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Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record

139 points by xqcgrek2 5y ago

kiryin 5y ago
As a non-american, my picture of the american media started shattering with the Iraq war, and especially the events preceding it. It's only been down-hill since then.
- breckenedge 5y ago
  Just curious, are you implying that the media was simply parroting the lies about WMDs that led to the (second) Iraq war?
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    There is a lot of self-criticism from the media itself that more or less admits this. Here's a NYT article from 2004: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th... See also this article on Judith Miller's stories from 2001-2002 (she was forced to resign from the NYT): https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/ https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/ These aren't isolated incidents, but they were particularly egregious.
    - tootie 5y ago
      Miller was essentially a saboteur. She was primarily operating out of self-interest but used her position to promote false stories in exchange for access. And she was punished for her crimes. NYT also ran Joseph Wilson's oped explaining the yellowcake accusations against Iraq were likely fabricated.
      - mandmandam 5y ago
        An apology and a retraction don't outweigh years of cheer-leading. They did serious harm by loaning W and his goons credibility. It's hard to overstate how responsible they are for the whole thing.
  - kiryin 5y ago
    That is a part of it. Some organizations were better than others, but for certain publications/channels, it felt like their sole purpose was to coax the american public into endorsing another war, using whatever rationalizations necessary.
  - zz865 5y ago
    Its not just that. I remember in the build up to the war CNN having lots of patriotic style coverage with how great the US armies were, how bad Saddam was (and his brother), lots of pictures of jets and battle ships. Once the war started there were lots of amazing shots of smart bombs doing amazing things, but no coverage of anyone living there on the receiving end.
    - NittLion78 5y ago
      All of that was just them dusting off the 1991 playbook from the first Gulf War. That was the first time an ongoing war was mass marketed in the "modern" way, I think (you could argue successful war propaganda has been happening for centuries through other media). I even remember this thing at the Scholastic Book Fair that was basically a book-magazine thing and contained a large fold out map and a list of all the int'l military divisions that would be participating in Operation Desert Storm; essentially armchair generalship marketed to kids.
- zachguo 5y ago
  Surprisingly people easily accept the media's foreign coverage without doubt even if they are skeptical about their domestic coverage.
h2odragon 5y ago
Relevant: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/vaccines-konstantin-kisin https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/vaccines-ko...
- joemazerino 5y ago
  Compelling and worthy of a HN post.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  This guy is apparently a comedian, but I'm not sure it translates that well from the original Russian.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  This claims to be providing a reason people distrust vaccines, but is really just a list of cases where a conservative is exposed to bad media (it's framed as an "anybody" being exposed to bad media). It ignores the cases where a conservative is exposed to good media, a liberal is exposed to bad media, and a liberal is exposed to good media. Being exposed to bad media is the reason for the vast majority of political distrust on all sides. Vaccines aren't special in this regard, but this writeup is using it as an excuse to paint a picture for political points, and thereby contribute to bad media.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    The average person lacks the resources and intellect to accurately assess covid vaccines. They have to rely on trust. Can you provide a trustworthy source on whether or not an individual should get the vaccine? I think I get what you’re trying to say but I’m arguing it doesn’t matter. Any bad media (especially of the ideologically motivated kind) is an absolute failure.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I think a large part of the media had worked hard for this. Having no trustworthy media is bad because it is needed. I think articles are currently more down to facts, but gaining trust takes far longer than losing it. And there is still plenty of either lies or naive obliviousness.
- res0nat0r 5y ago
  The internet has decimated most newspaper revenue in the USA and has seen massive newsroom closures over the past decade. Only large entities like the NYT and WaPo etc really have the pockets to do expensive in depth reporting. Also trust is low because one political party in the USA has made it it's mantra for decades now to deride any news that is critical of it as "fake news" and a "liberal bias", so that doesn't help the situation.
  - paulgb 5y ago
    It's interesting how willing folks in tech are to say “if you're not paying, you're the product” when it comes to apps or social networks, but then turn around and sneer at news paywalls. If you're not willing to pony up a few bucks for subscriptions, of course you'll get sensationalized and click-driven news, that's the business model you voted for with your wallet. (I'll plug ProPublica, though. They do good work as a non-profit, including a series on TurboTax that has put political heat on the company's practices)
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      I payed my favorite newspaper and they still didn't write what I like. Fun aside, I think you are correct. The net inflated the value of articles and similar to art, quality didn't necessarily translate to value. Although I don't think that tech people were particularly stingy in paying writers.
      - res0nat0r 5y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28785366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28785366 seems relevant right now too...
zz865 5y ago
Is there any real media left? Most newspapers are a shadow of their former selves. Cable news channels are more about entertainment than news.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Reuters isn't bad. (I mean, it might be bad for UK news, but it's not bad for international and US news.)
- cafard 5y ago
  In larger cities, there are still newsrooms.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  Yes, non-profit news organizations that mimic the NPR/CPB model are finding traction in lots of communities around the country, and many of them do great work. Most of them are digital "print" publications that do some video here and there. There was also a major shift towards news festivals that did long-form interviews with various types of leaders, many of which are posted on sites like Youtube. Unfortunately, the pandemic has hampered a lot of those types of events.
- airstrike 5y ago
  I think the rule of thumb is free media sucks, paid media is generally a couple notches better than that baseline. I happily pay for the WSJ and Bloomberg, though admittedly I skip all of the WSJ Opinion pieces because they can be worse than OAN
- conscion 5y ago
  Recently I've been using Wikipedia as my news source. They have both a current events page [1] and a page summarizing this year's events [2]. I feel like Wikipedia's goal of being an encyclopedia forces out a lot of editorializing. Wikipedia also has the benefit of every article has the in-line links to context through other Wikipedia pages. It also has given me the opportunity to read about news stories that have fallen out of the public eye even though their "story" is still progressing (like the Ever Given blocking the Suez). To make the articles more readable. I changed my link styling to more closely match the text styling, which can be done directly through the Wikipedia user account (using the "common.css" page). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021#January https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021#January
rootusrootus 5y ago
A vicious combination of many 'media' sources actually sucking, and a concerted political effort to push that narrative. No wonder people are confused.
- coldacid 5y ago
  I think more are angry with the media than simply confused.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Who is confused? TFA indicates that confusion about media is at its second lowest level on record.
