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When Americans lost faith in the news

• RickJWagner 4y ago
  The New Yorker writes an article about lost faith in the press. They didn't even make it a paragraph in before making a partisan attack. This is rich.
• mewse-hn 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/iUGb1 https://archive.ph/iUGb1
• throwawayacc3 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • andrewclunn 4y ago
    I'd argue that Epstein, Covid, and internet censorship touching everyone and everything had a greater impact. Those things you listed impacted Republican's trust in news for sure, but at this point even Jimmy Dore has a good laugh at the likes of Sam Harris and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's basically, "do you trust your corporate overlords?" which doesn't require that one have a particular view on economic policy.
    • eatsyourtacos 4y ago
      It's amazing what religion does to a person. I wonder if we'll ever move beyond the worst thing ever created by the human race.
      • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        After Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, you think religion is the worst thing ever created by the human race?
        • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
          Humans will engage in wars and genocides against other people just because they are other groups of humans. It doesn't matter what sort of thought process or ideology is used to justify it. But sure, look up things such as "the Armenian Question". Religious genocides existed before the Shoah. Heck, read some of the bible to see some more examples. Human sacrifice also has a long, long tradition in various religions. While the toll for any particular human sacrifice will be few in number, iterated over centuries it adds up.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    The media decided they didn't want to be in the broadcast booth. They wanted to be part of the action on the field. That's their choice, but we no longer trust their broadcast to be unbiased.
  • coolbreezetft22 4y ago
    I'll take real professional journalism over amateur internet commentary any day. Anytime I hear people generically blaming "The Media" for everything I just roll my eyes.
    • throwawayacc3 4y ago
      >I'll take real professional journalism over amateur internet commentary any day. This is a /r/selfawarewolves-tier post. Bravo. >Anytime I hear people generically blaming "The Media" for everything I just roll my eyes. My post outlined multiple specific instances where the media dropped the ball. It by definition is not "generically blaming."
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      To an extent, sure. By default I will likely take a professional over amateur. That said, have you read an article where you are the expert on the subject and found yourself questioning whether the author understands the subject? I remember reading one like that and it was something of an eye-opener. In that case, they got some basic stuff wrong ( and if they spoke with anyone in the industry, they either misunderstood or misrepresented what they said ). I have certain faith in printed word, but I will admit I trust it less and less.
    • BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
      “Real professional journalism” ain’t what it used to be. Market forces have gutted the workforce, disincentivized long-form content, encouraged partisanship, and most importantly of all, consolidated most media under a handful of large companies. “The Media” is not a monolith, but a substantial amount of press is owned and operated by a select few institutions.
      • coolbreezetft22 4y ago
        Personally, I read The Economist on a weekly basis and feel that is very good quality. Not that I think it's 100% accurate or always right (though they admit when they are wrong and put in corrections), but the writing is also good and just enjoyable to read. Like reading a novel from a good author. It also gives a good breadth of coverage even if not always super in-depth. This is a very different experience from watching cable news for example. Yet both are considered "The Media"
• whatshisface 4y ago
  Maybe it's obvious manuvering like this that's to blame: >Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information, as long as it’s genuine, by whatever means and with whatever motives. Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him. So basically, "we're saying something that will turn our audience against him, but as an aside we mentioned that a couple organizations you've probably never heard of spoke out against something we're not going to explain, and that on balance means we're defending him."
  • jchw 4y ago
    I was gonna say, it honestly feels like there's evidence in this article that would go great lengths to explain the real problem. I feel there is a huge disconnect between journalists and the public, and I think that having journalists be on Twitter helped make people aware of that disconnect. Unfortunately, it has only grown.
    • whatshisface 4y ago
      I also thought it was eye-widening where they described access journalism as a happy and productive equilibrium involving the tolerance of "some hypocrisy on both sides."
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Good grief yes. If that was a sincere paragraph in that article, than I have to admit that there is no hope there, because any kind of self-reflection and soul searching is basically pointless with that kind of revelation. This weird patina of technically true sentences structured in a way that is intended to mislead or lead onto a specific thought pattern is just sad for anyone paying attention. This weird variation of navel gazing is very weird though. Is the author seriously suggest they should stop doing that? At that point, even the remnants of their current credibility will perish with the first source they burn since no one sensible will be stupid enough to disclose anything of value. If it is not sincere, then I am in full agreement with you. It is a poster child why Americans lost faith in news.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  Any article on loss of faith in the news that does not mention Dan Rather using forged documents in a 60 Minutes episode about Bush is really missing a lot. I think that was the big turning point.
  • bagels 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
  • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    I'd place the turning point on Bush blacklisting anyone in the press corps who questioned the message Cheney/Rove was trying to sell.
