12 ms·

Trust in newspapers and television news collapses to historic low

180 points by bilsbie 4y ago

beloch 4y ago
This article ends on a couple of pretty bizarre points. >Politico founding editor and editorial chairman John Harris reminded Smith on stage that "in the old days," a handful of people at a small number of outlets had all the agenda-setting power and they "would’ve all been white men." Diversity in the newsroom eroded trust!? >"All of us have biases and that maybe true objectivity is, what does your newsroom look like? How diverse is it?" said Al Jazeera English host Femi Oke at the event. Al Jazeera is Qatar's state-funded news agency. It's not the diversity of their newsroom, which probably isn't any higher than average, that matters but the topic that determines how much you can trust them. The language of coverage also apparently matters, since their Arabic coverage often has a significantly different slant than their English language coverage. ------------- I probably put more trust in traditional media than average, but that trust has definitely declined. This is for a few reasons not really covered in the article. Practically all but one or two newspapers in my country are owned by the same corporation. They target different demographics with different papers, but show a remarkable unity on topics that the owners have an interest in. Consolidation of media into a smaller number of wealthy, corporate hands has undeniably introduced significant bias, but it's gotten harder to identify that bias as the diversity of news publications has decreased. We are no longer presented with multiple independent viewpoints on a given event. Rather, we get multiple columnists from the same media conglomerate under the same editorial pressure. The internet has also played a role by making the monetization of news more difficult, and the typical corporate response when revenue drops is to cut costs. Why fund a bunch of war-zone reporters to get different views of a conflict when you can fill the same amount of air-time for a fraction of the cost with a bunch of pundits arguing with each other? This is cheaper, but also produces far less reliable information about the conflict. Bottom line, we need to find a way increase the diversity of ownership of news sources and also find a way to fund quality journalism. I still do appreciate traditional media because, if you're aware of their ownership biases, you at least know what you're dealing with. Alternative and social media are often much harder to vet.
FpUser 4y ago
My impression of modern news is that there is virtually no journalism and it is mostly low quality propaganda.
pacarvalho 4y ago
Even though the graphs do show some correlation between politics and media trust, I believe there may be other factors at play here. For instance, the need to make headlines ever more clickbait may also be eroding trust. Since the body of the article and the headline often don't agree.
- samizdis 4y ago
  That doesn't really hold for TV news, though. And even though it is annoying in print when articles fail to stand up their headlines, it doesn't necessarily mean that readers dismiss such articles entirely. It's more that they get pissed at the headline writers. Cf any number of articles headlined as a cancer "breakthrough" or an asteroid "heading for Earth" etc.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    Getting pissed at headline writers and not trusting the media not to lie to you, I am not so sure are two separate things.
option_key 4y ago
This could mean that information literacy is on the rise.
- Victerius 4y ago
  Or the opposite (that information literacy is on the decline, and people who are more intelligent and better educated trust the news more, at least from credible sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and CNN).
  - jwond 4y ago
    I’m not sure there are any news outlets remaining that I would consider credible, at least not consistently. They all have substantial black marks.
    - Kibae 4y ago
      Reuters is credible IMO.
      - junofan 4y ago
        DC and NYC coverage (especially of political demonstrations) can get a little dicey but otherwise they seem mostly ok.
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        >Reuters is credible IMO. Can't say I agree: Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-blast-minister-idUKKCN105073 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-blast-minister-id...
    - themitigating 4y ago
      All are the same level? Seems unlikely
  - haggy102 4y ago
    CNN is credible? According to whom?
kodah 4y ago
What's the point of publishing a report if they only intend to explain part of why they think only one of three interest groups in those categories don't trust them? The abysmally low numbers in the first place could start with an explanation, maybe one that doesn't shift the blame onto the viewer and takes accountability? I say this as someone would be an independent or Democrat on this graph.
tyleo 4y ago
As an American both right and left leaning news outlets don’t seem trustworthy. I find right wing news particularly annoying as it seems to amount to anger spewing and name calling in many cases. Left wing outlets are no angels either and present an extremely biased and hyperbolic picture of the world.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Which is worse?
  - balderdash 4y ago
    They both produce the same outcome, they feed the consumers existing biases/priors and reinforce the notion that the other side is contemptible. They just do it it in different ways.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      It's not possible for the amount to be equal considering the number of people, companies, and news stories involved
- echelon 4y ago
  Read both. With both sides of the story you see what is being emphasized or downplayed by each party. You also see the shared themes. Add in international sources and see how they differ.
rayiner 4y ago
Look at the CNN main page right now: https://www.cnn.com/ https://www.cnn.com/ For me it shows: 1) Mass shooting porn (several different items) 2) Something about Twitter 3) Different shooting 4) Assassination of the former PM of a G7 country (somehow below the fold) 5) Trump 6) Abortion Only after much scrolling do you get to a story about the economy, which polls report is the single most important issue to most Americans.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  I’m confused about what you’re trying to say. CNN ran the jobs and unemployment numbers this morning when they came out. And they are in fact on the homepage. Contrast with FoxNews.com, which doesn’t have the numbers at all on the homepage (as far as I can tell, maybe I’m missing them, it’s late) and instead has an opinion from Larry Kudlow about how he thinks a recession is coming. Also after much scrolling. They did report the numbers though. What is your point exactly?
  - rayiner 4y ago
    On the current CNN mobile page, the jobs numbers are more than halfway down, under something about Ford and VW self driving operations. The point is that, at best, CNN is out of touch with what people actually care about, and also milking tragedy for profit. Less charitably, they’re focusing on stories that could help democrats in the midterms while burying economic stories that are bad for democrats, while milking tragedy for profit. In the last decade they’ve completely dropped the pretense that they’re not openly rooting for one side. Fox News is partisan entertainment, and deliberately so. I’m not sure why you’re even bringing them up.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      Fox News and CNN some of the largest news networks, and not all of Fox is partisan entertainment. Same for CNN which aired critical stories about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails every single day for months in 2016. The point was to bring another datapoint into the mix. If CNN were burying economic stories bad for Democrats, why isn’t Fox News the partisan entertainment network featuring them? Maybe the stories just aren’t so interesting to people? Or maybe they’re not so bad as you think? I tend to watch all 3 cable networks and inflation, recession worries, good jobs and unemployment numbers, and high but declining gas prices have been topics on all 3 this week. I just don’t see how anyone is hiding anything. The information is there, as you pointed out. Every story I saw yesterday about good jobs numbers had caveats about inflation and recession worries. I mean, are you suggesting that people aren’t aware of these things?
crikeyjoe 4y ago
Of course, it's all programming. But now it's replaced by forums like this and all the bots.
pmorici 4y ago
The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that as the Internet and cable tv gave news organizations greater reach they tended to become partisan in order to differentiate themselves. Truth is no longer profitable to the extent it contradicts what their audience wants to hear.
- jackcosgrove 4y ago
  Public opinion is bimodal in the US, shaped by the two party system. During the broadcast era media were forced to tailor their message for the median because you can only broadcast one message. However the median is actually smaller than the two modes on either side. When multicast messaging became technologically possible, it made economic sense to tailor your message for one of the modes, both to differentiate and to tap into a more engaged audience, the extremes of which had been ignored during the broadcast era.
fatcat500 4y ago
They burnt through all the cultural capital they had by spending it on short-term political victories. Now people see the media not as a source of information, but as an instrument of the establishment to influence and control. The same will happen with the other institutions. We already have large amount of people skeptical of the CDC, WHO, and other health oriented orgs. We have growing skepticism of large financial institutions (fed & inflation, IMF & "you will own nothing", etc.). There is widespread skepticism of academic institutions, which will cause the value of academic titles to depreciate. All this because the people who control these institutions insist on using them as political instruments (at certain times). I wonder what the situation will be 50 years from now...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- creato 4y ago
  This take would be a lot more reasonable if people weren’t turning to crazy Facebook uncles for information instead.
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    They turn there because what could be less establishment? The establishment gives its imprimatur to the news media, and they've proven untrustworthy, so the (weak) reasoning goes, why not turn to whatever the establishment condemns? Listen to Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Q, the Doomsinger of Alexandria (okay, I made that one up). They don't trust any of it anyway, except a few of the worst Q addicts, but they figure, we know CNN lies and twists, and they hate us, so might as well listen to the liar who's on our side.
    - jimkleiber 4y ago
      I agree with everything except that last part: "So might as well listen to the liar who I trust is on our side"
      - 4y ago
hertzrat 4y ago
Trust is low because I read a science journalism article recently that claimed mit (or somebody else) had found, but we’re not sharing, drugs that prolonged life spans by 30%. In reality, the report said that they found a drug that raised levels of a certain chemical predictably in mice and humans, and did not venture further claims. The article is fraudulent and almost every science news post does it. If the media wants to be trusted, they need to stop lying
CSMastermind 4y ago
It's interesting to me because the original subscription model of newspapers was built to counter the perceived low information quality that came from an era where papers were based entirely on sales and ad revenue (leading to the original 'clickbait' headlines). It seems like the internet, powered by advertising, brought the 'attention' economy roaring back. In its wake news organizations and their hard-won subscriber bases were eroded. Now we seemed poised to relearn the same lessons about what happens when your incentives are not for truth and accuracy but rather attention.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  Before that though there were interest based papers and local news that was hard hitting and relevant, union papers, private investigation, and generally a high interest in journalism that was worth a damn. As the internet has evolved inexorably to take advantage of our psychology, I don't think we are going back.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mattbuilds 4y ago