quartesixte 5y ago
I don’t necessarily think this is a de facto terrible thing. Healthy skepticism towards having a few large corporations be the source of truth about the world is necessary to prevent manipulation and coercion of the public by a few wealthy individuals. The unfortunate part comes when that skepticism clouds the ability to discern whether or not one is contradicting fundamental physical properties of the world. . . Not to say that those aren’t entirely up for debate either.
- starfallg 5y ago
  >Healthy skepticism towards having a few large corporations be the source of truth about the world is necessary to prevent manipulation and coercion of the public by a few wealthy individuals. Manipulation is now in social media and other 'decentralized' platforms, but the money is still from the same people, just even less accountable. I don't think it improved at all, quite the opposite in fact.
rdudek 5y ago
To be honest, I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything. One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour. Most boring, non-sensational broadcast there is and yet, they fill it up with sold content and reporting. Also, no advertising.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  > I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything. The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it. It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    This is also my suspicion, although I've heard that NYT's subscriptions are doing as well as they've ever done and while I wouldn't describe NYT's journalism as "click-bait", they've certainly engaged in more than their share of overt ideological propagandism (which isn't unique to them, but part of a landscape shift away from aspirationally objective reporting).
    - busterarm 5y ago
      The best sign of click bait is posting obviously false, inflammatory articles and then silently putting out a retraction days later after the clicks have come in. The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.
      - raxxorrax 5y ago
        Perhaps the avid reader would say that they are most disappointed in papers like the NYT. You cannot really be disappointed by FOX or CNN. Different medium, but I think it still applies.
dmingod666 5y ago
Maybe they would fare better if they were journalists rather than activists and propagandists...
- pessimizer 5y ago
  No, people trust activists and propagandists, because they know where they're coming from. The problem comes when people claiming to have some bizarre abstract Platonic neutrality are constantly lying to you in order to push you into the behavior that they would prefer you have. Activists and propagandists are far more honest, and are far more trusted by the public.
  - dmingod666 5y ago
    Maybe honesty shouldn't be bizzare. Only if you wholesale buy into the 2 party divide will you think that facts are a foreign concept. There can be news people that are pro-truth, pro-citizen and not pro any party. That would look like the views of a normal person off the street who is not super into politics - the fourth pillar of democracy. Do you hate mixing religion with politics? Well, law with politics, news with politics and law enforcement / millitary with politics is the same toxic mixture that ends up stealing power from the citizen, who is supposed to be the most powerful entity in a functioning democracy..
- p_j_w 5y ago
  If that were the issue then people wouldn't be running to news sources like OANN, who are far more propagandistic and activist.
  - dmingod666 5y ago
    I think it's injecting judgement and morality into news. Once news is flavored by political views and moral judgements people will pick the sources that show the correct reprehensible behaviour based on their world view.. One good attempt I've seen a while back was Sagar Enjetti and Crystal Ball with a show called 'The Rising' - It's on YouTube but produced quite well.. The guy has a republican tilt and the girl supports democrat politics and they have a very good rapport with each other - which results in both calling out holes in each others argument without being adverserial..
dnissley 5y ago
It's not too surprising. How can anyone trust a journalism that has chosen to prioritize advocacy over the nuts and bolts of reporting? Fox news was the first -- it's all Fox news today. See https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-report...
- rajin444 5y ago
  I can’t think of a single major news outlet that is trustworthy. They still provide some value, but you need a heavy dose of skepticism.
  - tomp 5y ago
    That's why I love ZeroHedge. No credibility by definition, so you don't even expect it. You have to think on your own. But, they provide very timely news on "market-moving" information (i.e. news that are/will be breaking news), often faster than mainstream media. So that is a very valuable service (for me).
- unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  We have a generation of 'reporters' who never knew the old way of journalism. Dispatches from flagship news outlets disclose no awaress they're doing their jobs in a tragically wrongheaded manner.
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
    They're not reporters anymore they're political activists and that's the problem.
- trutannus 5y ago
  The blend of activism and journalism is the crux of the problem. In Canada the state-run news organization CBC knows they have low trust, however can't admit their role in it. About once a year they write an op-ed talking about the best ways to use legislation to fix the problem. This is the same state-run media company that said objectivity is "potentially harmful": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-july-12-2020-1.5639297/objectivity-is-the-view-from-nowhere-and-potentially-harmful-expert-1.5639304 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-july-...
afavour 5y ago
Much of this is the media's own doing but they're not alone: politicians have been drumming this beat for decades. They don't want voters to trust the media because that's the primary means by which they are held accountable.
- z3c0 5y ago
  I enjoy the tag line for Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation: "They know we know they lie". So for them, the game becomes to make everything look like a lie so that we can't distinguish what the truth is. Demonizing media and creating fractured narratives is the prime way to accomplish this.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I'm sure politicians and others enjoy the low levels of trust, but I think (to your point) this has been brought on by the media's own rejection of aspirations of objectivity and neutrality. As some love to say, "[perfect] objectivity and neutrality are impossible [so the media is right in going full-on activist]". The media is having a firesale on its own credibility, and the "proceeds" are going to specific ideological causes to the detriment of society as a whole (what good can possibly come from an ideology which explicitly and routinely condemns objectivity, neutrality, rigor, etc?).
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    "The media" is generally a series of for-profit corporations that wish to maintain an audience by any means possible, and also have major business interests in front of Congress. When the OP says "politicians prefer it when objective media goes away and gets replaced with advocates" and you say (paraphrasing) that "the objective media has responded to financial incentives and become advocates [so they can gain viewers and credibility with Congress]" you aren't saying anything different. You're just describing a situation in which societal and political incentives were changed to disincentivize the financial benefit of responsible reporting, and both media companies and politicians are responding to those incentives. To then say "gosh I'm really mad at the media because they're bad" is like being mad at raindrops because they're wet. If you don't like the situation, propose an actual political or policy change that will improve the situation. I see too many people saying "I hate the media, and [my preferred politicians] rail against the media, ergo I will vote for [my preferred politicians]" failing to recognize that this dynamic simply reinforces the feedback loop rather than changing anything.
ameminator 5y ago