  • bell-cot 4y ago
    No. Yes, Dan was a sucker for some crudely-forged documents from a really dodgy source. But journalists skimping on fact-checking when they liked the story was SOP a century or few earlier. For instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Check
  • LarryMullins 4y ago
    Another big one was The New York Times and Judith Miller uncritically parroting Bush administration lies about Saddam Hussein making nuclear weapons. It became so flagrantly bullshit that the New York Times actually apologized for it a year or two later, but by then it was too late. I still read The New York Times, but I do so knowing they have an American establishment bias and will make themselves uncritical puppets of the government whenever they feel so inclined. Probably most of what they publish is usually more true than false, but you've always got to read it with a grain of salt. The newspaper is best as a bellwether for what the American establishment wants the American public to believe. Having "faith" is precisely the wrong way to read a newspaper.
  • njarboe 4y ago
    So many events missing. This story itself is an example of why people have lost faith. No WMDs in Iraq for me was the one that turned me. A Republican administration seeding the New York Times that lie and they published it with basically no research. The former CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, who oversaw the acquisition of KBR for fuck sake (the largest private contractor in the Iraq war with $10s? of billions of contract dollars per year)[1]) was the de-facto president of the US at the time. The Hunter Biden laptop story being suppressed as Russian misinformation right before the election when it was legitimate is another big one. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBR_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBR_(company) "In the 2000s, KBR employed more American private contractors and had a larger contract with the U.S. government than any other firm in Iraq. The company's roughly 14,000 U.S. employees in Iraq provide logistical support to the U.S. military.[38] Some U.S. Marines revived the Vietnam-era nickname 'Burn & Loot' as a name for the company during the Iraq War.[39]"
• Mouthfeel 4y ago
  [dead]
• LarryMullins 4y ago
  > Half a century ago, most of the public said they trusted the news media. That was the aberration. 120 years ago when newspapers owned by the likes of William Hearst were doing their best to start unnecessary wars for shits and giggles, would you have trusted the news media? I hope not. The news industry was crooked then, and I don't think there's any reason to believe the American media briefly became trustworthy in the mid 20th century when public trust in the media was at all-time highs. I think Americans got caught up in a post-war optimistic fervor that blinded them to the faults of American media, and American society in general. Now the news media feel entitled to that level of trust which they never deserved in the first place. Reminder that one of America's most beloved "founding fathers" was a newspaperman propagandist. A man called Benjamin Franklin, who founded numerous newspapers specifically to push the revolutionary narrative in colonial America. Say what you like about the man, but impartial reporting was not his priority. The supposed age of impartial trustworthiness in news media is myth, not history. Newspapers have always been the tools of those who own them.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    >Benjamin Franklin, who founded numerous newspapers specifically to push the revolutionary narrative in colonial America. He was a printer with a franchise of other printers already, and he did value-added stuff like print the news long before the first stirrings of revolution; are you sure he wouldn't have founded them anyway?
    • KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
      Just like Murdoch amirite?
  • heyflyguy 4y ago
    So many great points in here! Ben Franklin ref is gold.
  • mountainb 4y ago
    It's not that much of an exaggeration to say that the default role of newspapers is to provoke political, ethnic, and religious pogroms and to advance various hackneyed agendas. The brief time in the US that coincided with a relatively trusted news establishment coincided with a lot of painstaking efforts at professionalization and projecting an aura of critical neutrality. Customers stopped wanting that, and the professionals were too expensive anyway. Now, we're back to pogrom-of-the-month club journalism, sometimes mostly digital but sometimes also in reality.
• GAN_Game 4y ago
  > Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. One of the main things Assange revealed, which has not been disputed, is how Clinton intervened in the 2016 Democratic primary election, to damage the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, using any means possible to stop the grassroots pressure from below felt in both major parties. Strange how the revelation of the inside truth of this election intervention is itself called election intervention.
  • cafard 4y ago
    As a downvoted comment below hints, Bernie Sanders had only briefly declared himself a Democrat by 2016. He had caucused with the Democrats since his election to the Senate, but did not belong to the party.
  • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    I mean at least Trump joined the Republican party when he was running for its presidential nomination.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    It was also called election intervention to post about Hunter Biden's laptop. Twitter banned any links to the New York Post article about it. When I first saw the article, I was thinking "Republicans trying to make a big deal out of nothing" which was probably right, but really the reaction on the other side made it a big deal.
• 1sembiyan 4y ago
  The internet happened. Now we have access to not just what the elites think (via the mainstream press), but also also what they miss or misrepresent. The exposure to many other plausible narratives mean that the mainstream media will never be the same again - most people now understand the news is not concerned with just objectivity or truth, but with narrative (even if journalists conflate the two). I don’t think you can ever rewind back on the internet and information explosion. The animal has tasted blood, and it wants more. Trump shouldn’t be given so much credit for the present moment. It should instead go to the iPhone, twitter, Reddit, Facebook, 4chan, blogs - the internet fire hose. And it’s not just the United States, it’s happening all over the world.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    I've started paying attention to how many news articles are essentially collections of Twitter screenshots. Which is still valuable, given how annoying Twitter is to navigate and how some may be deleted.