  Sorry to hijack your comment and kind of unrelated, but does anyone have any books that discuss the beginning of mass media/newspapers. Your comment about the internet brining back the “attention” economy has me interested in the origins of mass media. Just seems like it would be an interesting topic that probably has some relevance today.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    One of the most delightful takes I've run across is a 1909 lecture by Hamilton Holt, himself a magazine publisher, titled Comemercialism and Journalism. It's a short, engaging, fact-filled, and highly-informative read: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft Other than that, I've compiled a "light reading list" which I still feel is a good starting point though I'd probably add to it. Previously mentioned in this thread, and inlcuding Holts's work, as well as several of the other suggestions responding to your question. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
shrubble 4y ago
Almost 30 years ago, author Michael Crichton laid out his media criticism in Wired magazine. It's sad that aside from the dated examples, it rings so true now: https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/ https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Despite the down-votes, you are likely right on the money. I know several people whose eyes were opened regarding the media for the five year 2016-2020 period.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  and "two weeks to flatten the curve"... "gee guess we didn't need those emergency wards after all, oh goody we saved the world"
O__________O 4y ago
If you look at the linked page, pretty obvious that the source of the divide is politically driven and largely tied to republican distrust of the media — which goes back Regan destroying objective reporting with deregulation in 1987 and Clinton enabling media monopolies in the 90s: https://apnews.com/article/business-immigration-deregulation-f2021dc7425a4001b1f910a3bb075b87 https://apnews.com/article/business-immigration-deregulation...
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  It was popularized by fox news. They declare themselves as the only source of "fair and balanced news" and lot of less sophisticated people buy into it because they feed them stories, regardless of the truth behind it, they want to see and rub their opinion all over it instead of just reporting the facts of the story.
  - dlivingston 4y ago
    It’s a multivariate problem. I would guess that both you and parent are right, along with half a dozen other major variables. That’s not to diminish the role that Fox or Reagan has had, but rather, that it’s a much more complex problem. And, you would be remiss laying it solely on Conservative feet.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Fox News didn’t even exist until 1996. OP is talking about a decline in trust in institutions that started long before that: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g...
  - 99_00 4y ago
    Then why, as the article states, do "Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'."
- 99_00 4y ago
  What do you mean it is "politically driven". And what does enabling media monopolies have to do with republican distrust of media? Also, from the article "Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'". How does that square with "republican distrust of media"?
raggi 4y ago
I think the US needs to regulate "news" vs. "entertainment news" and so on. I remember speaking to some younger folks recently, and I mentioned journalistic integrity, and they didn't even believe the concept ever exists. I doubt they have ever consumed any significant amount of content produced by professional journalists operating under the stricture of formal editorials and fact checking, but it is still somewhat concerning that they don't even acknowledge its existence. There's some things to be said in this space: - Newspapers were never competently replaced, business model wise - Web ads were never sufficiently constrained to not break web pages - Ad blockers ultimately started to completely destroy any last chance that ad powered solutions could pay for professional journalism - Entertainment journalism has a different business model, enabling it to be more readily available, and popular, than formal journalism - I don't think anyone knows where to go from here I really dislike the term "media" in these discussions, because it seems to lump "entertainment news" squarely in with formal journalism, and I do not think they're equivalent - moreover it's clear the difference is not well observed anymore, and that's extremely concerning.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  I know where to go: away from the internet and back to real life, observing what is around me with my own two eyes and drawing conclusions from that. If I find myself ignorant about a particular topic, I will go study it myself rather than rely on "the experts."
  - raggi 4y ago
    There are almost no communities left in the world who do not at least use a manufactured mechanical device to create fire every day, and even the production, sale and distribution of those devices has some significant and politically relevant implications to our world. I don't think the eyes only world exists anymore. You're absolutely free (I hope) to try to ignore the rest of it, but you'll interact with it regardless.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    That's just a stop-gap solution. We have small bandwidth and can't be expected to figure out the truth on our own for every relevant topic. That's why it's a travesty that there aren't journalistic outlets that can be reliably counted on to stick up for the truth when that truth happens to be contrary to their political leaning.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Can you imagine the absolute field day the mass media would have if Trump had a son like Hunter Biden? The only way his sons are not like Hunter Biden is that their dad is the bigger train wreck.
  - ErikVandeWater 4y ago
    Good one!
- themitigating 4y ago
  They mass media is going after hunter biden. https://www.foxnews.com/category/person/hunter-biden https://www.foxnews.com/category/person/hunter-biden
- mynameishere 4y ago
  Democrats are curiously uninterested in media bias. I suppose that, as soon as you admit such a thing, your political world starts collapsing. "We're in charge? And have been for decades? And everything is colored to both fool and please me?" And consider Hunter Biden, who is actually small potatoes. Consider just his comment "10 percent to the big guy"--that statement alone and nothing else about him--from the desk of Donald Trump Jr., would be 24/7 news month after month from 95 percent of the media. They'd be cutting back on their kangaroo court coverage and everything! And Hunter was talking about Ukraine! That's pretty curious (you'd think). But I think your average dope isn't even aware of what a goddamned crook Biden is. So why would an informed person have "trust" in the media? Educated Soviets didn't trust the Pravda either.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
Cupertino95014 4y ago
[flagged]
- themitigating 4y ago
  "The leaders of today’s Democratic Party ... despise this country,” he said. “They have said so. They continue to. That is shocking but it is also disqualifying. We cannot let them run this nation because they hate it. Imagine what they would do to it.” Tucker carlson on foxnews
- labster 4y ago
  That’s completely false. The news is owned by massive corporations pushing far-right agendas. The left can hardly get any coverage, while people who would be considered moderates in Europe are branded as far left radicals in the US news.
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    Funny: "The left can hardly get any coverage." What are things like on Planet Labster? If there's a press conference and Biden only calls on "friendly" reporters that his staff has told him to call on, does your news outlet even report it? If a BAD reporter asks a question about a Biden voicemail with his son and the press secretary refuses to discuss it, do you even read about it?
    - labster 4y ago
      The planet where Biden is considered a middle of the road moderate. He’s to the right of the UK Conservative Party on health care, but to the left on immigration. I hear plenty on Hunter Biden but don’t really care. I’m not sure why anyone cares the president’s son is kind of a screw-up. Most people don’t like to talk about family embarrassments in public.
      - Cupertino95014 4y ago
        LOL: "middle of the road moderate." Given a 30% approval rating, it doesn't seem like he's hitting his target. Get your sons right, at least. Beau is the one who died. Hunter is the one trading on his father's name, getting on the board of Ukrainian gas companies despite lacking any conceivable expertise.
bandyaboot 4y ago
Speaking of the US, and generally, we have the media and the politics that we deserve. I just laugh at these polls. Yeah, our news media is super low quality, but so is our average citizen. edit: To clarify, I laugh not because it’s funny, but because all the other more appropriate emotions have long since run out.
- borissk 4y ago
  That's a slippery slope thinking - if the average citizen is low quality and easy to manipulate why would the bureaucrats and politicians avoid stealing bits and pieces of the common good - leading to corrupted societies like Russia and many/most African countries where no progress is made/can be made. Obviously the West is not there yet, but if the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for, we'll get there.
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    Yes we will. So far the institutions that have been built up have continued on cruise control avoiding much in the way of large scale or persistent corruption. But, the 4 years of Trump demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
    - _gabe_ 4y ago
      > But, the 2 years of Biden demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars. > But, the 8 years of Obama demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars. > But, the 8 years of Bush demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars. I'm sorry, I just really don't like statements like this. It literally tells me nothing except what political affiliation you have and it does not give any coherent argument for/against why "the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for".
tayo42 4y ago
Nothing to do with politics, I started to lose trust in news when I started coming across more articles on topics that I was actually knowledgeable about and noticed they're misleading, just wrong, or had some bias in it. If you think about it, does the typical journalist who probably trained in just writing really understand some of these complex topics they write about.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  > If you think about it, does the typical journalist who probably trained in just writing really understand some of these complex topics they write about. No, but I like to think that journalism is supposed to be about finding the real experts, asking good questions that the general populace would want answered, and judiciously recording and reporting the answers they get. I feel like most of the journalism we get today is more akin to bad interviews, where the interviewer doesn't know when to shut up and let the expert talk haha.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
crmd 4y ago
Go to nytimes.com right now and search for the string “far-right” and then the string “far-left”, counting the number of times these respective phrases were included in an article in the past year. Then, do the same on foxnews.com. Symmetric opposites. Even readers with relatively low media literacy understand now that mass media doesn’t just give you curated stories about what is happening, they are also telling you how to feel about what is happening. This has probably always been happening but ordinary Americans are more aware of it now. They are about as credible as the US Supreme Court which claims to apolitically “call balls and strikes”.
- lemmsjid 4y ago
  While I find Fox News odious politically, at least the news desks at Fox News and the New York Times are dedicated to factual reporting, even if bias can be found in choice of story or omission. At least both are dedicated to public discourse and a certain regard for verifiable truth. The scariest by far thing to me is the increased movement towards total trust in media bodies that are happy to live in a realm of utter fabrication and appeal to raw paranoia and hatred of other groups.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    How much of their respective content is “news” versus “editorial”?
throwaway892238 4y ago
Is that actually true? Historically? If you go back to the first newspapers, they were basically rags. Throughout history, newspapers have been censored, they've been biased, partisan, used as propaganda. At the turn of the American Revolution they became political weapons. Later the robber barons used them to shape public opinion and punish rivals. Lately we seem to make a lot of proclamations about how terrible things are, and then we feel bad because we think things are "worse than ever". But usually they aren't as bad as they used to be.
- randomtwiddler 4y ago
  The notable difference is that historically the ownership of the outlets was widely varied. Now it is consolidated under the control of very few. That doesn't seem like a positive change to me.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  The comparison isn't with Gilded-Age era Yellow Journalism (generally 1890s -- 1910s), but the period of professionalised journalism born from Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion and dating roughly from the 1920s through about 2010, with a significant decline being noted beginning with the consolidation and financialisation of news in the 1980s. In reality, there's been a long-term secular decline remarkably constant over decades dating to the 1950s and the end of WWII. That's been punctuated by a number of factors --- the advent of television and television news, mass advertising, cable TV, media consolidation, financialisation, the Internet, neoliberalism, 9/11, the US-Iraq War & War on Terrorism, the 2008-09 global financial crisis (which tanked ad spend), and the rise of the smartphone and mobile social media. I.F. Stone interviewed on the PBS show Day at Night in 1974 spoke of what he saw as a golden age of American journalism in the 1970s, largely with the reporting on Watergate and the Vietnam War. That's the zenith to which the present situation might be compared. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g The topic is of course fare more complex. I've compiled a "light reading list" which I'm still working through myself, and need to add to, here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
uejfiweun 4y ago
This was inevitable. News used to serve a very necessary purpose. People simply didn't get much information and the news was a very necessary way to learn what was happening in the world around you. But times change. Now we live in the information age. People are constantly bombarded by information, so much that they can't even process it, myself included. The news media simply had no hope. So they executed a strategy that absolutely succeeded in the short term: reporting to induce mass hysteria. Covid is the worst pandemic ever, Trump destroyed the entire country, the US is a fundamentally racist and awful country that must die, etc. As I said, they succeeded in the short term to boost revenues, but the truth is that it was all mostly bullshit. And this strategy could only work once. Most things the news reports are just idiotic bullshit or opinions of people who don't matter, and people en masse are recognizing this. So yeah, I think this was inevitable. In the words of CBS president Les Moonves, the whole shift was "bad for the country, good for [CBS's] business". I definitely agree that the modern clickbait news is bad for the country, and I am not a shareholder of CBS, so I personally celebrate the collapse of trust in news and can't wait for it to completely die and for the new grassroots era of information to take hold (but I do dread the impact of deepfakes and the like).
- jakogut 4y ago
  We see similar approaches with social media. Fear and anger drive engagement, and engagement creates more ad revenue. I point this out whenever anybody expresses outrage to me over something they read off social media.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Why would grassroots journalism be more trustworthy? More people with no oversight or consequences? The amount of money spent on some research stories is tremendous how will grass roots journalists be able to do that The news was the only thing capable of pointing out corruption in business and politics. It was perfect, it didn't always work, sometimes they lied, and many had an agenda. Now it isn't trusted. Guss who will benefit.
MBCook 4y ago
Between one party practically running on the media being evil, the news covering every little thing no matter how stupid as a big event to keep up ratings, and barely doing any journalism (just showing press conference soundbites as fact) I’m not too surprised.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Which party?
  - junofan 4y ago
    The one amplifying (misinformation|fake news), of course ;)
  - MBCook 4y ago
    You have got to be kidding.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
marssaxman 4y ago
> the "single most important factor" in media distrust was "the horrible coverage" in the run-up to the Iraq war and "the disastrous media coverage in the years after 9/11," This is certainly true of my own experience. I am surprised to see it being pointed out so plainly in what appears to be a relatively mainstream sort of news outlet.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  There was also zero consequences for both the horrible coverage and the lies. We have people like David "axis of evil" Frum holding prestigious positions at media companies. He should be pumping gas or flipping burgers somewhere.
  - debacle 4y ago
    There were extreme consequences, but during the Obama era the government stepped in and started spending a lot of money propping up the news industry.
- harry-wood 4y ago
  I didn't understand that bit to be honest. Maybe because I'm from the UK. Why was the media coverage in the years after 9/11 disastrous?
  - flycaliguy 4y ago
    Perhaps the way the war in Afghanistan was drummed up.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I'm no expert but the news was a big part of causing American fervor when we started wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were united in a very unique way after the attacks and the news took advantage of that to drum up war support. We went to war with Iraq that literally had nothing to do with it. Wild when you think about it. I was young at the time and even I was calling for their country to be nuked. News 24/7 talking about the invasions.
Clubber 4y ago
Here's a related video I watched last night (not mine). Kinda goes over the historical events that changed what journalism is. Money and McCarthy era backlash are a couple big ones. Why News Used To Have Less Bias Exploring the claim that American news in the 50's and 60's was unbiased. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZPJpdmw3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZPJpdmw3A
caramelcustard 4y ago
Journalism as both an industry and an institution is going through a global "subculture" phase: from the arrogance of "you can't sit with us" attitude of ideologically driven media to those who follow neutrality for the sake of neutrality to please every audience possible.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Do you evidence of this?
ekianjo 4y ago
> The standards used by traditional media outlets — like fact-checking, bylines, datelines, and corrections — have not been fully-adopted by online news commentators on blogs, podcasts and social media. amusing comment, since so-called "fact checking" is just pure horse-shit mechanism to call something disinformation by using some fake experts that are in your pockets.
alfor 4y ago
The mass media is very left leaning and getting worse. They used to control the narrative, not so much anymore. They are in a spiral of death: lower revenu, more clickbait titles, less trust, more clickbait until there is nothing left of substance. The conservatives could feel how much media was perverted a few year ago, now it getting clear for people close to the center.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Election fraud accusations were reported on constantly without any evidence by right wing media. This is from a ruling in the case against foxnews that they tried to have dismissed: “Even assuming that Fox News did not intentionally allow this false narrative to be broadcasted, there is a substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” Cohen wrote in his decision. Just a note, this is not a judgment just a finding that the case can proceed
  - alfor 4y ago
    How many report have you see to discredit the same idea. My guess is that it’s probably 10 to 1. How many false accusation have you seen against Trump? It was a constant barrage of attack. Even humorists where no longer funny by hitting Trump so many times it got boring. Anyway, you are free to believe that the media is unbiased.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      I responded to someone who implied that this only happens with certain media. I didn't say anything about anyone being unbiased.
- he0001 4y ago
  How is media left leaning according to you? How does it manifest?
borissk 4y ago
It's just human nature. Look at Windows Update. It's a great feature, makes the OS many times more secure - potentially can patch 0-day exploits almost instantly. But Microsoft cannot use it just for customers good, they have to abuse the feature and use it to push advertisement, push more telemetry (aka snooping), push unwanted OS version updates, push unwanted option changes (oops, Edge is now the default browser). They fear that if they use Windows Update just for customer's good they are leaving money on the table and they hope the majority won't notice/understand the abuse. Same thing with mass media. It's a great feature of modern society and technology - a key element in any modern country (both liberal and unfortunately totalitarian - like Russia and China). But the owners cannot use it just for the society good - they fear they are leaving money on the table (and leaving money on the table means you're an easy target for take over) and they hope the majority won't understand the media is being abused (but as the article states the majority now does understand mass media is being abused and is not trustworthy).
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Public trust in government has also declined rapidly. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust-in-government-1958-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust... I am doubtful whether this loss in legitimacy can be recovered.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  I’m one of those rule follower types. Worked in govt for a while. Long time democrat “big govt” voter. If I’m losing faith it’s got to be a bad sign I think. So I believe these stats. I never thought govt was great, but very often “good enough”. Then we got cdc blocking Covid testing, Biden doing his big EV summit without Tesla and going on about GM being the one changing things, the space launch system boondoggle, just makes it hard to trust govt will spend money wisely
peterweyand0 4y ago
Trust in journalism, television and the news has never been lower, especially among Republicans and independents. And now for the good news - "And distrust in traditional institutions could force them to reckon with institutional problems, like a lack of diversity." I don't even know what to say, I'm shocked by the complete lack of self introspection. Even three lines up we have - "Data and experts suggest the public struggles to distinguish fact-based journalism from opinion content online." So I guess a gay black man would be able to somehow report facts better? The entire article is baffling.
- sbf501 4y ago
  I think you missed the point: How many gay black men own news institutions, or run them?
  - peterweyand0 4y ago
    When someone says "an institution needs more diversity" they mean that given two people for any job in the industry the minority should be chosen for diversities sake. They want women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities and religious minorities to be more qualified for available jobs for the sake of being rarer, as opposed to true equality. It's nonsense. And I say this as a weird person - me being weird shouldn't make me more qualified for any job in which my weirdness is orthogonal - nor should any non-job related uniqueness qualify anyone else. There are too few (good) jobs and too many qualified people, so it's a kind of gatekeeping. College is similar for the most part, but they do you the favor of teaching you something (while fleecing you at the same time, but that's another issue).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >"And distrust in traditional institutions could force them to reckon with institutional problems, like a lack of diversity." >I don't even know what to say, I'm shocked by the complete lack of self introspection. My "favorite" example of this, from CNN before COVID19 became a worldwide problem: "Coronavirus task force another example of Trump administration's lack of diversity" <https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-diversity-obama/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronav...>
akomtu 4y ago
So, let's take a look at the Axios' front page that fits 20 headlines: 4 headlines are about Musk and Twitter, as if this event has any importance to our lives. In any case, there is no need to rehash the same thing four times. 4 headlines are about abortion. Yeah, we know what's happened, you've told us ten times this already. It seems they just need to fill space with something. 2 talk about the Japan's Abe. As if they didn't talk about him yesterday. Then there's a bunch of cheap space-fillers like "The summer of subvariants" and "Handshakes are back". Trying to resuscitate the corpse of covid. These are budget click baits: mouse traps without the bait. GPT-3 would do a better job. The style of most content there is a mix of fearmongering, opinion forming, omission of details, and so on. Needless to say, they never ever report the opposite side of things: readers might start thinking, forming their own opinions and we don't want any of that. Where are the actual news, Axios?
dilan-dio4 4y ago
This may not be horrible thing if merely applied news from TV/social media, as most of that is pure garbage from both sides. The problem is that news that isn't sensationalized and hyperbolic is so dry that it will never be palatable by the average news consumer. There's a couple out there that manage to ride the thin line of both objective and entertaining like The Intercept, AP, Quillete.
unity1001 4y ago
This was caused by the consolidation of the press by a handful of corporations (at the moment 4-5 i believe) after the regulations that prevented that from happening were removed. The number of 4-5 also paints a false picture: Those 'different' corporations would have shared owners and large investment funds among them, so basically all press is consolidated among a handful of extremely rich men at this point. There was absolutely no reason why such people would not buy out all news and use it as a tool to propagate their own private interests when those regulations were removed. Especially by using them to push their public agenda to boost their business interest and different corporations' stock prices. Just like how it was in late 19th century with the Robber Barons. And don't even start looking at its effect on the elections - that's a bigger cesspit than what you can imagine.
- mc32 4y ago
  The news is not only shaped by news "organs" but also shaped these days by journalists themselves with their own interests and agendas whereas before they had an editor to dampen some of that personal stuff. But now we have journalists lying in the face of facts or ignoring strong counterarguments. In other words they have more or less all have their personal slant and push it to the fore without much restraint. There is little nuance. And by god, do they copy pasta talking points. Today Shinzo Abe out of the blue acquired the adjective "divisive".
  - vkou 4y ago
    > whereas before they had an editor to dampen some of that personal stuff. Or alternatively, before they had an editor to set that set of interests and agendas.
    - mc32 4y ago
      They did but editors tend to temper their journalists and keep them from going off the deep end of the pool. So yes, they had agendas too but they were kept from going into wild Pravda as well as The Enquirer territory.
  - 4y ago
juanani 4y ago
hadlock 4y ago
Was really impressed in the drop-off in covid news. Covid continues on at the same rate as before, is getting zero coverage, zero challenge to the CDC/WHO on giving a formal name to the "omicron" BA.4 and BA.5 variants despite so desperately needing to. The whole "it's mild" and then, well, neutralizing as many people before omicron as after, in two or three months, was an impressive anti-panic play, I'm not sure what else you could call that. Russia is sweeping through Ukraine at an impressive rate, but you wouldn't know that reading the headlines. Conservative media is telling one story, but the left is ignoring a lot of headlines as well.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  The US is a $20 trillion economy. Russia is sweeping through Ukraine at an impressively slow rate considering how little we are supporting them relative to the size of our economy.
- blindmute 4y ago
  - dang 4y ago
    Since you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, we've banned the account. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - blindmute 4y ago
      I disagree with your interpretation of primarily in regards to my comments. My comments are about a wide range of things, and when in ideological threads (curiously permitted constantly) they are primarily satire. They are also pretty much always in response to another ideological post; I am not creating ideology discussion out of thin air. So I'm just going to make a new account.
midislack 4y ago
"Orange man bad" killed it, it just became farcical. Nobody will ever, EVER take the media seriously ever again. I blame the deep state, which the media went from claiming didn't exist, to praising for helping to defeat Trump. It's cool, fully half the country is no longer tuning in and prefers to get their information from more reliable sources like Alex Jones. CIA fucked up SUPER hard and people aren't going back onto the farm's pastures, ever again. Can't take it back, can't fix it. Only thing that could help is honest reportage from a neutral perspective, and let's face it this will never ever ever happen. It's the end of an era. And America will become more healthy and diverse because the media failed so badly. Fifth estate became the fourth column decades ago, but people finally noticed once it became just farcical.
99_00 4y ago
Because the news is not credible. It's biased, misleading and deceptive. It favours the Democratic party. Of course many Democrats see bias in their favour as being simply reporting the truth. This stat says it all: Just 5% of Republicans said they had "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in newspapers, compared to 35% of Democrats. Only 8% of Republicans said they had "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in TV news, compared to 20% of Democrats. *Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'.*
wolverine876 4y ago
It has zero to do with newspapers (news websites?) and TV news. It's a radical revolution that is reaching a new peak - it's very hot to join the movement and disparage the institutions. It's power, to destroy, when the other option is to feel powerlessness; it's a mob that has completely swept up a large segment of the population and they are sweeping away much of the good and productive in society. People are so deep in it that they can't discuss it or even name it ... I don’t know who discovered water but I’m sure it wasn’t a fish. (Seriously: very likely you know what I'm talking about, but what is it called? We haven't even named it, we are so paralyzed.). The critical question to ask, of any radical revolution, is 'who benefits'? It's almost never the people caught up in it; they are usually manipulated or used or simply discarded by someone else who acts opportunistically. And the nihilism of this revolution ensures they will not benefit. How much damage will be done? How many generations will it take to rebuild? 1,000 years, like after the fall of Rome? I'm sure Romans thought that was impossible too, until the very last moment.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  Social media is fracking societal bonds for profit. It's not some evil conspiracy, just an alignment of incentives. We're in the timeline where SkyNet didn't send back a T-1000, they sent back Mark Zuckerberg and the like. ::: THIS ::: Is the AI apocalypse. We'll figure it all out, and route around the damage, I hope.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    The same people benefit every time (the reactionaries). It's hard to believe that is coincidence.
- rexpop 4y ago
  > disparage the institutions Can't we just call it post-structuralism or post-modernism?
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    It's not post-modernism; it's a rejection of post-modernism. Most importantly, the new movement-that-shall-not-be-named embraces and worships power, in themselves and others. Perhaps the most essential foundation of post-modernism is that power is a curse and danger.
mikewarot 4y ago
The model of journalism en vogue consists of telling stories that are depressing AND tell the user the problem is too big to fix, and thus absolving them of blame. It's hard not to end up nihilistic and hopeless in a world filled with those stories. The route around it is to ignore those institutions that have failed us, and build our own networks. HN is one of those networks. Pay attention to what people tell you, and if it turns out to be right or not in the long run. That's what I do.
lifeencoder 4y ago
Newspaper of the 21st Century https://nsource.news https://nsource.news
TwoNineFive 4y ago
The NEWS media has nobody but themselves to blame. My most recent favorite thing to despise is how often they use "blast" and "slam" and other hyperbolic wordage in headlines.
t0bia_s 4y ago
Really? Well... This could be trusted or not. It is just on our decision if we trust in information that is given to us or not. Or why even bother in first place if most of the news are actually irelevant for me?
forinti 4y ago
The quality of news generally is just awful. You could pick a newspaper from any day of the year and you'll have the same articles: crime, soccer, some hardly disguised ad for a new movie, etc. There's no reason to read it. TV news is also highly ritualistic. Why do they mention the stock exchanges every day? It's not really information, and those who care about it already know.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This feels a bit like polling people's belief in gods plural, or holy people/organisations. In many ways, it could be mapping knowledge that there is more than one opinion on the matter. Which could be interpreted positively (once you know there is more than one perspective you might evaluate them all more objectively) or it might reflect people doubling down on denouncing the other people's gods, or a mix of the two. Without any context on who has faith in what sources it seems somewhat useless. Particularly as "mainstream" media seems particularly slippery to define. "Do you believe in superstitions?" Is going to give weird answers if a more secular voting group is also aware that their particular religion is a superstition vs "No, I don't believe in any superstitions, I'm a Baptist".
egberts1 4y ago
Crushing consolidation of news, newspaper, magazines, and media in both printed and digital form are the cause of distrustfulness when “narratives” are being crafted by and in the hand of fewer but more-consolidated owners. This is called “mainstream media”. Budding writers of mainstream media are then forced to craft a disingenuous storyline to befit their masters. This is called a “narrative”. Unless they can secure their own wage and seek out the truth to the bottom of a story, they are called “muckrakers” and they would be practicing “yellow journalism”. And this current situation is not healthy for a freedom of press needed to maintain a robust form of democracy, pure (simple) ot not (Republic). For now, your local bar and neighbor shall remain closest to the kernel of truth.
throwaway8689 4y ago
On the occasions when I have been close to a newsworthy event, I have seen/read the reports afterwards and found them quite different from my own knowledge - so I haven't had much trust in the news in a long time.
wdr1 4y ago
The litmus test I often apply is: Do I feel more informed on the topic, such that I understand different POVs & can make up my own mind? Or am I being pushed a narrative? There are some exceptions, but most media fails. I don't want a news source to tell me how to think. Or even to validate my thinking. If anything, I want to understand why I might be wrong & other ways to look at a topic.
ninefathom 4y ago
While this is certainly believable, I think it's merely a symptom of a larger cultural shift towards sensationalism. Rephrased, I think that large swathes of the human population have been conditioned over the last couple of decades to perceive "fact" as "dull." Some might frame this as a chicken-and-egg issue: did the media outlets feed our instinctive bias towards flashy-shiny-blinky-zoomy, or did our natural bias pull the media outlets in that direction? At the end of the day, however, it seems likely that it was probably both; the addiction demands ever-increasing dosage and so on. The better question, to me, is this: do we, as individuals, have an ethical or moral responsibility to condition ourselves to be more appreciative of bland fact, for the sake of the species as a whole? Are cold, boring facts like broccoli for our brains?

180 points by bilsbie 4y ago

This article ends on a couple of pretty bizarre points. >Politico founding editor and editorial chairman John Harris reminded Smith on stage that "in the old days," a handful of people at a small number of outlets had all the agenda-setting power and they "would’ve all been white men." Diversity in the newsroom eroded trust!? >"All of us have biases and that maybe true objectivity is, what does your newsroom look like? How diverse is it?" said Al Jazeera English host Femi Oke at the event. Al Jazeera is Qatar's state-funded news agency. It's not the diversity of their newsroom, which probably isn't any higher than average, that matters but the topic that determines how much you can trust them. The language of coverage also apparently matters, since their Arabic coverage often has a significantly different slant than their English language coverage. ------------- I probably put more trust in traditional media than average, but that trust has definitely declined. This is for a few reasons not really covered in the article. Practically all but one or two newspapers in my country are owned by the same corporation. They target different demographics with different papers, but show a remarkable unity on topics that the owners have an interest in. Consolidation of media into a smaller number of wealthy, corporate hands has undeniably introduced significant bias, but it's gotten harder to identify that bias as the diversity of news publications has decreased. We are no longer presented with multiple independent viewpoints on a given event. Rather, we get multiple columnists from the same media conglomerate under the same editorial pressure. The internet has also played a role by making the monetization of news more difficult, and the typical corporate response when revenue drops is to cut costs. Why fund a bunch of war-zone reporters to get different views of a conflict when you can fill the same amount of air-time for a fraction of the cost with a bunch of pundits arguing with each other? This is cheaper, but also produces far less reliable information about the conflict. Bottom line, we need to find a way increase the diversity of ownership of news sources and also find a way to fund quality journalism. I still do appreciate traditional media because, if you're aware of their ownership biases, you at least know what you're dealing with. Alternative and social media are often much harder to vet.

FpUser 4y ago

My impression of modern news is that there is virtually no journalism and it is mostly low quality propaganda.

pacarvalho 4y ago

Even though the graphs do show some correlation between politics and media trust, I believe there may be other factors at play here. For instance, the need to make headlines ever more clickbait may also be eroding trust. Since the body of the article and the headline often don't agree.

samizdis 4y ago
That doesn't really hold for TV news, though. And even though it is annoying in print when articles fail to stand up their headlines, it doesn't necessarily mean that readers dismiss such articles entirely. It's more that they get pissed at the headline writers. Cf any number of articles headlined as a cancer "breakthrough" or an asteroid "heading for Earth" etc.
- RajT88 4y ago
  Getting pissed at headline writers and not trusting the media not to lie to you, I am not so sure are two separate things.

option_key 4y ago

This could mean that information literacy is on the rise.

Victerius 4y ago
Or the opposite (that information literacy is on the decline, and people who are more intelligent and better educated trust the news more, at least from credible sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and CNN).
- jwond 4y ago
  I’m not sure there are any news outlets remaining that I would consider credible, at least not consistently. They all have substantial black marks.
  - Kibae 4y ago
    Reuters is credible IMO.
    - junofan 4y ago
      DC and NYC coverage (especially of political demonstrations) can get a little dicey but otherwise they seem mostly ok.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      >Reuters is credible IMO. Can't say I agree: Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-blast-minister-idUKKCN105073 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-blast-minister-id...
  - themitigating 4y ago
    All are the same level? Seems unlikely
- haggy102 4y ago
  CNN is credible? According to whom?

kodah 4y ago

What's the point of publishing a report if they only intend to explain part of why they think only one of three interest groups in those categories don't trust them? The abysmally low numbers in the first place could start with an explanation, maybe one that doesn't shift the blame onto the viewer and takes accountability? I say this as someone would be an independent or Democrat on this graph.

tyleo 4y ago

As an American both right and left leaning news outlets don’t seem trustworthy. I find right wing news particularly annoying as it seems to amount to anger spewing and name calling in many cases. Left wing outlets are no angels either and present an extremely biased and hyperbolic picture of the world.

themitigating 4y ago
Which is worse?
- balderdash 4y ago
  They both produce the same outcome, they feed the consumers existing biases/priors and reinforce the notion that the other side is contemptible. They just do it it in different ways.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    It's not possible for the amount to be equal considering the number of people, companies, and news stories involved
echelon 4y ago
Read both. With both sides of the story you see what is being emphasized or downplayed by each party. You also see the shared themes. Add in international sources and see how they differ.

rayiner 4y ago

Look at the CNN main page right now: https://www.cnn.com/ https://www.cnn.com/ For me it shows: 1) Mass shooting porn (several different items) 2) Something about Twitter 3) Different shooting 4) Assassination of the former PM of a G7 country (somehow below the fold) 5) Trump 6) Abortion Only after much scrolling do you get to a story about the economy, which polls report is the single most important issue to most Americans.

ModernMech 4y ago
I’m confused about what you’re trying to say. CNN ran the jobs and unemployment numbers this morning when they came out. And they are in fact on the homepage. Contrast with FoxNews.com, which doesn’t have the numbers at all on the homepage (as far as I can tell, maybe I’m missing them, it’s late) and instead has an opinion from Larry Kudlow about how he thinks a recession is coming. Also after much scrolling. They did report the numbers though. What is your point exactly?
- rayiner 4y ago
  On the current CNN mobile page, the jobs numbers are more than halfway down, under something about Ford and VW self driving operations. The point is that, at best, CNN is out of touch with what people actually care about, and also milking tragedy for profit. Less charitably, they’re focusing on stories that could help democrats in the midterms while burying economic stories that are bad for democrats, while milking tragedy for profit. In the last decade they’ve completely dropped the pretense that they’re not openly rooting for one side. Fox News is partisan entertainment, and deliberately so. I’m not sure why you’re even bringing them up.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Fox News and CNN some of the largest news networks, and not all of Fox is partisan entertainment. Same for CNN which aired critical stories about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails every single day for months in 2016. The point was to bring another datapoint into the mix. If CNN were burying economic stories bad for Democrats, why isn’t Fox News the partisan entertainment network featuring them? Maybe the stories just aren’t so interesting to people? Or maybe they’re not so bad as you think? I tend to watch all 3 cable networks and inflation, recession worries, good jobs and unemployment numbers, and high but declining gas prices have been topics on all 3 this week. I just don’t see how anyone is hiding anything. The information is there, as you pointed out. Every story I saw yesterday about good jobs numbers had caveats about inflation and recession worries. I mean, are you suggesting that people aren’t aware of these things?

crikeyjoe 4y ago

Of course, it's all programming. But now it's replaced by forums like this and all the bots.

pmorici 4y ago

The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that as the Internet and cable tv gave news organizations greater reach they tended to become partisan in order to differentiate themselves. Truth is no longer profitable to the extent it contradicts what their audience wants to hear.

jackcosgrove 4y ago
Public opinion is bimodal in the US, shaped by the two party system. During the broadcast era media were forced to tailor their message for the median because you can only broadcast one message. However the median is actually smaller than the two modes on either side. When multicast messaging became technologically possible, it made economic sense to tailor your message for one of the modes, both to differentiate and to tap into a more engaged audience, the extremes of which had been ignored during the broadcast era.

fatcat500 4y ago

They burnt through all the cultural capital they had by spending it on short-term political victories. Now people see the media not as a source of information, but as an instrument of the establishment to influence and control. The same will happen with the other institutions. We already have large amount of people skeptical of the CDC, WHO, and other health oriented orgs. We have growing skepticism of large financial institutions (fed & inflation, IMF & "you will own nothing", etc.). There is widespread skepticism of academic institutions, which will cause the value of academic titles to depreciate. All this because the people who control these institutions insist on using them as political instruments (at certain times). I wonder what the situation will be 50 years from now...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
creato 4y ago
This take would be a lot more reasonable if people weren’t turning to crazy Facebook uncles for information instead.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  They turn there because what could be less establishment? The establishment gives its imprimatur to the news media, and they've proven untrustworthy, so the (weak) reasoning goes, why not turn to whatever the establishment condemns? Listen to Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Q, the Doomsinger of Alexandria (okay, I made that one up). They don't trust any of it anyway, except a few of the worst Q addicts, but they figure, we know CNN lies and twists, and they hate us, so might as well listen to the liar who's on our side.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    I agree with everything except that last part: "So might as well listen to the liar who I trust is on our side"
    - 4y ago

hertzrat 4y ago

Trust is low because I read a science journalism article recently that claimed mit (or somebody else) had found, but we’re not sharing, drugs that prolonged life spans by 30%. In reality, the report said that they found a drug that raised levels of a certain chemical predictably in mice and humans, and did not venture further claims. The article is fraudulent and almost every science news post does it. If the media wants to be trusted, they need to stop lying

CSMastermind 4y ago

It's interesting to me because the original subscription model of newspapers was built to counter the perceived low information quality that came from an era where papers were based entirely on sales and ad revenue (leading to the original 'clickbait' headlines). It seems like the internet, powered by advertising, brought the 'attention' economy roaring back. In its wake news organizations and their hard-won subscriber bases were eroded. Now we seemed poised to relearn the same lessons about what happens when your incentives are not for truth and accuracy but rather attention.

zwkrt 4y ago
Before that though there were interest based papers and local news that was hard hitting and relevant, union papers, private investigation, and generally a high interest in journalism that was worth a damn. As the internet has evolved inexorably to take advantage of our psychology, I don't think we are going back.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mattbuilds 4y ago
Sorry to hijack your comment and kind of unrelated, but does anyone have any books that discuss the beginning of mass media/newspapers. Your comment about the internet brining back the “attention” economy has me interested in the origins of mass media. Just seems like it would be an interesting topic that probably has some relevance today.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  One of the most delightful takes I've run across is a 1909 lecture by Hamilton Holt, himself a magazine publisher, titled Comemercialism and Journalism. It's a short, engaging, fact-filled, and highly-informative read: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft Other than that, I've compiled a "light reading list" which I still feel is a good starting point though I'd probably add to it. Previously mentioned in this thread, and inlcuding Holts's work, as well as several of the other suggestions responding to your question. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

shrubble 4y ago

Almost 30 years ago, author Michael Crichton laid out his media criticism in Wired magazine. It's sad that aside from the dated examples, it rings so true now: https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/ https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

nathanaldensr 4y ago
Despite the down-votes, you are likely right on the money. I know several people whose eyes were opened regarding the media for the five year 2016-2020 period.
h2odragon 4y ago
and "two weeks to flatten the curve"... "gee guess we didn't need those emergency wards after all, oh goody we saved the world"

O__________O 4y ago

If you look at the linked page, pretty obvious that the source of the divide is politically driven and largely tied to republican distrust of the media — which goes back Regan destroying objective reporting with deregulation in 1987 and Clinton enabling media monopolies in the 90s: https://apnews.com/article/business-immigration-deregulation-f2021dc7425a4001b1f910a3bb075b87 https://apnews.com/article/business-immigration-deregulation...

stjohnswarts 4y ago
It was popularized by fox news. They declare themselves as the only source of "fair and balanced news" and lot of less sophisticated people buy into it because they feed them stories, regardless of the truth behind it, they want to see and rub their opinion all over it instead of just reporting the facts of the story.
- dlivingston 4y ago
  It’s a multivariate problem. I would guess that both you and parent are right, along with half a dozen other major variables. That’s not to diminish the role that Fox or Reagan has had, but rather, that it’s a much more complex problem. And, you would be remiss laying it solely on Conservative feet.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Fox News didn’t even exist until 1996. OP is talking about a decline in trust in institutions that started long before that: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g...
- 99_00 4y ago
  Then why, as the article states, do "Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'."
99_00 4y ago
What do you mean it is "politically driven". And what does enabling media monopolies have to do with republican distrust of media? Also, from the article "Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'". How does that square with "republican distrust of media"?

raggi 4y ago

I think the US needs to regulate "news" vs. "entertainment news" and so on. I remember speaking to some younger folks recently, and I mentioned journalistic integrity, and they didn't even believe the concept ever exists. I doubt they have ever consumed any significant amount of content produced by professional journalists operating under the stricture of formal editorials and fact checking, but it is still somewhat concerning that they don't even acknowledge its existence. There's some things to be said in this space: - Newspapers were never competently replaced, business model wise - Web ads were never sufficiently constrained to not break web pages - Ad blockers ultimately started to completely destroy any last chance that ad powered solutions could pay for professional journalism - Entertainment journalism has a different business model, enabling it to be more readily available, and popular, than formal journalism - I don't think anyone knows where to go from here I really dislike the term "media" in these discussions, because it seems to lump "entertainment news" squarely in with formal journalism, and I do not think they're equivalent - moreover it's clear the difference is not well observed anymore, and that's extremely concerning.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
I know where to go: away from the internet and back to real life, observing what is around me with my own two eyes and drawing conclusions from that. If I find myself ignorant about a particular topic, I will go study it myself rather than rely on "the experts."
- raggi 4y ago
  There are almost no communities left in the world who do not at least use a manufactured mechanical device to create fire every day, and even the production, sale and distribution of those devices has some significant and politically relevant implications to our world. I don't think the eyes only world exists anymore. You're absolutely free (I hope) to try to ignore the rest of it, but you'll interact with it regardless.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  That's just a stop-gap solution. We have small bandwidth and can't be expected to figure out the truth on our own for every relevant topic. That's why it's a travesty that there aren't journalistic outlets that can be reliably counted on to stick up for the truth when that truth happens to be contrary to their political leaning.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Can you imagine the absolute field day the mass media would have if Trump had a son like Hunter Biden? The only way his sons are not like Hunter Biden is that their dad is the bigger train wreck.
- ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  Good one!
themitigating 4y ago
They mass media is going after hunter biden. https://www.foxnews.com/category/person/hunter-biden https://www.foxnews.com/category/person/hunter-biden
mynameishere 4y ago
Democrats are curiously uninterested in media bias. I suppose that, as soon as you admit such a thing, your political world starts collapsing. "We're in charge? And have been for decades? And everything is colored to both fool and please me?" And consider Hunter Biden, who is actually small potatoes. Consider just his comment "10 percent to the big guy"--that statement alone and nothing else about him--from the desk of Donald Trump Jr., would be 24/7 news month after month from 95 percent of the media. They'd be cutting back on their kangaroo court coverage and everything! And Hunter was talking about Ukraine! That's pretty curious (you'd think). But I think your average dope isn't even aware of what a goddamned crook Biden is. So why would an informed person have "trust" in the media? Educated Soviets didn't trust the Pravda either.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

Cupertino95014 4y ago

[flagged]

themitigating 4y ago
"The leaders of today’s Democratic Party ... despise this country,” he said. “They have said so. They continue to. That is shocking but it is also disqualifying. We cannot let them run this nation because they hate it. Imagine what they would do to it.” Tucker carlson on foxnews
labster 4y ago
That’s completely false. The news is owned by massive corporations pushing far-right agendas. The left can hardly get any coverage, while people who would be considered moderates in Europe are branded as far left radicals in the US news.
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  Funny: "The left can hardly get any coverage." What are things like on Planet Labster? If there's a press conference and Biden only calls on "friendly" reporters that his staff has told him to call on, does your news outlet even report it? If a BAD reporter asks a question about a Biden voicemail with his son and the press secretary refuses to discuss it, do you even read about it?
  - labster 4y ago
    The planet where Biden is considered a middle of the road moderate. He’s to the right of the UK Conservative Party on health care, but to the left on immigration. I hear plenty on Hunter Biden but don’t really care. I’m not sure why anyone cares the president’s son is kind of a screw-up. Most people don’t like to talk about family embarrassments in public.
    - Cupertino95014 4y ago
      LOL: "middle of the road moderate." Given a 30% approval rating, it doesn't seem like he's hitting his target. Get your sons right, at least. Beau is the one who died. Hunter is the one trading on his father's name, getting on the board of Ukrainian gas companies despite lacking any conceivable expertise.

bandyaboot 4y ago

Speaking of the US, and generally, we have the media and the politics that we deserve. I just laugh at these polls. Yeah, our news media is super low quality, but so is our average citizen. edit: To clarify, I laugh not because it’s funny, but because all the other more appropriate emotions have long since run out.

borissk 4y ago
That's a slippery slope thinking - if the average citizen is low quality and easy to manipulate why would the bureaucrats and politicians avoid stealing bits and pieces of the common good - leading to corrupted societies like Russia and many/most African countries where no progress is made/can be made. Obviously the West is not there yet, but if the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for, we'll get there.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  Yes we will. So far the institutions that have been built up have continued on cruise control avoiding much in the way of large scale or persistent corruption. But, the 4 years of Trump demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
  - _gabe_ 4y ago
    > But, the 2 years of Biden demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars. > But, the 8 years of Obama demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars. > But, the 8 years of Bush demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars. I'm sorry, I just really don't like statements like this. It literally tells me nothing except what political affiliation you have and it does not give any coherent argument for/against why "the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for".

tayo42 4y ago

Nothing to do with politics, I started to lose trust in news when I started coming across more articles on topics that I was actually knowledgeable about and noticed they're misleading, just wrong, or had some bias in it. If you think about it, does the typical journalist who probably trained in just writing really understand some of these complex topics they write about.

_gabe_ 4y ago
> If you think about it, does the typical journalist who probably trained in just writing really understand some of these complex topics they write about. No, but I like to think that journalism is supposed to be about finding the real experts, asking good questions that the general populace would want answered, and judiciously recording and reporting the answers they get. I feel like most of the journalism we get today is more akin to bad interviews, where the interviewer doesn't know when to shut up and let the expert talk haha.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

crmd 4y ago

Go to nytimes.com right now and search for the string “far-right” and then the string “far-left”, counting the number of times these respective phrases were included in an article in the past year. Then, do the same on foxnews.com. Symmetric opposites. Even readers with relatively low media literacy understand now that mass media doesn’t just give you curated stories about what is happening, they are also telling you how to feel about what is happening. This has probably always been happening but ordinary Americans are more aware of it now. They are about as credible as the US Supreme Court which claims to apolitically “call balls and strikes”.

lemmsjid 4y ago
While I find Fox News odious politically, at least the news desks at Fox News and the New York Times are dedicated to factual reporting, even if bias can be found in choice of story or omission. At least both are dedicated to public discourse and a certain regard for verifiable truth. The scariest by far thing to me is the increased movement towards total trust in media bodies that are happy to live in a realm of utter fabrication and appeal to raw paranoia and hatred of other groups.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  How much of their respective content is “news” versus “editorial”?

throwaway892238 4y ago

Is that actually true? Historically? If you go back to the first newspapers, they were basically rags. Throughout history, newspapers have been censored, they've been biased, partisan, used as propaganda. At the turn of the American Revolution they became political weapons. Later the robber barons used them to shape public opinion and punish rivals. Lately we seem to make a lot of proclamations about how terrible things are, and then we feel bad because we think things are "worse than ever". But usually they aren't as bad as they used to be.

randomtwiddler 4y ago
The notable difference is that historically the ownership of the outlets was widely varied. Now it is consolidated under the control of very few. That doesn't seem like a positive change to me.
dredmorbius 4y ago
The comparison isn't with Gilded-Age era Yellow Journalism (generally 1890s -- 1910s), but the period of professionalised journalism born from Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion and dating roughly from the 1920s through about 2010, with a significant decline being noted beginning with the consolidation and financialisation of news in the 1980s. In reality, there's been a long-term secular decline remarkably constant over decades dating to the 1950s and the end of WWII. That's been punctuated by a number of factors --- the advent of television and television news, mass advertising, cable TV, media consolidation, financialisation, the Internet, neoliberalism, 9/11, the US-Iraq War & War on Terrorism, the 2008-09 global financial crisis (which tanked ad spend), and the rise of the smartphone and mobile social media. I.F. Stone interviewed on the PBS show Day at Night in 1974 spoke of what he saw as a golden age of American journalism in the 1970s, largely with the reporting on Watergate and the Vietnam War. That's the zenith to which the present situation might be compared. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g The topic is of course fare more complex. I've compiled a "light reading list" which I'm still working through myself, and need to add to, here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

uejfiweun 4y ago

This was inevitable. News used to serve a very necessary purpose. People simply didn't get much information and the news was a very necessary way to learn what was happening in the world around you. But times change. Now we live in the information age. People are constantly bombarded by information, so much that they can't even process it, myself included. The news media simply had no hope. So they executed a strategy that absolutely succeeded in the short term: reporting to induce mass hysteria. Covid is the worst pandemic ever, Trump destroyed the entire country, the US is a fundamentally racist and awful country that must die, etc. As I said, they succeeded in the short term to boost revenues, but the truth is that it was all mostly bullshit. And this strategy could only work once. Most things the news reports are just idiotic bullshit or opinions of people who don't matter, and people en masse are recognizing this. So yeah, I think this was inevitable. In the words of CBS president Les Moonves, the whole shift was "bad for the country, good for [CBS's] business". I definitely agree that the modern clickbait news is bad for the country, and I am not a shareholder of CBS, so I personally celebrate the collapse of trust in news and can't wait for it to completely die and for the new grassroots era of information to take hold (but I do dread the impact of deepfakes and the like).

jakogut 4y ago
We see similar approaches with social media. Fear and anger drive engagement, and engagement creates more ad revenue. I point this out whenever anybody expresses outrage to me over something they read off social media.
themitigating 4y ago
Why would grassroots journalism be more trustworthy? More people with no oversight or consequences? The amount of money spent on some research stories is tremendous how will grass roots journalists be able to do that The news was the only thing capable of pointing out corruption in business and politics. It was perfect, it didn't always work, sometimes they lied, and many had an agenda. Now it isn't trusted. Guss who will benefit.

MBCook 4y ago

Between one party practically running on the media being evil, the news covering every little thing no matter how stupid as a big event to keep up ratings, and barely doing any journalism (just showing press conference soundbites as fact) I’m not too surprised.

themitigating 4y ago
Which party?
- junofan 4y ago
  The one amplifying (misinformation|fake news), of course ;)
- MBCook 4y ago
  You have got to be kidding.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

marssaxman 4y ago

> the "single most important factor" in media distrust was "the horrible coverage" in the run-up to the Iraq war and "the disastrous media coverage in the years after 9/11," This is certainly true of my own experience. I am surprised to see it being pointed out so plainly in what appears to be a relatively mainstream sort of news outlet.

AlexandrB 4y ago
There was also zero consequences for both the horrible coverage and the lies. We have people like David "axis of evil" Frum holding prestigious positions at media companies. He should be pumping gas or flipping burgers somewhere.
- debacle 4y ago
  There were extreme consequences, but during the Obama era the government stepped in and started spending a lot of money propping up the news industry.
harry-wood 4y ago
I didn't understand that bit to be honest. Maybe because I'm from the UK. Why was the media coverage in the years after 9/11 disastrous?
- flycaliguy 4y ago
  Perhaps the way the war in Afghanistan was drummed up.
- xeromal 4y ago
  I'm no expert but the news was a big part of causing American fervor when we started wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were united in a very unique way after the attacks and the news took advantage of that to drum up war support. We went to war with Iraq that literally had nothing to do with it. Wild when you think about it. I was young at the time and even I was calling for their country to be nuked. News 24/7 talking about the invasions.

Clubber 4y ago

Here's a related video I watched last night (not mine). Kinda goes over the historical events that changed what journalism is. Money and McCarthy era backlash are a couple big ones. Why News Used To Have Less Bias Exploring the claim that American news in the 50's and 60's was unbiased. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZPJpdmw3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZPJpdmw3A

caramelcustard 4y ago

Journalism as both an industry and an institution is going through a global "subculture" phase: from the arrogance of "you can't sit with us" attitude of ideologically driven media to those who follow neutrality for the sake of neutrality to please every audience possible.

themitigating 4y ago
Do you evidence of this?

ekianjo 4y ago

> The standards used by traditional media outlets — like fact-checking, bylines, datelines, and corrections — have not been fully-adopted by online news commentators on blogs, podcasts and social media. amusing comment, since so-called "fact checking" is just pure horse-shit mechanism to call something disinformation by using some fake experts that are in your pockets.

alfor 4y ago

The mass media is very left leaning and getting worse. They used to control the narrative, not so much anymore. They are in a spiral of death: lower revenu, more clickbait titles, less trust, more clickbait until there is nothing left of substance. The conservatives could feel how much media was perverted a few year ago, now it getting clear for people close to the center.

themitigating 4y ago
Election fraud accusations were reported on constantly without any evidence by right wing media. This is from a ruling in the case against foxnews that they tried to have dismissed: “Even assuming that Fox News did not intentionally allow this false narrative to be broadcasted, there is a substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” Cohen wrote in his decision. Just a note, this is not a judgment just a finding that the case can proceed
- alfor 4y ago
  How many report have you see to discredit the same idea. My guess is that it’s probably 10 to 1. How many false accusation have you seen against Trump? It was a constant barrage of attack. Even humorists where no longer funny by hitting Trump so many times it got boring. Anyway, you are free to believe that the media is unbiased.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    I responded to someone who implied that this only happens with certain media. I didn't say anything about anyone being unbiased.
he0001 4y ago
How is media left leaning according to you? How does it manifest?

borissk 4y ago

It's just human nature. Look at Windows Update. It's a great feature, makes the OS many times more secure - potentially can patch 0-day exploits almost instantly. But Microsoft cannot use it just for customers good, they have to abuse the feature and use it to push advertisement, push more telemetry (aka snooping), push unwanted OS version updates, push unwanted option changes (oops, Edge is now the default browser). They fear that if they use Windows Update just for customer's good they are leaving money on the table and they hope the majority won't notice/understand the abuse. Same thing with mass media. It's a great feature of modern society and technology - a key element in any modern country (both liberal and unfortunately totalitarian - like Russia and China). But the owners cannot use it just for the society good - they fear they are leaving money on the table (and leaving money on the table means you're an easy target for take over) and they hope the majority won't understand the media is being abused (but as the article states the majority now does understand mass media is being abused and is not trustworthy).

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Public trust in government has also declined rapidly. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust-in-government-1958-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust... I am doubtful whether this loss in legitimacy can be recovered.

onphonenow 4y ago
I’m one of those rule follower types. Worked in govt for a while. Long time democrat “big govt” voter. If I’m losing faith it’s got to be a bad sign I think. So I believe these stats. I never thought govt was great, but very often “good enough”. Then we got cdc blocking Covid testing, Biden doing his big EV summit without Tesla and going on about GM being the one changing things, the space launch system boondoggle, just makes it hard to trust govt will spend money wisely

peterweyand0 4y ago

Trust in journalism, television and the news has never been lower, especially among Republicans and independents. And now for the good news - "And distrust in traditional institutions could force them to reckon with institutional problems, like a lack of diversity." I don't even know what to say, I'm shocked by the complete lack of self introspection. Even three lines up we have - "Data and experts suggest the public struggles to distinguish fact-based journalism from opinion content online." So I guess a gay black man would be able to somehow report facts better? The entire article is baffling.

sbf501 4y ago
I think you missed the point: How many gay black men own news institutions, or run them?
- peterweyand0 4y ago
  When someone says "an institution needs more diversity" they mean that given two people for any job in the industry the minority should be chosen for diversities sake. They want women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities and religious minorities to be more qualified for available jobs for the sake of being rarer, as opposed to true equality. It's nonsense. And I say this as a weird person - me being weird shouldn't make me more qualified for any job in which my weirdness is orthogonal - nor should any non-job related uniqueness qualify anyone else. There are too few (good) jobs and too many qualified people, so it's a kind of gatekeeping. College is similar for the most part, but they do you the favor of teaching you something (while fleecing you at the same time, but that's another issue).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TMWNN 4y ago
>"And distrust in traditional institutions could force them to reckon with institutional problems, like a lack of diversity." >I don't even know what to say, I'm shocked by the complete lack of self introspection. My "favorite" example of this, from CNN before COVID19 became a worldwide problem: "Coronavirus task force another example of Trump administration's lack of diversity" <https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-diversity-obama/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronav...>

akomtu 4y ago

So, let's take a look at the Axios' front page that fits 20 headlines: 4 headlines are about Musk and Twitter, as if this event has any importance to our lives. In any case, there is no need to rehash the same thing four times. 4 headlines are about abortion. Yeah, we know what's happened, you've told us ten times this already. It seems they just need to fill space with something. 2 talk about the Japan's Abe. As if they didn't talk about him yesterday. Then there's a bunch of cheap space-fillers like "The summer of subvariants" and "Handshakes are back". Trying to resuscitate the corpse of covid. These are budget click baits: mouse traps without the bait. GPT-3 would do a better job. The style of most content there is a mix of fearmongering, opinion forming, omission of details, and so on. Needless to say, they never ever report the opposite side of things: readers might start thinking, forming their own opinions and we don't want any of that. Where are the actual news, Axios?

dilan-dio4 4y ago

This may not be horrible thing if merely applied news from TV/social media, as most of that is pure garbage from both sides. The problem is that news that isn't sensationalized and hyperbolic is so dry that it will never be palatable by the average news consumer. There's a couple out there that manage to ride the thin line of both objective and entertaining like The Intercept, AP, Quillete.

unity1001 4y ago

This was caused by the consolidation of the press by a handful of corporations (at the moment 4-5 i believe) after the regulations that prevented that from happening were removed. The number of 4-5 also paints a false picture: Those 'different' corporations would have shared owners and large investment funds among them, so basically all press is consolidated among a handful of extremely rich men at this point. There was absolutely no reason why such people would not buy out all news and use it as a tool to propagate their own private interests when those regulations were removed. Especially by using them to push their public agenda to boost their business interest and different corporations' stock prices. Just like how it was in late 19th century with the Robber Barons. And don't even start looking at its effect on the elections - that's a bigger cesspit than what you can imagine.

mc32 4y ago
The news is not only shaped by news "organs" but also shaped these days by journalists themselves with their own interests and agendas whereas before they had an editor to dampen some of that personal stuff. But now we have journalists lying in the face of facts or ignoring strong counterarguments. In other words they have more or less all have their personal slant and push it to the fore without much restraint. There is little nuance. And by god, do they copy pasta talking points. Today Shinzo Abe out of the blue acquired the adjective "divisive".
- vkou 4y ago
  > whereas before they had an editor to dampen some of that personal stuff. Or alternatively, before they had an editor to set that set of interests and agendas.
  - mc32 4y ago
    They did but editors tend to temper their journalists and keep them from going off the deep end of the pool. So yes, they had agendas too but they were kept from going into wild Pravda as well as The Enquirer territory.
- 4y ago

juanani 4y ago

hadlock 4y ago

Was really impressed in the drop-off in covid news. Covid continues on at the same rate as before, is getting zero coverage, zero challenge to the CDC/WHO on giving a formal name to the "omicron" BA.4 and BA.5 variants despite so desperately needing to. The whole "it's mild" and then, well, neutralizing as many people before omicron as after, in two or three months, was an impressive anti-panic play, I'm not sure what else you could call that. Russia is sweeping through Ukraine at an impressive rate, but you wouldn't know that reading the headlines. Conservative media is telling one story, but the left is ignoring a lot of headlines as well.

mensetmanusman 4y ago
The US is a $20 trillion economy. Russia is sweeping through Ukraine at an impressively slow rate considering how little we are supporting them relative to the size of our economy.
blindmute 4y ago
- dang 4y ago
  Since you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, we've banned the account. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - blindmute 4y ago
    I disagree with your interpretation of primarily in regards to my comments. My comments are about a wide range of things, and when in ideological threads (curiously permitted constantly) they are primarily satire. They are also pretty much always in response to another ideological post; I am not creating ideology discussion out of thin air. So I'm just going to make a new account.

midislack 4y ago

"Orange man bad" killed it, it just became farcical. Nobody will ever, EVER take the media seriously ever again. I blame the deep state, which the media went from claiming didn't exist, to praising for helping to defeat Trump. It's cool, fully half the country is no longer tuning in and prefers to get their information from more reliable sources like Alex Jones. CIA fucked up SUPER hard and people aren't going back onto the farm's pastures, ever again. Can't take it back, can't fix it. Only thing that could help is honest reportage from a neutral perspective, and let's face it this will never ever ever happen. It's the end of an era. And America will become more healthy and diverse because the media failed so badly. Fifth estate became the fourth column decades ago, but people finally noticed once it became just farcical.

99_00 4y ago

Because the news is not credible. It's biased, misleading and deceptive. It favours the Democratic party. Of course many Democrats see bias in their favour as being simply reporting the truth. This stat says it all: Just 5% of Republicans said they had "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in newspapers, compared to 35% of Democrats. Only 8% of Republicans said they had "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in TV news, compared to 20% of Democrats. *Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'.*

wolverine876 4y ago

It has zero to do with newspapers (news websites?) and TV news. It's a radical revolution that is reaching a new peak - it's very hot to join the movement and disparage the institutions. It's power, to destroy, when the other option is to feel powerlessness; it's a mob that has completely swept up a large segment of the population and they are sweeping away much of the good and productive in society. People are so deep in it that they can't discuss it or even name it ... I don’t know who discovered water but I’m sure it wasn’t a fish. (Seriously: very likely you know what I'm talking about, but what is it called? We haven't even named it, we are so paralyzed.). The critical question to ask, of any radical revolution, is 'who benefits'? It's almost never the people caught up in it; they are usually manipulated or used or simply discarded by someone else who acts opportunistically. And the nihilism of this revolution ensures they will not benefit. How much damage will be done? How many generations will it take to rebuild? 1,000 years, like after the fall of Rome? I'm sure Romans thought that was impossible too, until the very last moment.

mikewarot 4y ago
Social media is fracking societal bonds for profit. It's not some evil conspiracy, just an alignment of incentives. We're in the timeline where SkyNet didn't send back a T-1000, they sent back Mark Zuckerberg and the like. ::: THIS ::: Is the AI apocalypse. We'll figure it all out, and route around the damage, I hope.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  The same people benefit every time (the reactionaries). It's hard to believe that is coincidence.
rexpop 4y ago
> disparage the institutions Can't we just call it post-structuralism or post-modernism?
- wolverine876 4y ago
  It's not post-modernism; it's a rejection of post-modernism. Most importantly, the new movement-that-shall-not-be-named embraces and worships power, in themselves and others. Perhaps the most essential foundation of post-modernism is that power is a curse and danger.

mikewarot 4y ago

The model of journalism en vogue consists of telling stories that are depressing AND tell the user the problem is too big to fix, and thus absolving them of blame. It's hard not to end up nihilistic and hopeless in a world filled with those stories. The route around it is to ignore those institutions that have failed us, and build our own networks. HN is one of those networks. Pay attention to what people tell you, and if it turns out to be right or not in the long run. That's what I do.

lifeencoder 4y ago

Newspaper of the 21st Century https://nsource.news https://nsource.news

TwoNineFive 4y ago

The NEWS media has nobody but themselves to blame. My most recent favorite thing to despise is how often they use "blast" and "slam" and other hyperbolic wordage in headlines.

t0bia_s 4y ago

Really? Well... This could be trusted or not. It is just on our decision if we trust in information that is given to us or not. Or why even bother in first place if most of the news are actually irelevant for me?

forinti 4y ago

The quality of news generally is just awful. You could pick a newspaper from any day of the year and you'll have the same articles: crime, soccer, some hardly disguised ad for a new movie, etc. There's no reason to read it. TV news is also highly ritualistic. Why do they mention the stock exchanges every day? It's not really information, and those who care about it already know.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

This feels a bit like polling people's belief in gods plural, or holy people/organisations. In many ways, it could be mapping knowledge that there is more than one opinion on the matter. Which could be interpreted positively (once you know there is more than one perspective you might evaluate them all more objectively) or it might reflect people doubling down on denouncing the other people's gods, or a mix of the two. Without any context on who has faith in what sources it seems somewhat useless. Particularly as "mainstream" media seems particularly slippery to define. "Do you believe in superstitions?" Is going to give weird answers if a more secular voting group is also aware that their particular religion is a superstition vs "No, I don't believe in any superstitions, I'm a Baptist".

egberts1 4y ago

Crushing consolidation of news, newspaper, magazines, and media in both printed and digital form are the cause of distrustfulness when “narratives” are being crafted by and in the hand of fewer but more-consolidated owners. This is called “mainstream media”. Budding writers of mainstream media are then forced to craft a disingenuous storyline to befit their masters. This is called a “narrative”. Unless they can secure their own wage and seek out the truth to the bottom of a story, they are called “muckrakers” and they would be practicing “yellow journalism”. And this current situation is not healthy for a freedom of press needed to maintain a robust form of democracy, pure (simple) ot not (Republic). For now, your local bar and neighbor shall remain closest to the kernel of truth.

throwaway8689 4y ago

On the occasions when I have been close to a newsworthy event, I have seen/read the reports afterwards and found them quite different from my own knowledge - so I haven't had much trust in the news in a long time.

wdr1 4y ago

The litmus test I often apply is: Do I feel more informed on the topic, such that I understand different POVs & can make up my own mind? Or am I being pushed a narrative? There are some exceptions, but most media fails. I don't want a news source to tell me how to think. Or even to validate my thinking. If anything, I want to understand why I might be wrong & other ways to look at a topic.

ninefathom 4y ago

While this is certainly believable, I think it's merely a symptom of a larger cultural shift towards sensationalism. Rephrased, I think that large swathes of the human population have been conditioned over the last couple of decades to perceive "fact" as "dull." Some might frame this as a chicken-and-egg issue: did the media outlets feed our instinctive bias towards flashy-shiny-blinky-zoomy, or did our natural bias pull the media outlets in that direction? At the end of the day, however, it seems likely that it was probably both; the addiction demands ever-increasing dosage and so on. The better question, to me, is this: do we, as individuals, have an ethical or moral responsibility to condition ourselves to be more appreciative of bland fact, for the sake of the species as a whole? Are cold, boring facts like broccoli for our brains?