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I upvoted this, but it's not quite true. It's not wrong to say that the press has always incuriously reprinted the press releases of the powerful, but in days o

I upvoted this, but it's not quite true. It's not wrong to say that the press has always incuriously reprinted the press releases of the powerful, but in days of yore there also used to be a thing called "investigative journalism", largely snuffed out now, thanks to the consolidation of media ownership. What that's done to the structure of newsrooms, the compensation offered therein, and hell, the whole mission of print media, is only obvious to those old enough to remember what local papers used to look like.

newsclues 5y ago
Depends on the posters age, many people grew up in an age of poor journalistic standards, not all of us remember the golden age.
Frost1x 5y ago
"News" and large facets of "journalism" have now, unfortunately, become nothing more than propoganda platforms filled with opinionated narratives to paint stories. Even when they're not, they often use selection bias to choose what they do and don't report on to tote some agenda. Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for. Like pretty much all professions, it's also become far more demanding to be a good journalist or investigative journalist due to how many stories reported on require more specialized knowledge to understand and portray correctly. The bar used to be lower and a journalist could better grasp a situation or understanding. Now, with a lot of technology and science, you pretty much need a pretty deep and well rounded background to properly understand and address issues. The general bar of education has risen, including that of deceitful people, which places even higher demands on journalists to put them in check. Could dig further into the point but the moral of the story is that the bar is raising to a point where misinformation and disinformation have an edge due to the sheer volume of information, lack of ability for any one person to have enough understanding, and incentives to be deceitful. That means the barrier to entry cost to dig out deceit has often become too high. I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this.
- yeetaccount 5y ago
  > Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for. This should be an entire discussion thread. Even scrupulous journalistic outlets have to stay competitive on the business side. And people don’t want facts, they want a story; something to spawn feeling instead of thought.
- thrashh 5y ago
  I disagree. There is still investigative journalism and plenty of good news sources. They are imperfect but you get to know where they excel and where they don’t, plus perfect news sources have never existed in the history of history. What happened instead is that the bottom fell out. There are so many newer sources of information today but most of them are very poor so the average quality of news has precipitously dropped. But as it always goes, the good stay good. I currently pay about $40/month in news and magazines (but borrow Netflix/Hulu/HBO/etc. from friends, lol) and I enjoy the news I get. It’s a range of current events to policy analysis. I think a bigger change is that previously what people thought of events didn’t honestly matter as much in day to day policy dealings either. People weren’t any more informed back then — they just didn’t even know what was going on, for better and worse.
- trs8080 5y ago
  > I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this. lol WHAT? - https://www.propublica.org/ https://www.propublica.org/ - https://themarkup.org/ https://themarkup.org/ - https://revealnews.org/ https://revealnews.org/ - https://www.kqed.org/ https://www.kqed.org/ - https://www.motherjones.com/ https://www.motherjones.com/ - https://www.themarshallproject.org/ https://www.themarshallproject.org/ the problem is that folks like yourself want to sit back and have news come to you as a consumptive activity, and you expect it for free. you have to actively go out and seek valid sources of information -- you can't have your worldview shaped for you.
JamisonM 5y ago
I am constantly baffled at the sweeping statements that get made about modern journalism. In the "days of yore" the quality of journalism was higher? Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country". Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism. Look at the Pulizer Won by the Boston Globe for 2021, lifesaving investigative journalism that is expensive and difficult- and exactly the sort of thing that the Golden Age would have never dug up.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country". To paraphrase Mitch Hedburg, sure, they used to. They still do, but they used to, too. But now there are fewer of them. >Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism. This strikes me as kind of a crazy claim, but in the grandparent I was bemoaning the decline of functional local journalism. The rot hasn't really, truly hit big newspapers in big cities; the parent's citation of the continued existence of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting kinda doesn't change the realities of the local news, the decline of which is evident, well-studied, and heralds corruption of both democracy and mere finance.[0][1][2] I've linked blog-level readings, but feel free to scrutinize the links in the Global Anti-Corruption Blog article [0] for more academic analysis on the topic. Look to groups like Alden Capital [3], which buy up and destroy small-town American news sources. You'll find that those disappearing local papers used to pen most of the original reporting in the US. It's so fucking evident that mainstream institutions like PBS and NPR and even Netflix recognize it -- namely, "The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" [4] on exactly what I'm talking about. [0] https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-of-small-newspapers-means-higher-risk-of-local-corruption-in-the-u-s/ https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-... [1] https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-less-democracy/ https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-les... [2] https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-measures-the-cost-of-corruption-when-the-local-newspaper-dies https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-... [3] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-of-when-a-hedge-fund-buys-newspapers https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-o... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA

newsclues 5y ago

Depends on the posters age, many people grew up in an age of poor journalistic standards, not all of us remember the golden age.