    • deltree7 4y ago
      Except they also cherry-pick the Tweets. E.g: "X heavily criticized for Y action" Supporting Tweet screenshots : 1 like, 4 likes ....
      • hot_gril 4y ago
        Yeah, I remember one article (I think on Fox) whose entire source was a tweet from a random guy with 2 followers.
  • manuelabeledo 4y ago
    > Now we have access to not just what the elites think (via the mainstream press), but also also what they miss or misrepresent. ... Sprinkled with a lot of bs on top. Let's be frank here: the Internet, as we currently use it, gives voice to _everyone_, regardless of the accuracy of the information, and while I agree that the upside is that we do have access to more information, it has not significantly changed the quality of it.
• anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  I have plenty of faith in Propublica. It used to be that you knew, and cared, what was news reporting and what was opinion. I wonder whether this is cyclical though. It's not as if partisanship is new in newspapers. They used to be very blatant about it, having "Republican" and "Democrat" in their actual names.
• BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  For me personally, I began to lose trust in the news after I started learning about persuasion and cognitive science. After that, I started seeing manipulative rhetoric and propaganda techniques in articles and news segments that didn’t seem like obvious hit pieces. A skilled communicator has a considerable amount of leeway when reporting “facts”. Journalists like to depict themselves as objective and rational guardians of democracy. But they’re just regular people, and their profession has adopted a mentality of righteousness. I roll my eyes every time I see “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on WaPo’s website.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    > I roll my eyes every time I see “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on WaPo’s website Was it The Guardian that used to have a banner on the bottom listing scary things like "erosion of democracy" and asking for you to pay? Generally if something is trying to stir up fear while asking for money, I don't trust it.
• heyflyguy 4y ago
  Has there ever really been independent fact-based journalism? I think not. We're all human with inherent bias, and while it seems like journalists tried harder in older times - they still had bias. We can yell and scream at eachother about who started what, and who was worse; but for what? It seems that as years go by that editorial boards (leaning in both directions) are having much more impact on what you and I read. Those editorial boards are influenced by owners and investors. Those people have bias as well. There still does not seem to be a journalism source that is bias-free. I read yesterday that "Chat GPT is a panacea for bias in reporting". I nearly gagged! In 2001 when the twin towers fell, I was encouraged by how suddenly everyone put down their party ties and went to talk about how we would rebuild and retaliate. In present day, the war in Ukraine has done nothing but further split our nation. So what changed? We didn't act like this during Bosnia. Is it the effect of journalism bias, or is it our nature as humans still working through the shock of Covid that we can't let things go. Are we now looking to argue just one more time to make sure "the other side" knows we think they're wrong? We are sick as the human race, and nobody is admitting that. We've gone from intent to divide instead of intent to unite.
  • LarryMullins 4y ago
    > In 2001 when the twin towers fell, I was encouraged by how suddenly everyone put down their party ties and went to talk about how we would rebuild and retaliate. In present day, the war in Ukraine has done nothing but further split our nation. So what changed? For one, we now have the hindsight of knowing how the post 9/11 mentality you speak of turned out. 20 years of fruitless wars based on lies.
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  Most of the Anglosphere still has way too much faith in the BS nonsense the media runs...
• vagabund 4y ago
  Social media commoditized facts (how monetizable is having the breaking investigative story if the upshot is on twitter moments after the fact?), so out of necessity, news organizations shifted their differentiation to their editorial narrative. And if the alpha is in interpretation of the facts, people are right to prefer subject matter experts or domain practitioners -- the opinions of whom are now abundantly available on substacks, sites like aeon, or even in twitter threads -- over journalism majors that over-index toward one set of views and one social class, and haven't always done the requisite research to draw informed conclusions. Gell-Mann Amnesia applies now more than ever. I hoped to find a more conciliatory tone in this piece, for some greater level of introspection on their field, but immediately it invokes Trump and how victimized major media companies have been. There are plenty of non-traditional, but non-'Trumpified' news sources that are beating the incumbents on merit. It doesn't need to mean it's the end of democracy.
• jsemrau 4y ago
  The 24 hour news cycle and the abolishment of the Fairness doctrine paved the way. Who wants to see 5 adults discuss someone shitposting on Twitter as "breaking news". "Britney Spears slams Alyssa Milano for old tweet that questioned her well-being: 'This definitely feels like a form of bullying!'"
• sys32768 4y ago
  Here is James Fenimore Cooper talking about the American press in The American Democrat (1838): >As the press of this country now exists, it would seem to be expressly devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and destroy all that is good, and to elevate and advance all that is evil in the nation. The little truth that is urged, is usually urged coarsely, weakened and rendered vicious, by personalities; while those who live by falsehoods, fallacies, enmities, partialities and the schemes of the designing, find the press the very instrument that the devils would invent to effect their designs.
  • vagabund 4y ago
    Adding de Tocqueville, from 1831: > The characteristics of the American journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace; and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors.
• logicalmonster 4y ago
  This article starts out with a gross inaccuracy that is often repeated, but is not true. Donald Trump did not say that the news media is the enemy of the people. He said that the fake news is the enemy of the people. Those are almost identical phrases, but that slight difference has a completely different meaning: media is good, but lying media is bad. Can you wonder why Americans have lost trust in the news? Even an article purporting to clear things up for us starts out being misleading.
  • gazpachotron 4y ago
    [dead]
  • chimprich 4y ago
    There are several cases of Trump using the term without reference to "fake news". For example, just look at an archive of his tweets. April 5th 2019: "The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!" Or how how about singling out individual news organisations he doesn't like as "enemies of the people"? Feb 20th 2019: "The New York Times reporting is false. They are a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!" The difference between calling all the media "enemies of the people" or just the ones he dislikes doesn't seem to be that big a distinction for the purposes of the argument. EDIT: removed unnecessary emotion
    • macintux 4y ago
      He also has effectively redefined “fake news” to mean “unflattering (to him) news”.
    • hot_gril 4y ago
      > "The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!" Yeah, I thought he said something like this, thanks for confirming. They should have just quoted him.
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  It is a myth that Americans ever had faith in the News (any more than they have had faith in Politics). For about 250 years (in the US), newspapers have been mostly political rags. They rose to popularity as a way for a single person or group to spread propaganda. Around 1900 they shifted from political rags to scandal-themed yellow journalism, and later turned more "professional", but never lost their slant towards ideologies, social/economic classes, trades, etc. The powerful have always controlled, influenced, and suppressed them. They've never been objective. We've thought about the news as entertainment for the last 50 years. The movie Network came out in 1976, and predicted the abandonment of "balanced" journalism and information in favor of entertainment and profit. We've also known that the news may be staged, selectively covered, biased, and have a leading agenda in the stories they cover and how they cover them. And I mean, come on: Editorials? Literally just a biased person shouting their biased opinions, as if they have the right to speak for every reader? The news has always been bullshit. Useful bullshit, but still bullshit. Anyone who thinks what they read is "true" doesn't understand the concept of truth.
  • fullshark 4y ago
    Trend has been dramatic though: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as... Great deal/Quite a lot Confidence in Newspapers went from about 35-40% in the 80s to about 22% today (COVID likely a major influence on 2022's 16% number). Very Little number also notable.
    • 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
      Before Trump was elected, the polls predicted Hillary would win. Before Biden was elected, the polls predicted Trump would win. Polls can be manipulated, misconstrued, and simply poorly executed. Leading questions, doublebarreled questions, double negatives, question order, margin of error, misread data, "random" sampling, focus groups saying what you want to hear, flukes like a surge due to novelty, and more, all skew polls in ways that don't reflect reality. Polls are more shamanism than science. So why did the numbers change? The media has been telling us we shouldn't trust them for years, and people are reporting back what they've been told. It's also possible that when people say they "don't trust the news", what they really mean is they don't trust what's being reported - as in, if they're reading about politics, they don't trust the politics. You might suspect the newspaper is lying, or you might suspect Trump is lying - but either way, it's "the news" you don't trust, so you start to doubt the institution that's bringing you the lies.
• gandalfgeek 4y ago
  If you have the time to watch it, this Munk Debate on "Don't Trust the Mainstream Media" is a good articulation of both sides. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vkgROIINEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vkgROIINEs At the beginning, the audience was evenly split on the motion (48/52). 82% said they were open to changing their minds over the course of the debate. At the end, audience was 67/33 (!!) in favor of the motion, apparently one of the largest swings in Munk debate history. The heart of it is a cabal who think they are "right", feeling no compunction about using whatever means necessary to make everyone else submit to their obviously correct worldview. The Twitter Files came out after this debate, but oh boy the rout would have been even sweeter had that been out at the time. Murray and Taibbi were talking straight. Gladwell and Goldberg were dissembling and side-stepping and strawmanning. I think it was that intellectual dishonesty that the audience ultimately picked up on.
  • 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    I actually found it inarticulate. There's really only one thing to consider: can you trust what the media says? The fact is you have no idea if what they're reporting is true or false, as they freely admit they make mistakes and sometimes report false stories, and their viewership has a 95% partisan slant. So you have no idea if what you're reading next is true or not. Therefore, you can't trust it. Putting trust in the media is akin to blind belief. Without a rigidly documented process and chain of evidence in full view of the public (like, you know, a science) it's all just "claims". No wonder it's devolved into partisanship. Politics is a 21st century religion, and the media its gospel choir.
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    I can't say I've met many humans who ever think they are "wrong". A few will claim that they are open to changing their minds about their beliefs, but I suspect they are mostly deluding themselves. I am no different.
• luxuryballs 4y ago
  Is this some kind of elaborate parody because this article is a prime example of why people don’t trust the press. And here I thought they were going to say that it’s because the press sold out to power and now just prints lies or convenient half-truths.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    Was going to say, it's funny watching the New Yorker complain about this.
  • iconjack 4y ago
    The author uses the Clinton email scandal as an example of how the media over-covered certain stories. "That Clinton was somehow a criminal for doing what her predecessor Colin Powell had also done—conduct government business using a private server—was a staple of the Trump campaign" How does an educated person, journalist or not, not know the difference between using a private email account, which is what Colin Powell confessed to, and having a private email server set up in your home? (rumored to be quite insecure in the first few months) There are several such "mistakes" in this article. It indeed read like a parody.
• m348e912 4y ago
  I always have been curious about how many journalists and news personalities are either useful idiots or are in on the grift. It seems like a healthy mix of both.
  • LarryMullins 4y ago
    In the Chomsky model of media propaganda, most of the participants are true believers, hired because they truly believe and are therefore the most qualified for their jobs. Even when they know they're lying, they're doing it because they think the ends justify the means and believe the ends are just.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• UIUC_06 4y ago
  > The Post kept track of the lies. The paper calculated that by the end of his term the President had lied 30,573 times. There it is right in the first paragraph. Does The Post keep the number of Biden's lies? At least CNN listed them: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/20/politics/fact-check-biden-false-claims-first-year-2021/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/20/politics/fact-check-biden-fal...
  • iconjack 4y ago
    Spot check the Post's database of 30,573 lies. It's a joke. *This very sentence, if uttered by Trump, would be entered in their database: a joke is an amusing action or story with a punchline; our database is an objective list of lies.
    • sp0rk 4y ago
      Can you share some examples?
      • jaywalk 4y ago
        Here's an easy one I just picked from their list: Trump: "We just got seventy five million votes. And that's a record in the history of in the history of sitting presidents." WaPo: "When the counting was finished, Trump had received 74 million votes, not 75 million as he often claims" and then a bunch of irrelevant crap about how Biden got more, and how a record number of people voted in 2020. Discounting 75 vs 74 million, Trump did get more votes than any sitting President in history. That is a fact, not a lie.
      • iconjack 4y ago
        Spot-checking works best if we remotely agreed on a random number, but here's one a just looked in on. Trump claim: “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90% of which floods across from our southern border.” WaPo's own "factcheck", ironically, confirms what he said was true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/live-updates/trump-white-house/live-fact-checking-and-analysis-of-president-trumps-immigration-speech/most-imported-heroin-comes-through-legal-points-of-entry/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/live-updates/tr... Most of the entries in the database are things like "we have the greatest economy in history" and other such vague puffery. And if Trump repeats it 100 times, it counts as 100 lies.
• skedaddle 4y ago
  Just say what happened (Ray Lyle, Kansas City Star) Marginalize pseudo-events, don't make a story where there isn't any, don't re-report same stories (Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image) "always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty" (Joseph Pulitzer, Retirement letter) Lessons from last century, when people trusted the news
• Manuel_D 4y ago
  Contrary to what seems to be common wisdom, increasing belief in misinformation is likely untrue [1]. I wonder if distrust in media stems from the fact that the democratization brought about by the internet has made people more aware of inaccuracies and bias than before. Not that the media is making more mistakes, but that people are more aware of them. Plenty of outlets half a century ago made glaring mistakes, but people probably didn't know. But now, when the media references a primary source it's often possible for people to immediately view the primary source themselves and see how it matches up with how the outlet described it. I suspect there's a significant segment of news producers and writers that don't understand this dynamic. They think they can get away with the same kind of slant as they could back in the days of print, they don't realize that I'm reading their article on one manner and googling their sources on the other. 1. https://www.slowboring.com/p/misinformation-myth https://www.slowboring.com/p/misinformation-myth
• mariodiana 4y ago
  I'll tell you when I lost faith in The New Yorker. I was a subscriber for many years. I get that the people over at The New Yorker could not stand Donald Trump. But during the four years he was president (and even before, during the months of the campaign), it seemed like every other cover of their magazine was a grotesque and febrile caricature of the man. It made the magazine seem a bit unbalanced—and by that I don't mean "politically."
  • stcroixx 4y ago
    Same experience. Happened with NPR too at the same time.
• none_to_remain 4y ago
  The "free press" in the First Amendment refers to the right of any individual to freely operate the machinery of publication, not any grant of special rights to "the press" as the collective of journalists and related trades. Don't let them trick you!
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    Exactly. There is no carve out for a specific occupation. Free press gives rights to all citizens.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I remember well the day I lost faith in the news media as surely as the childhood moment "Father Christmas" stopped being real. For me, it was the second Iraq war. The whole thing was so blatantly a put-up. Day after day the news media went along with what were obviously, and later proven, falsehoods. To watch and listen felt corrupting, like being part of something unreal, like witnessing an accident or assault, but being powerless to do anything. The intransigent deafness of government to the feelings of the people, and the role the "mass media" played in that have never left me. It was a coming of age for me. I was astounded that trusted organisations and people I respected were so willingly engaged in something false and monstrous.
  • mandmandam 4y ago
    Same! It was so obviously a scam, and only became more obvious over the years. But seemingly smart people kept falling for it. They'd get angry and then dismissive if you showed them clear evidence. I thought people would get wise to the bullshit after evidence came out - instead they all kept following the Piper. People who should have known better started attacking the whistleblowers, even though the smear campaigns were as blatant as could be. Basically all anti-war media is banned from Wikipedia - and 'the liberals' are fine with it. I believed people would wise up as the true costs of war (20 trillion plus if you count the interest and don't count the societal destruction) started to be felt. Instead, the anger was successfully redirected to 'others' of various stripes; immigrants, refugees (from the wars we incited!), 'Russian hackers', blue vs red, "gobal communist elites" (ffs), etc. My own parents minds were melted by corporate media over the last twenty years. Close friends got baited into the same permanent fear/rage state that they complained about Fox News promulgating. And people seem to have forgotten it all, let it slide, to the point where a key architect, cheerleader and enabler of the disastrous invasions is now President. And people are happy about it, even as he breaks strikes and sets record military budgets while talking shit about nuclear and economic superpowers. I'd love to see America get its shit together, but now it feels more likely that Santa Claus will drop me a PS5 and a Ferrari. Constant ceaseless propaganda has more of an effect than I gave it credit for, and people are way more likely to put up with it that I could have believed.
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• pessimizer 4y ago
  > I’ve avoided opining in my more than fifty years as a reporter. This time, however, I felt obligated to weigh in. Why? Because I am worried about journalism’s declining credibility and society’s increasing polarization. The two trends, I believe, are intertwined. > My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work. This combination adds to people’s distrust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences. https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-4.php https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p... The press versus the president, by Jeff Gerth in the Columbia Journalism Review
• kriskrunch 4y ago
  I lost faith in the media when I read about William Randolph Hearst and Yellow Journalism. That's what they called "fake news" back then. Looks like a systemic problem.
• unity1001 4y ago
  Its because this happened: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/ https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me... In the US Chamber Of Commerce memo of 1971, Lewis Powell said that the elite that own the corporations should start using them to push their own interests instead of allowing 'anti-American' (anticapitalist and antiwar) activities. It called for the consolidation of press sector and the use of press sector to push 'American' values and fighting against anti-war crowd. It advocated the private universities reject or expel students that were a risk to the system. In the following years, especially starting with Reagan, the establishment literally implemented all of the advice in that document, and Powell went on to become a supreme court judge who helped that process of privatizing the entire US, including the press.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  There was a book circa 1970 called "The Information Machines" by Ben Bagdikian (who was famous for his later book "The Media Monopoly") which contains the most damning indictment of "The news" I have ever seen. Bagdikian and many futurists around 1970 expected online communications to develop more quickly than it did and in this report for the RAND corporation he expected most people to be getting their news from something like CNN.com in the early 1980s and expecting personalization, filter bubbles and all of that. There is a part in that book where he talks about the process by which the editor of a small town newspaper selects articles from the AP newswire and how that person has 6 seconds to decide if something is "fit to print". Thus the very process of selecting "news" from a wide range of events does damage to the fabric of reality: what appears in a newspaper is by no means a legitimate sample of "what is going on". Worse yet, real events get crowded out by psuedo-events as pointed out in this classic book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-events_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e... the author of which expected television stars to outcompete traditional politicians in 1962 and (like Bagdikian) might have been surprised about how it long it took. Real events get crowded out by pseudo-events because in many ways pseudo-events are more "real" (see Baurdillard's concept of the "hyper-real") and meaningful than real events. One category is the press release about the report that describes some situation for the purpose of advocacy. People might find it really satisfying to read about some theory about, say, black people being beat up by the police, either from a left or right perspective. As a particular article fits into a particular ideology people find these meaningful. In the real world there are numerous events and releases of factual information which are only partially consistent with people's world views and people tend to reject these in favor of processed opinions. The most embarrassing thing about The New York Times is that articles on the opinion page are the most popular. Mostly these are ignorant people mouthing off, not better than the best discussions on HN. Other reporters for the Times work really hard to do original reporting and get the facts right but readers are indifferent. It is the (really worthless) opinion page that drives subscriptions and revenue. This is just as true about CNBC (Jim Cramer doesn't know what he is talking about but he makes up acronyms like FAANG that stick) or Fox News (which is only comfortable when people are sitting around the studio talking about the way things are spozed to be... whenever the camera goes to the outside world it scrolls ALERT ALERT ALERT) Some of what bothers me about people who spam anti-vax and Twitter Files stuff to HN is that if they were successful they would be displacing other content from the site. Maybe I am misrepresenting them but I can't help but perceive their goal is displace other kinds of conversations with their BS.
• userabchn 4y ago
  There have been quite a few instances of "fake news" stories about famous people making donations, such as to hurricane victims, that the famous people have said were not true and they don't know where they came from. No one seems to benefit from these stories, and they don't seem click-baity enough to have been made-up for the ad impressions, so the goal seems to be to erode public trust in the news. When it thus appears that there are active efforts to achieve this (perhaps by countries seeking to boost receptiveness to their influence operations), I don't think the news media deserves all of the blame for the decline in trust.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    Whether or not that is the case why does it matter? Every person, business, organization, and government lies. What matters is the frequency, how serious the lies are, and what is done about them. If someone says they don't trust some news network because they lied or have an agenda where are they getting their information from? A person on Facebook who could also lie and have an agenda. Making trust a binary value is the greatest manipulation tactic ever. More importantly if your news network is mostly opinions then you're less likely to run afoul of that low threshold of trust.
• rascul 4y ago
  I never had faith to lose. It's always been full of clickbait, lies, propaganda, and ideologies. And now paywalls so I can't even read the article. If journalists want people to have faith in the news then they need to start being credible and reputable. Very few are, and none of them write for the New Yorker.
• breck 4y ago
  Coincidentally today we are launching the Paine Accelerator: we are going to fund local, public domain, print-at-home newspapers. (Our early prototypes are LongBeach.pub and Hawaii.pub) The newspaper industry will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqDTJfabAGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqDTJfabAGs https://pd.pub/paine https://pd.pub/paine
• bedhead 4y ago
  Almost all of MSM had a noticeable, albeit restrained liberal bias for decades. This is what caused the birth of Fox News (which is no better) In the first place, it was just a natural response. That bias existed but it was tolerable, generally. Then Trump came along a few years after the woke cult emerged and the MSM had a radical cultural shift that amounted to “the ends justify the means.” Journalists had gotten replaced with activists who fancied themselves heroes doing god’s work. The collapse of journalistic integrity was shockingly swift. The echo chamber and perverse cultural incentives in this profession are truly unimaginable. Now all the safeties have been removed, and as the journo-activism became so widespread it got normalized, like how at Enron everyone just thought fraud was normal because it’s all they saw every day. There’s no going back, the culture rot has metastasized. Related, it always astounded me that newspapers had opinion desks. There is no more certain way to let political bias overtake the newsroom than having an entire opinion team to define the ideals of the company.
• throwaway1w2 4y ago
  I used to read 2 news papers when i was in college and liberal. I was thinking whats written/reported was truth not somebodys opinions. As i grew old and realized the truth i became centralist. my moto these days is never trust anything/anyone.
• horsawlarway 4y ago
  The "news" in America has devolved quite a bit. We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need, and they often get drowned out by entertainment news, which is really just seeking engagement for advertising - the reader is not the customer, they are the product being sold. In this sense, the lost faith is both warranted and correct. --- As an aside - I think this is going to get much, much worse. We had a brief golden age where "seeing is believing" was a real thing, and a photograph or video carried substantial weight as evidence. That window seems to be closing. As image manipulation becomes easier and easier, I think media will become much more bitterly divided. "Truth" will once again become a subjective take based on the sources you trust - you will likely end up reading and trusting the same news sources your family/friends/acquaintances do. It will be harder to challenge your trust in those sources because the challenge will boil down to "he said/she said" fights between proclaimed experts with different motives and incentives, with no easy way for a layman to find believable evidence themselves (ex: A clear + trusted photo or video). We're gonna go back to "who can shout the loudest" with the fun kink that this time money can literally buy robotic voices that shout all the time while pretending to be people from your community.
  • skedaddle 4y ago
    > The "news" in America has devolved quite a bit. We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need The ownership structure of most news organizations is qualitatively different now than it was in the mid-century heyday of the "independent press". Joseph Pulitzer, for example, was succeeded by generations of owner/editors with a legacy to uphold until the 90s, when JP III died and the family's media interests transferred around and eventually becoming public. By that point, of course, papers had been raising capital from Wall Street for decades already. So they are funded differently now. The publicly held conglomerates and private equity firms that largely own news organizations today are constitutionally of managing, perhaps even understanding, the "public trust" they own. At best they're concerned with trust in the news. The concept of public trust is a little subtle. Every news organization, in the US, is a sort of public news organization (in theory).