I think the political party breakdown is very interesting as well. Trust from the Democratic side has not really dropped so much, but the mistrust from the Republican side looks absolutely staggering. 11% of Republicans trust the media - which is down from 14% 4 years ago. This doesn't seem like a big drop, but relatively, that is still a 20% decrease, in an already low amount. Something is deeply wrong when half of your adult population just flat out doesn't trust you. Where do these people get their news about the world? Do they just live in a constant state of mistrust?
- ur-whale 5y ago
  "These people", really?
  - ameminator 5y ago
    I mean, I was specifically referring to people who mistrust the media. I think it's the media's fault for this - "these" people seem absolutely rational and correct in their mistrust. However, that doesn't obviate the need to have factual information about the world. Goings-on in local communities and nationally. So I am curious - where do they get their knowledge from? Do they trust local sources and ignore national ones? Are there specific personalities they listen to? Is it all Facebook and YouTube, all of the time? Or do they just not watch, or use large grains of salt when they do watch? Anyways, I am legitimately curious and I do think it's a problem that no one outside the left trusts the media. If that isn't a blatant condemnation of these media companies, who squandered that trust away, I don't know what is.
    - sseagull 5y ago
      > I think it's the media's fault for this Sort of, but not completely in my opinion. In some sense they give people what they want, the same as Facebook giving people content that they "engage" more with (which is often negative). Asking the media companies (who are as profit driven as anyone else) to be the adults is like asking social media companies to do the same. When it comes down to it, they will optimize for profit, and if not enough people are really interested in good journalism and reporting, that will get cut and replaced with sensationalism.
djoldman 5y ago
The actual question: > In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media -- such as newspapers, TV and radio -- when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly -- a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all? The article reports that those responding with "great deal" or "a fair amount" is the second-lowest on record.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
Not surprising. legacy (Main stream) Media pushing false narrative like Joe Rogan taking horse med. the "horse med" that Joe Rogan take is also use on human as well and his doctor prescribe it.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
Prime example here, of the state things are in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru-SoiTKfO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru-SoiTKfO4 Two people can hear the same thing, and come to different conclusion of what was said. What was said can be different from what was heard. What was heard can be different from what was reported. And what was reported can be different from what was reported as being reported.
mrfusion 5y ago
If you’re interested here are some highlights from my journey to 0% trust in the media: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI&feature=youtu.be https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-all-media-infographic/ https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HPM70d_jT9k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HPM70d_jT9k https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783 I’d be curious to hear yours.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  What're your thoughts on, say, the BBC and CBC?
- retrac98 5y ago
  For me it's that whenever the media report on a subject I have expertise in, I can immediately see how much of what's reported is total bs.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I was once interviewed about my thoughts on a candidate during a presidential primary. Without giving away too much detail, I mentioned that I was unenthusiastic about the candidate and didn't understand his sudden surge in popularity. I threw in a sentence about wanting to vote for someone I actually felt was authentic and trustworthy. The reporter used my "I want someone trustworthy" quote (without the context) and in such a way to imply I saw something in the candidate, when in reality, I was explaining that I didn't trust him as far as I could throw him. She just tossed my line in the article right after mentioning good things about the candidate. Totally and utterly misleading. Pretty direct and eye opening to me. That reporter went out with a story in mind and used my words however she saw fit.
  - shockeychap 5y ago
    Wow. That's all kinds of gross and shady.
- andrewclunn 5y ago
FridayoLeary 5y ago
Just out of curiosity; how much do people here trust the news stories that make the front page of HN?
- Loughla 5y ago
  Depends on the story, the publisher, and the sources. Like everything else. If the story is well cited, from a reputable publisher, and/or backed up by concrete facts, then I tend to trust is a little. Not a lit, but a little. I am generally skeptical of most things here, though. As another poster in here said, I am always shocked by the ignorance on this site relating to things I have a ton of experience with. I have to assume that same ignorance extends to other areas as well. That being said, in general, if a post makes it to the top of HN, it seems to be better informed than other places I go for news.
- sivanmz 5y ago
  I read the comments first
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    In essence, that's a distributed trust model.
seventytwo 5y ago
“Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.” Objective truth always exists. It’s just a matter of gathering the data to refine our perceptions and mental models to match.
WriterGuy2021 5y ago
I feel a very strong low tide in the general publics withdrawal of their support of many institutions. Where is all that energy previously occupied going to go?
gadders 5y ago
It's all click bait now, from whatever side, crafted to generate outrage. News media is sold to the general public below cost to drive eyeballs to advertising. As the saying goes, the general public aren't the customer, they're the product.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
If you want a to understand the mistrust, Awekan with JP has a satirical channel on youtube that takes on "we lie to you the news". From a conservative perspective. Funny and absurd. 2 million subs. https://www.youtube.com/user/AwakenWithJP https://www.youtube.com/user/AwakenWithJP
- nksprzak 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1fnlV8xW2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1fnlV8xW2A Got 50 seconds in and "White House tells Facebook what to say to brainwash us with" is said as the viewpoint I'm supposed to agree with.
  - dukeofdoom 5y ago
    You don't need to agree with it, just recognize that its a pretty accurate representation that conservatives believe fb is coordinating the censorship with the government. In no small part due to them banning Trump, and statements like this from the press secretary. Psaki: 'We're Flagging Problematic Posts On Facebook That Spread Disinformation' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqEvQKO5_gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqEvQKO5_gM
yorwba 5y ago
The full set of "Media Use and Evaluation" questions is quite interesting: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1663/Media-Use-Evaluation.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1663/Media-Use-Evaluation.aspx E.g. in response to the question "Now, apart from how FREQUENTLY you use them as sources of news, we'd like to know whether or not you can trust the accuracy of the news and information you get from each of the following news sources. First, do you feel you can trust the accuracy of the news and information you get from ... ?" the source that the most people (74%) said they can trust in 2019 (the last time the question was asked) was local television news. Other local news sources also got rated more trustworthy than national ones. I wonder how much of that is due to culture fit (reporting news in a way that matches the expectations of the people in the area) vs ease of verification (if something happened in your neighborhood, it's easier to find out whether the news is accurate than if it's about a faraway place you've never been to).
methodiosmel 5y ago
At the point, I'm shocked that anyone actually trusts the media.
anonymouswacker 5y ago
The deregulation of the '90's, combined with questionable court decisions, and the resulting interference with Government in media--not to mention the rise of social media & big tech's influence and the resulting wane of traditional media's--has brought us to the point where most media orgs have no incentive to act trustworthy. It's just not profitable any more!
pluc 5y ago
The answer to whether you should trust media is the same as the answer to "Are media allowed to lie without repercussions?"
- usefulcat 5y ago
  s/same as/opposite of/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
paul7986 5y ago
If there is a need for fact checking websites and or resources the media on all sides is a joke!
- rajin444 5y ago
  The fact checking websites are the media.
ryanmarsh 5y ago
Can someone tell me why we should have ever trusted any of them in the first place? How was trust earned? Was trust ever broken? What was done to rebuild trust?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  At one point, the New York Times had an editor who knew that his newsroom leaned left. So he deliberately steered the paper somewhat right, in order to balance out the reporters. He literally had on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight." That earns some trust. Not total trust, but a lot more than I trust the NYT today.
decasteve 5y ago
It’s not just trust in media (or government). It’s most societal institutions that have lost trust. I’d argue even trusting one’s own neighbours is probably at an all-time low. Trust should be something we think about in our interactions and how we can work to improve it.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
The Russians are quite good at sowing mistrust. Thank you Mr Murdoch for aiding and abetting.
andyxor 5y ago
well, what do you expect if they lie about almost everything. The "Fake news" phenomenon is very real.
NHQ 5y ago
Who is the media again?
Auracle 5y ago
I think that if the media had given Trump credit for Operation Warpspeed/the vaccines there’d be a lot less vaccine hesitancy on the right. I’m not saying people being less hesitant because of that would be logical, but it’s one way their bias has actually killed people. Frankly, Biden should have done so too. I think it would have been the best ethical and political move. Imagine if they did a commercial together telling people to get vaccinated.
- jahewson 5y ago
  Operation Warpspeed was a miserable failure. They promised 100 million vaccines by the end of 2020 and managed 5m, screwing up at almost every step. And it’s not like they did anything to speed up vaccine development, because that was all done in Europe. Realize that as soon as Biden took over then there was zero chance of any conservative doing anything to help Biden “succeed” in any dimension, regardless of how many lives are on the line. You don’t see Trump on Fox News telling people to get vaccinated do you?
  - Auracle 5y ago
    They were late by what - a few months? Speaking of Europe, we had vaccines for quite a while and they didn't. There's also no way prepurchasing a bunch of different vaccines didn't help/fund development. As per your second point, I agree. On the other side you had democratic presidential candidates saying they wouldn't take "Trump's vaccine." It's disgusting what the political divide has brought.
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >I think that if the media had given Trump credit for Operation Warpspeed/the vaccines Is there any evidence that Trump deserves credit for this or that it was actually successful?
  - Auracle 5y ago
    He deserves as much credit as most presidents do for most things done under them...which is to say, not much. But you can be damned sure that if Biden was president first and then Trump we'd still be hearing about how it was due to President Biden that we have the vaccines.
aww_dang 5y ago
Fact check: "Media did nothing wrong"
realmod 5y ago
This is entirely the media's fault. Sadly most journalists no longer know the word impartiality. They instead focus on creating narratives that fit their views and push them onto the masses. Nothing is more infuriating and disappointing than seeing simple established facts being distorted and twisted into something it's not. And this includes reputable media such as Washington Post and NYTimes. I think Reuters might be the only news agency keeping sensationalism and bias to the minimum. This a global problem. Journalism is no more.
throwawaysea 5y ago
How can anyone trust the media when it seems to have become a target of institutional capture for political and ideological gain? Journalism is not really journalism anymore - it's propaganda. It's duty is not to inform, but to persuade. This tendency towards advocacy journalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism) has been very apparent in the trend of newsroom revolts. See the following example stories about this phenomenon: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-times-washington-post-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-t... https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/30/7-woke-rebellions-in-americas-newsrooms/ https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/30/7-woke-rebellions-in-...
tankenmate 5y ago
I know the following is somewhat naive / oversimplified; but it is a good thought provoker. You can't advertise a product that is misleading or dangerous, and yet there are no such limitations (or even warnings!) on the media? Maybe media reporting should have warnings on it like medicine advertising.
- convery 5y ago
  Well, ye. There's always elite classes with special rules. Social media is pushed to censor 'misinformation' while news media can lie all day. Entertainment media need to clearly label product placements, news media can make 'sponsored content' nearly indistinguishable from the other content. If you have a blog with 'questionable' content you can be fined, news media can have 'opinion' columns advocating for genocide and there's no issue. If you get arrested at a riot, you can just say you're a journalist and you'll likely be let go as they don't want to bother with the potential outrage..
dukeofdoom 5y ago
I'm worried about undue influence of Tech Billionaires. If you hold the belief that "Global warming is real", "and the world has too many people." How pernicious those two beliefs put together could be. You couple that with some Eugenic beliefs in creating a super human race. And find out that Epstein had those views, and then you find out about the flight logs of people that visited his island. It just breeds distrust. [Edit] Some proof: Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-eugenics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-... Bill Gates: Gene editing can help humanity https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2018/04/bill-gates-gene-editing-can-help-humanity/ https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2018/04/bill-gat...
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Nearly 20 years ago we started pushing STEM in society. I would expect everyone here thinks that's a great idea but what happened to Not-STEM. Journalism lost all their top candidates into STEM. The quality of journalism objectively dropped and when that happens it turns into "Yellow Journalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism Basically what we see today in journalism is no different than 100 years ago. A very high degree of yellow journalism. Pulitzer and Hearst became so bad that they openly called for the assassination of the US president(mckinley). Both ran basically the same call to assassinate with different authors. The realization that pulitzer and hearst had some hand in having the republican president assassinated is what got him to stop. He went back to the paper and put a stop to the yellow journalism and then put the prize in his will. Very obvious the Hannity and Oreilly Fox news led the move, but now it's virtually everyone. It's not even just the USA. The yellow journalism coming out of the CBC is a nice steady flow.
e-clinton 5y ago
The biggest issue with media to me is that they report opinion as news.
fallingfrog 5y ago
The media right now are in a similar position as the media in any kleptocracy or oligarchy: they repeat the lies of power uncritically and try to anesthetize the public with crude sensationalism. You can see why they’re afraid to ask questions too; look what they did to Assange. Or Stephen Donzinger. You’ll probably not hear that name much on mainstream news. Meanwhile the NSA violates the constitution daily and the Congress is perpetually unable to address any of the concerns of the public while the powerful gorge themselves on the corpse of the public good. It’s a story as old as time. Usually this is the last stage leading to general collapse of the government.