Frost1x 5y ago

"News" and large facets of "journalism" have now, unfortunately, become nothing more than propoganda platforms filled with opinionated narratives to paint stories. Even when they're not, they often use selection bias to choose what they do and don't report on to tote some agenda. Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for. Like pretty much all professions, it's also become far more demanding to be a good journalist or investigative journalist due to how many stories reported on require more specialized knowledge to understand and portray correctly. The bar used to be lower and a journalist could better grasp a situation or understanding. Now, with a lot of technology and science, you pretty much need a pretty deep and well rounded background to properly understand and address issues. The general bar of education has risen, including that of deceitful people, which places even higher demands on journalists to put them in check. Could dig further into the point but the moral of the story is that the bar is raising to a point where misinformation and disinformation have an edge due to the sheer volume of information, lack of ability for any one person to have enough understanding, and incentives to be deceitful. That means the barrier to entry cost to dig out deceit has often become too high. I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this.

yeetaccount 5y ago
> Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for. This should be an entire discussion thread. Even scrupulous journalistic outlets have to stay competitive on the business side. And people don’t want facts, they want a story; something to spawn feeling instead of thought.
thrashh 5y ago
I disagree. There is still investigative journalism and plenty of good news sources. They are imperfect but you get to know where they excel and where they don’t, plus perfect news sources have never existed in the history of history. What happened instead is that the bottom fell out. There are so many newer sources of information today but most of them are very poor so the average quality of news has precipitously dropped. But as it always goes, the good stay good. I currently pay about $40/month in news and magazines (but borrow Netflix/Hulu/HBO/etc. from friends, lol) and I enjoy the news I get. It’s a range of current events to policy analysis. I think a bigger change is that previously what people thought of events didn’t honestly matter as much in day to day policy dealings either. People weren’t any more informed back then — they just didn’t even know what was going on, for better and worse.
trs8080 5y ago
> I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this. lol WHAT? - https://www.propublica.org/ https://www.propublica.org/ - https://themarkup.org/ https://themarkup.org/ - https://revealnews.org/ https://revealnews.org/ - https://www.kqed.org/ https://www.kqed.org/ - https://www.motherjones.com/ https://www.motherjones.com/ - https://www.themarshallproject.org/ https://www.themarshallproject.org/ the problem is that folks like yourself want to sit back and have news come to you as a consumptive activity, and you expect it for free. you have to actively go out and seek valid sources of information -- you can't have your worldview shaped for you.

JamisonM 5y ago

I am constantly baffled at the sweeping statements that get made about modern journalism. In the "days of yore" the quality of journalism was higher? Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country". Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism. Look at the Pulizer Won by the Boston Globe for 2021, lifesaving investigative journalism that is expensive and difficult- and exactly the sort of thing that the Golden Age would have never dug up.

revolvingocelot 5y ago
>Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country". To paraphrase Mitch Hedburg, sure, they used to. They still do, but they used to, too. But now there are fewer of them. >Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism. This strikes me as kind of a crazy claim, but in the grandparent I was bemoaning the decline of functional local journalism. The rot hasn't really, truly hit big newspapers in big cities; the parent's citation of the continued existence of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting kinda doesn't change the realities of the local news, the decline of which is evident, well-studied, and heralds corruption of both democracy and mere finance.[0][1][2] I've linked blog-level readings, but feel free to scrutinize the links in the Global Anti-Corruption Blog article [0] for more academic analysis on the topic. Look to groups like Alden Capital [3], which buy up and destroy small-town American news sources. You'll find that those disappearing local papers used to pen most of the original reporting in the US. It's so fucking evident that mainstream institutions like PBS and NPR and even Netflix recognize it -- namely, "The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" [4] on exactly what I'm talking about. [0] https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-of-small-newspapers-means-higher-risk-of-local-corruption-in-the-u-s/ https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-... [1] https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-less-democracy/ https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-les... [2] https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-measures-the-cost-of-corruption-when-the-local-newspaper-dies https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-... [3] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-of-when-a-hedge-fund-buys-newspapers https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-o... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA