always. There tend to be exceptions to everything. What’s important is the average or the trend.
- tines 5y agoBefore the Typographic Man became the Graphic Man. Daniel Boorstin talks about this very thing in The Image, which is a fascinating read.
- jmeister 5y agoVery interesting references. Thank you.
- refurb 5y agoI think the big changes has been the fracturing of “opinion shapers”. Back in the JFK era nobody talked about his affairs - that was an agreement among the media. Then the disruption of the 60’s happened and the Vietnam War drove a schism between official govt stance and the truth on the ground and some media personalities were famous for exposing it. Now everything is fractured and when you dig into it you realize both side are trying to shape the narrative, so both are being selective about the truth. By fighting over whose wool to pull over your eyes they inadvertently pulled it off entirely.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BurningFrog 5y agoThe news rooms are dying out. The journalism jobs are disappearing. The interesting question is what will replace what we now call "journalism", and how it will work. Interesting times ahead!
- weimerica 5y ago> The interesting question is what will replace what we now call "journalism", and how it will work. One might well call it for what it is, PR and propaganda, but in my experience one will want to retain the title "journalist" for all the positive emotional weight it contains. I've had drinks with a few local paper "journalists" of the current, young generations and the reality of their work is shaping of narrative rather than reporting, but on the topic of job title view themselves in the same light as an Upton Sinclair. Brings to mind the early 2010s "positively changing the world" startup software engineers building Orwellian systems.
- kyle_martin1 5y agoI don’t think there such a thing as objective journalism—- there is only who is honest about the lens from which they view the world. For instance, CNN is left leaning and Fox is right leaning. They should just explicitly state their viewpoint so viewers can calibrate how much credence they give to unsourced claims and see past the political posturing.
- _gtly 5y agoYou might want to check out allsides.com [1] which gives a rating for where media sources lie on a left-right spectrum 1. https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
- xadhominemx 5y agoThat’s an absurd chart. They put politico as left and cnn as far left (equivalent to Breitbart). Come on.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoThey distinguish between news and opinion, but CNN is definitely left. I'd call them the equal opposite to Fox.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xadhominemx 5y agoYou’re not American and don’t live in the US. You’re perspective is limited and your opinion is wrong.
- ctrlp 5y agoCorrect, these ratings make no sense. CNN should rightly have been labelled as Deep State Media.
- 5y ago
- two2two 5y agoWhile journalism was/is the fourth estate, the watchdog of the government, the people as the watchdog of journalists is becoming the rising fifth estate. This fifth estate isn't so organized or always of much quality, but observable signal is emerging. Truly, I've noticed a more substantial signal coming from HN comments questioning the veracity of the fourth estate. It's great to see.
- papito 5y agoMost good journalism is moving behind paywalls, but disinformation campaigns are free.
- eplanit 5y agoThat describes it exactly. I think it will have to completely fail, and then a new generation (tragically, probably not the present one, or even then next) will have to rebuild it from the ashes. Maybe the positive way to see the present is as being that prelude to a better day for your grandchildren.
- raxxorrax 5y agoIf you aren't objective to the best possible degree, your readers don't trust you anymore. Newspapers are in economic peril, but the trust issue is something a lot of journalists brought on themselves.
- merpnderp 5y agoInteresting point, but I saw a judge took that to the extreme with a libel suit against Rachael Maddow, by saying no one would ever think she was offering news, only her opinion, thus no one would ever believe her. But people often believe things they've been told, even when it comes from people who are clearly not objective on the matter, so perhaps the judge was wrong.
- dexterdog 5y agoThat ruling was used later to defend Tucker Carlson for basically the same thing. A good way to tell if a source is left or right leaning is to see which of those stories they reported on and how.
- xadhominemx 5y agoThat’s not true. Readers don’t trust you when you don’t tell them what they want to hear. They are extremely fragile.
- Steltek 5y agoFox News circa 2000's is the best example. A huge outlier for media bias at the time but Republicans tuned in because it reinforced and validated their beliefs.
- raxxorrax 5y agoI don't know if that is true. We had a press telling people what they wanted to hear and trust is now extremely low.
- xadhominemx 5y ago
- fastball 5y agoI think maybe you're attributing to malice what can more easily be attributed to the fact that most journalists these days wanted/want to become creative writers, but that doesn't pay consistently so they became journos with the intent to write their novel in their spare time, but then realized they can just scratch the creative writing itch as part of their day job.
- fouric 5y agoI've heard this phenomenon described as "post-journalism", in an informative (albeit biased) article from City Journal: https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-report...
- BigGreenTurtle 5y agoI guess maybe I don't understand why one would go into journalism, but if your goal isn't to effect change why be a journalist? Were the journalists working on stories detailing the Catholic Church's pedo problem just doing it for kicks or a book deal?