139 points by xqcgrek2 5y ago

As a non-american, my picture of the american media started shattering with the Iraq war, and especially the events preceding it. It's only been down-hill since then.

breckenedge 5y ago
Just curious, are you implying that the media was simply parroting the lies about WMDs that led to the (second) Iraq war?
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  There is a lot of self-criticism from the media itself that more or less admits this. Here's a NYT article from 2004: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th... See also this article on Judith Miller's stories from 2001-2002 (she was forced to resign from the NYT): https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/ https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/ These aren't isolated incidents, but they were particularly egregious.
  - tootie 5y ago
    Miller was essentially a saboteur. She was primarily operating out of self-interest but used her position to promote false stories in exchange for access. And she was punished for her crimes. NYT also ran Joseph Wilson's oped explaining the yellowcake accusations against Iraq were likely fabricated.
    - mandmandam 5y ago
      An apology and a retraction don't outweigh years of cheer-leading. They did serious harm by loaning W and his goons credibility. It's hard to overstate how responsible they are for the whole thing.
- kiryin 5y ago
  That is a part of it. Some organizations were better than others, but for certain publications/channels, it felt like their sole purpose was to coax the american public into endorsing another war, using whatever rationalizations necessary.
- zz865 5y ago
  Its not just that. I remember in the build up to the war CNN having lots of patriotic style coverage with how great the US armies were, how bad Saddam was (and his brother), lots of pictures of jets and battle ships. Once the war started there were lots of amazing shots of smart bombs doing amazing things, but no coverage of anyone living there on the receiving end.
  - NittLion78 5y ago
    All of that was just them dusting off the 1991 playbook from the first Gulf War. That was the first time an ongoing war was mass marketed in the "modern" way, I think (you could argue successful war propaganda has been happening for centuries through other media). I even remember this thing at the Scholastic Book Fair that was basically a book-magazine thing and contained a large fold out map and a list of all the int'l military divisions that would be participating in Operation Desert Storm; essentially armchair generalship marketed to kids.
zachguo 5y ago
Surprisingly people easily accept the media's foreign coverage without doubt even if they are skeptical about their domestic coverage.

h2odragon 5y ago

Relevant: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/vaccines-konstantin-kisin https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/vaccines-ko...

joemazerino 5y ago
Compelling and worthy of a HN post.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
This guy is apparently a comedian, but I'm not sure it translates that well from the original Russian.
happytoexplain 5y ago
This claims to be providing a reason people distrust vaccines, but is really just a list of cases where a conservative is exposed to bad media (it's framed as an "anybody" being exposed to bad media). It ignores the cases where a conservative is exposed to good media, a liberal is exposed to bad media, and a liberal is exposed to good media. Being exposed to bad media is the reason for the vast majority of political distrust on all sides. Vaccines aren't special in this regard, but this writeup is using it as an excuse to paint a picture for political points, and thereby contribute to bad media.
- rajin444 5y ago
  The average person lacks the resources and intellect to accurately assess covid vaccines. They have to rely on trust. Can you provide a trustworthy source on whether or not an individual should get the vaccine? I think I get what you’re trying to say but I’m arguing it doesn’t matter. Any bad media (especially of the ideologically motivated kind) is an absolute failure.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I think a large part of the media had worked hard for this. Having no trustworthy media is bad because it is needed. I think articles are currently more down to facts, but gaining trust takes far longer than losing it. And there is still plenty of either lies or naive obliviousness.

res0nat0r 5y ago
The internet has decimated most newspaper revenue in the USA and has seen massive newsroom closures over the past decade. Only large entities like the NYT and WaPo etc really have the pockets to do expensive in depth reporting. Also trust is low because one political party in the USA has made it it's mantra for decades now to deride any news that is critical of it as "fake news" and a "liberal bias", so that doesn't help the situation.
- paulgb 5y ago
  It's interesting how willing folks in tech are to say “if you're not paying, you're the product” when it comes to apps or social networks, but then turn around and sneer at news paywalls. If you're not willing to pony up a few bucks for subscriptions, of course you'll get sensationalized and click-driven news, that's the business model you voted for with your wallet. (I'll plug ProPublica, though. They do good work as a non-profit, including a series on TurboTax that has put political heat on the company's practices)
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    I payed my favorite newspaper and they still didn't write what I like. Fun aside, I think you are correct. The net inflated the value of articles and similar to art, quality didn't necessarily translate to value. Although I don't think that tech people were particularly stingy in paying writers.
    - res0nat0r 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28785366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28785366 seems relevant right now too...

zz865 5y ago

Is there any real media left? Most newspapers are a shadow of their former selves. Cable news channels are more about entertainment than news.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Reuters isn't bad. (I mean, it might be bad for UK news, but it's not bad for international and US news.)
cafard 5y ago
In larger cities, there are still newsrooms.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
Yes, non-profit news organizations that mimic the NPR/CPB model are finding traction in lots of communities around the country, and many of them do great work. Most of them are digital "print" publications that do some video here and there. There was also a major shift towards news festivals that did long-form interviews with various types of leaders, many of which are posted on sites like Youtube. Unfortunately, the pandemic has hampered a lot of those types of events.
airstrike 5y ago
I think the rule of thumb is free media sucks, paid media is generally a couple notches better than that baseline. I happily pay for the WSJ and Bloomberg, though admittedly I skip all of the WSJ Opinion pieces because they can be worse than OAN
conscion 5y ago
Recently I've been using Wikipedia as my news source. They have both a current events page [1] and a page summarizing this year's events [2]. I feel like Wikipedia's goal of being an encyclopedia forces out a lot of editorializing. Wikipedia also has the benefit of every article has the in-line links to context through other Wikipedia pages. It also has given me the opportunity to read about news stories that have fallen out of the public eye even though their "story" is still progressing (like the Ever Given blocking the Suez). To make the articles more readable. I changed my link styling to more closely match the text styling, which can be done directly through the Wikipedia user account (using the "common.css" page). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021#January https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021#January

rootusrootus 5y ago

A vicious combination of many 'media' sources actually sucking, and a concerted political effort to push that narrative. No wonder people are confused.

coldacid 5y ago
I think more are angry with the media than simply confused.
jessaustin 5y ago
Who is confused? TFA indicates that confusion about media is at its second lowest level on record.

quartesixte 5y ago

I don’t necessarily think this is a de facto terrible thing. Healthy skepticism towards having a few large corporations be the source of truth about the world is necessary to prevent manipulation and coercion of the public by a few wealthy individuals. The unfortunate part comes when that skepticism clouds the ability to discern whether or not one is contradicting fundamental physical properties of the world. . . Not to say that those aren’t entirely up for debate either.

starfallg 5y ago
>Healthy skepticism towards having a few large corporations be the source of truth about the world is necessary to prevent manipulation and coercion of the public by a few wealthy individuals. Manipulation is now in social media and other 'decentralized' platforms, but the money is still from the same people, just even less accountable. I don't think it improved at all, quite the opposite in fact.

rdudek 5y ago

To be honest, I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything. One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour. Most boring, non-sensational broadcast there is and yet, they fill it up with sold content and reporting. Also, no advertising.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything. The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it. It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  This is also my suspicion, although I've heard that NYT's subscriptions are doing as well as they've ever done and while I wouldn't describe NYT's journalism as "click-bait", they've certainly engaged in more than their share of overt ideological propagandism (which isn't unique to them, but part of a landscape shift away from aspirationally objective reporting).
  - busterarm 5y ago
    The best sign of click bait is posting obviously false, inflammatory articles and then silently putting out a retraction days later after the clicks have come in. The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      Perhaps the avid reader would say that they are most disappointed in papers like the NYT. You cannot really be disappointed by FOX or CNN. Different medium, but I think it still applies.

dmingod666 5y ago

Maybe they would fare better if they were journalists rather than activists and propagandists...

pessimizer 5y ago
No, people trust activists and propagandists, because they know where they're coming from. The problem comes when people claiming to have some bizarre abstract Platonic neutrality are constantly lying to you in order to push you into the behavior that they would prefer you have. Activists and propagandists are far more honest, and are far more trusted by the public.
- dmingod666 5y ago
  Maybe honesty shouldn't be bizzare. Only if you wholesale buy into the 2 party divide will you think that facts are a foreign concept. There can be news people that are pro-truth, pro-citizen and not pro any party. That would look like the views of a normal person off the street who is not super into politics - the fourth pillar of democracy. Do you hate mixing religion with politics? Well, law with politics, news with politics and law enforcement / millitary with politics is the same toxic mixture that ends up stealing power from the citizen, who is supposed to be the most powerful entity in a functioning democracy..
p_j_w 5y ago
If that were the issue then people wouldn't be running to news sources like OANN, who are far more propagandistic and activist.
- dmingod666 5y ago
  I think it's injecting judgement and morality into news. Once news is flavored by political views and moral judgements people will pick the sources that show the correct reprehensible behaviour based on their world view.. One good attempt I've seen a while back was Sagar Enjetti and Crystal Ball with a show called 'The Rising' - It's on YouTube but produced quite well.. The guy has a republican tilt and the girl supports democrat politics and they have a very good rapport with each other - which results in both calling out holes in each others argument without being adverserial..

dnissley 5y ago

It's not too surprising. How can anyone trust a journalism that has chosen to prioritize advocacy over the nuts and bolts of reporting? Fox news was the first -- it's all Fox news today. See https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-report...

rajin444 5y ago
I can’t think of a single major news outlet that is trustworthy. They still provide some value, but you need a heavy dose of skepticism.
- tomp 5y ago
  That's why I love ZeroHedge. No credibility by definition, so you don't even expect it. You have to think on your own. But, they provide very timely news on "market-moving" information (i.e. news that are/will be breaking news), often faster than mainstream media. So that is a very valuable service (for me).
unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
We have a generation of 'reporters' who never knew the old way of journalism. Dispatches from flagship news outlets disclose no awaress they're doing their jobs in a tragically wrongheaded manner.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  They're not reporters anymore they're political activists and that's the problem.
trutannus 5y ago
The blend of activism and journalism is the crux of the problem. In Canada the state-run news organization CBC knows they have low trust, however can't admit their role in it. About once a year they write an op-ed talking about the best ways to use legislation to fix the problem. This is the same state-run media company that said objectivity is "potentially harmful": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-july-12-2020-1.5639297/objectivity-is-the-view-from-nowhere-and-potentially-harmful-expert-1.5639304 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-july-...

afavour 5y ago

Much of this is the media's own doing but they're not alone: politicians have been drumming this beat for decades. They don't want voters to trust the media because that's the primary means by which they are held accountable.

z3c0 5y ago
I enjoy the tag line for Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation: "They know we know they lie". So for them, the game becomes to make everything look like a lie so that we can't distinguish what the truth is. Demonizing media and creating fractured narratives is the prime way to accomplish this.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I'm sure politicians and others enjoy the low levels of trust, but I think (to your point) this has been brought on by the media's own rejection of aspirations of objectivity and neutrality. As some love to say, "[perfect] objectivity and neutrality are impossible [so the media is right in going full-on activist]". The media is having a firesale on its own credibility, and the "proceeds" are going to specific ideological causes to the detriment of society as a whole (what good can possibly come from an ideology which explicitly and routinely condemns objectivity, neutrality, rigor, etc?).
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  "The media" is generally a series of for-profit corporations that wish to maintain an audience by any means possible, and also have major business interests in front of Congress. When the OP says "politicians prefer it when objective media goes away and gets replaced with advocates" and you say (paraphrasing) that "the objective media has responded to financial incentives and become advocates [so they can gain viewers and credibility with Congress]" you aren't saying anything different. You're just describing a situation in which societal and political incentives were changed to disincentivize the financial benefit of responsible reporting, and both media companies and politicians are responding to those incentives. To then say "gosh I'm really mad at the media because they're bad" is like being mad at raindrops because they're wet. If you don't like the situation, propose an actual political or policy change that will improve the situation. I see too many people saying "I hate the media, and [my preferred politicians] rail against the media, ergo I will vote for [my preferred politicians]" failing to recognize that this dynamic simply reinforces the feedback loop rather than changing anything.

ameminator 5y ago

I think the political party breakdown is very interesting as well. Trust from the Democratic side has not really dropped so much, but the mistrust from the Republican side looks absolutely staggering. 11% of Republicans trust the media - which is down from 14% 4 years ago. This doesn't seem like a big drop, but relatively, that is still a 20% decrease, in an already low amount. Something is deeply wrong when half of your adult population just flat out doesn't trust you. Where do these people get their news about the world? Do they just live in a constant state of mistrust?

ur-whale 5y ago
"These people", really?
- ameminator 5y ago
  I mean, I was specifically referring to people who mistrust the media. I think it's the media's fault for this - "these" people seem absolutely rational and correct in their mistrust. However, that doesn't obviate the need to have factual information about the world. Goings-on in local communities and nationally. So I am curious - where do they get their knowledge from? Do they trust local sources and ignore national ones? Are there specific personalities they listen to? Is it all Facebook and YouTube, all of the time? Or do they just not watch, or use large grains of salt when they do watch? Anyways, I am legitimately curious and I do think it's a problem that no one outside the left trusts the media. If that isn't a blatant condemnation of these media companies, who squandered that trust away, I don't know what is.
  - sseagull 5y ago
    > I think it's the media's fault for this Sort of, but not completely in my opinion. In some sense they give people what they want, the same as Facebook giving people content that they "engage" more with (which is often negative). Asking the media companies (who are as profit driven as anyone else) to be the adults is like asking social media companies to do the same. When it comes down to it, they will optimize for profit, and if not enough people are really interested in good journalism and reporting, that will get cut and replaced with sensationalism.

djoldman 5y ago

The actual question: > In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media -- such as newspapers, TV and radio -- when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly -- a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all? The article reports that those responding with "great deal" or "a fair amount" is the second-lowest on record.

MangoCoffee 5y ago

Not surprising. legacy (Main stream) Media pushing false narrative like Joe Rogan taking horse med. the "horse med" that Joe Rogan take is also use on human as well and his doctor prescribe it.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

Prime example here, of the state things are in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru-SoiTKfO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru-SoiTKfO4 Two people can hear the same thing, and come to different conclusion of what was said. What was said can be different from what was heard. What was heard can be different from what was reported. And what was reported can be different from what was reported as being reported.

mrfusion 5y ago

If you’re interested here are some highlights from my journey to 0% trust in the media: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI&feature=youtu.be https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-all-media-infographic/ https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HPM70d_jT9k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HPM70d_jT9k https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783 I’d be curious to hear yours.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
What're your thoughts on, say, the BBC and CBC?
retrac98 5y ago
For me it's that whenever the media report on a subject I have expertise in, I can immediately see how much of what's reported is total bs.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I was once interviewed about my thoughts on a candidate during a presidential primary. Without giving away too much detail, I mentioned that I was unenthusiastic about the candidate and didn't understand his sudden surge in popularity. I threw in a sentence about wanting to vote for someone I actually felt was authentic and trustworthy. The reporter used my "I want someone trustworthy" quote (without the context) and in such a way to imply I saw something in the candidate, when in reality, I was explaining that I didn't trust him as far as I could throw him. She just tossed my line in the article right after mentioning good things about the candidate. Totally and utterly misleading. Pretty direct and eye opening to me. That reporter went out with a story in mind and used my words however she saw fit.
- shockeychap 5y ago
  Wow. That's all kinds of gross and shady.
andrewclunn 5y ago

FridayoLeary 5y ago

Just out of curiosity; how much do people here trust the news stories that make the front page of HN?

Loughla 5y ago
Depends on the story, the publisher, and the sources. Like everything else. If the story is well cited, from a reputable publisher, and/or backed up by concrete facts, then I tend to trust is a little. Not a lit, but a little. I am generally skeptical of most things here, though. As another poster in here said, I am always shocked by the ignorance on this site relating to things I have a ton of experience with. I have to assume that same ignorance extends to other areas as well. That being said, in general, if a post makes it to the top of HN, it seems to be better informed than other places I go for news.
sivanmz 5y ago
I read the comments first
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  In essence, that's a distributed trust model.

seventytwo 5y ago

“Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.” Objective truth always exists. It’s just a matter of gathering the data to refine our perceptions and mental models to match.

WriterGuy2021 5y ago

I feel a very strong low tide in the general publics withdrawal of their support of many institutions. Where is all that energy previously occupied going to go?

gadders 5y ago

It's all click bait now, from whatever side, crafted to generate outrage. News media is sold to the general public below cost to drive eyeballs to advertising. As the saying goes, the general public aren't the customer, they're the product.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

If you want a to understand the mistrust, Awekan with JP has a satirical channel on youtube that takes on "we lie to you the news". From a conservative perspective. Funny and absurd. 2 million subs. https://www.youtube.com/user/AwakenWithJP https://www.youtube.com/user/AwakenWithJP

nksprzak 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1fnlV8xW2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1fnlV8xW2A Got 50 seconds in and "White House tells Facebook what to say to brainwash us with" is said as the viewpoint I'm supposed to agree with.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  You don't need to agree with it, just recognize that its a pretty accurate representation that conservatives believe fb is coordinating the censorship with the government. In no small part due to them banning Trump, and statements like this from the press secretary. Psaki: 'We're Flagging Problematic Posts On Facebook That Spread Disinformation' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqEvQKO5_gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqEvQKO5_gM

yorwba 5y ago

The full set of "Media Use and Evaluation" questions is quite interesting: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1663/Media-Use-Evaluation.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1663/Media-Use-Evaluation.aspx E.g. in response to the question "Now, apart from how FREQUENTLY you use them as sources of news, we'd like to know whether or not you can trust the accuracy of the news and information you get from each of the following news sources. First, do you feel you can trust the accuracy of the news and information you get from ... ?" the source that the most people (74%) said they can trust in 2019 (the last time the question was asked) was local television news. Other local news sources also got rated more trustworthy than national ones. I wonder how much of that is due to culture fit (reporting news in a way that matches the expectations of the people in the area) vs ease of verification (if something happened in your neighborhood, it's easier to find out whether the news is accurate than if it's about a faraway place you've never been to).

methodiosmel 5y ago

At the point, I'm shocked that anyone actually trusts the media.

anonymouswacker 5y ago

The deregulation of the '90's, combined with questionable court decisions, and the resulting interference with Government in media--not to mention the rise of social media & big tech's influence and the resulting wane of traditional media's--has brought us to the point where most media orgs have no incentive to act trustworthy. It's just not profitable any more!

pluc 5y ago

The answer to whether you should trust media is the same as the answer to "Are media allowed to lie without repercussions?"

usefulcat 5y ago
s/same as/opposite of/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

paul7986 5y ago

If there is a need for fact checking websites and or resources the media on all sides is a joke!

rajin444 5y ago
The fact checking websites are the media.

ryanmarsh 5y ago

Can someone tell me why we should have ever trusted any of them in the first place? How was trust earned? Was trust ever broken? What was done to rebuild trust?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
At one point, the New York Times had an editor who knew that his newsroom leaned left. So he deliberately steered the paper somewhat right, in order to balance out the reporters. He literally had on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight." That earns some trust. Not total trust, but a lot more than I trust the NYT today.

decasteve 5y ago

It’s not just trust in media (or government). It’s most societal institutions that have lost trust. I’d argue even trusting one’s own neighbours is probably at an all-time low. Trust should be something we think about in our interactions and how we can work to improve it.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

The Russians are quite good at sowing mistrust. Thank you Mr Murdoch for aiding and abetting.

andyxor 5y ago

well, what do you expect if they lie about almost everything. The "Fake news" phenomenon is very real.

NHQ 5y ago

Who is the media again?

Auracle 5y ago

I think that if the media had given Trump credit for Operation Warpspeed/the vaccines there’d be a lot less vaccine hesitancy on the right. I’m not saying people being less hesitant because of that would be logical, but it’s one way their bias has actually killed people. Frankly, Biden should have done so too. I think it would have been the best ethical and political move. Imagine if they did a commercial together telling people to get vaccinated.

jahewson 5y ago
Operation Warpspeed was a miserable failure. They promised 100 million vaccines by the end of 2020 and managed 5m, screwing up at almost every step. And it’s not like they did anything to speed up vaccine development, because that was all done in Europe. Realize that as soon as Biden took over then there was zero chance of any conservative doing anything to help Biden “succeed” in any dimension, regardless of how many lives are on the line. You don’t see Trump on Fox News telling people to get vaccinated do you?
- Auracle 5y ago
  They were late by what - a few months? Speaking of Europe, we had vaccines for quite a while and they didn't. There's also no way prepurchasing a bunch of different vaccines didn't help/fund development. As per your second point, I agree. On the other side you had democratic presidential candidates saying they wouldn't take "Trump's vaccine." It's disgusting what the political divide has brought.
p_j_w 5y ago
>I think that if the media had given Trump credit for Operation Warpspeed/the vaccines Is there any evidence that Trump deserves credit for this or that it was actually successful?
- Auracle 5y ago
  He deserves as much credit as most presidents do for most things done under them...which is to say, not much. But you can be damned sure that if Biden was president first and then Trump we'd still be hearing about how it was due to President Biden that we have the vaccines.

aww_dang 5y ago

Fact check: "Media did nothing wrong"

realmod 5y ago

This is entirely the media's fault. Sadly most journalists no longer know the word impartiality. They instead focus on creating narratives that fit their views and push them onto the masses. Nothing is more infuriating and disappointing than seeing simple established facts being distorted and twisted into something it's not. And this includes reputable media such as Washington Post and NYTimes. I think Reuters might be the only news agency keeping sensationalism and bias to the minimum. This a global problem. Journalism is no more.

throwawaysea 5y ago

How can anyone trust the media when it seems to have become a target of institutional capture for political and ideological gain? Journalism is not really journalism anymore - it's propaganda. It's duty is not to inform, but to persuade. This tendency towards advocacy journalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism) has been very apparent in the trend of newsroom revolts. See the following example stories about this phenomenon: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-times-washington-post-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-t... https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/30/7-woke-rebellions-in-americas-newsrooms/ https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/30/7-woke-rebellions-in-...

tankenmate 5y ago

I know the following is somewhat naive / oversimplified; but it is a good thought provoker. You can't advertise a product that is misleading or dangerous, and yet there are no such limitations (or even warnings!) on the media? Maybe media reporting should have warnings on it like medicine advertising.

convery 5y ago
Well, ye. There's always elite classes with special rules. Social media is pushed to censor 'misinformation' while news media can lie all day. Entertainment media need to clearly label product placements, news media can make 'sponsored content' nearly indistinguishable from the other content. If you have a blog with 'questionable' content you can be fined, news media can have 'opinion' columns advocating for genocide and there's no issue. If you get arrested at a riot, you can just say you're a journalist and you'll likely be let go as they don't want to bother with the potential outrage..

dukeofdoom 5y ago

I'm worried about undue influence of Tech Billionaires. If you hold the belief that "Global warming is real", "and the world has too many people." How pernicious those two beliefs put together could be. You couple that with some Eugenic beliefs in creating a super human race. And find out that Epstein had those views, and then you find out about the flight logs of people that visited his island. It just breeds distrust. [Edit] Some proof: Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-eugenics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-... Bill Gates: Gene editing can help humanity https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2018/04/bill-gates-gene-editing-can-help-humanity/ https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2018/04/bill-gat...

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

Nearly 20 years ago we started pushing STEM in society. I would expect everyone here thinks that's a great idea but what happened to Not-STEM. Journalism lost all their top candidates into STEM. The quality of journalism objectively dropped and when that happens it turns into "Yellow Journalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism Basically what we see today in journalism is no different than 100 years ago. A very high degree of yellow journalism. Pulitzer and Hearst became so bad that they openly called for the assassination of the US president(mckinley). Both ran basically the same call to assassinate with different authors. The realization that pulitzer and hearst had some hand in having the republican president assassinated is what got him to stop. He went back to the paper and put a stop to the yellow journalism and then put the prize in his will. Very obvious the Hannity and Oreilly Fox news led the move, but now it's virtually everyone. It's not even just the USA. The yellow journalism coming out of the CBC is a nice steady flow.

e-clinton 5y ago

The biggest issue with media to me is that they report opinion as news.

fallingfrog 5y ago

The media right now are in a similar position as the media in any kleptocracy or oligarchy: they repeat the lies of power uncritically and try to anesthetize the public with crude sensationalism. You can see why they’re afraid to ask questions too; look what they did to Assange. Or Stephen Donzinger. You’ll probably not hear that name much on mainstream news. Meanwhile the NSA violates the constitution daily and the Congress is perpetually unable to address any of the concerns of the public while the powerful gorge themselves on the corpse of the public good. It’s a story as old as time. Usually this is the last stage leading to general collapse of the government.