• Dig1t 4y ago
  This article itself is a perfect example of why we don't trust the news anymore. I'm no Trumper, but most people know that Trump is not singlehandedly responsible for their distrust in the news, yet here we are reading an article telling us that that is the case. The narrative is too obvious.
• py1 4y ago
  Think Scott Alexander's post sheds a lot of light on this as well https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
• VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  I stopped watching the "news" (especially local news) 5 years ago and I've never been happier. The "news" will never make you feel good. It will only ever make you feel angry, fearful, anxious, or disenfranchised in some way. It will only make you feel like "everything is going to shit." And that's just TV news. I also stopped participating in unfiltered social media. No more Facebook except close friends or family. But if they start sharing garbage then they get muted. No exceptions. I'll go look at your feed if I care about what you're up to. My "news" comes from highly-moderated, topic-focused groups. HN, for example. But I will gladly stop reading (and downvote) a comment halfway through if it's nonsense. I'm not living in "blissful ignorance". I'm not putting my "head in the sand." I know what's going on in the world. I just choose not to be consumed by it. And my daily mood and outlook-on-life has improved dramatically because of that.
  • vmladenov 4y ago
    > I know what's going on in the world. This doesn’t really square with what the rest of your comment says. One would at least expect you to have mentioned regular reading of high-quality newspapers / magazines in order to justify this claim.
    • snacktaster 4y ago
      What is an example of a high-quality newspaper / magazine that the OP should read?
      • hot_gril 4y ago
        I like the National Interest for foreign policy stuff. They're opinion pieces, except from people who actually kinda matter, and it's important to check the author. I'll read something even if it's from a think tank I don't like.
      • vmladenov 4y ago
        Something that expects a reading level greater than that of an average high-school student and offers long, dense articles. I’m thinking The Atlantic, Financial Times, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, etc. Each varies in their biases and you grow to recognize them as you read more but they’re generally reliable sources written by serious people. There are of course also smaller, local papers worth reading. There are also papers I consider of lesser quality that still have some good journalists working for them —- but you have to actually read the byline and know who’s writing rather than focus on the brand. An unfortunate number of people don’t get past “NYT said X” and “National Review said Y”
• kkfx 4y ago
  Can't talk for USA being European living in EU BUT: anyone have ideas, "sides" etc. Journals as well and that's perfectly FINE as long as there are MANY different sources with different ideas. Facts might appear in some, not in others, because of relatives sides, but false fact appearing on some will be normally demolished by those of another side. Some facts will be depicted in positive or negative way, the same fact, depending of the side, but the reader still elicit the fact and distinguish if he/she want the reading part from the factual part. In that case we can "trust the press", simply because having most parts of the spectrum covered, we can read facts and opinion and form OUR personal opinion. When the press is a pravda, essentially al journals tell the same story, omit or cite the same facts, with the same side etc than we can't trust the press. NO MATTER if those who write are honest or not. Even when they tell the truth they will be considered mendacious. Nowadays the trust debt the press have gained, the self-inflicted reputational damage is big enough to be irrecoverable. A new press must then emerge, a press who represent various different opinions people do recognize, not just mocked actors like wrestlers. Until this happen the level of trust will be the same of any dictatorship press by their people. Below zero. BTW similar reputational damage have happened to "international" institutions, local governments and corporations. That's why we are near to the point of a civil war OR the rise of classic local dictatorships with their classic parabola.
• jimt1234 4y ago
  The first time I watched the news outside the US blew me away. The reporters talked about incidents, gave some facts, interviewed a few locals, then moved on. Then they did it again. And again. I felt like something was missing; I kept waiting for it, but it never came. The reporters never blamed anyone, they never made me angry, or afraid. It was weird. This was in Taiwan in the early-2000s. I remember one story was about a school in a rural/poor area that flooded so it was shut down temporarily. The parents were upset because they wanted their kids in school. The reporters talked about the situation, interviewed a few people, then that was it. I thought to myself, "Where's the talk about racism/classism? Where's the video of parents shouting at school board officials? So, no one's gonna shove a microphone in a local politician's face and ask misleading questions?" Like I said, it felt weird, like something was missing. I didn't know the news could be like that.
• MarkusWandel 4y ago
  Isn't it simply that the news used to come from hard drinking, smoking, schmoozing, pull-no-punches reporters working for papers that competed with each other for "the scoop"? They would dig up the dirt for you. Where are they now?
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    > Where are they now? Maybe the hard drinking and smoking got to them.
• glonq 4y ago
  I cut the evening news out of my daily routine in 2016, and have no regrets. It's basically all fearmongering, tribalism, and recreational outrage. I still try to remain aware of local and national and international events; I just don't want the "spin". I don't want to be told what's important or what to think or how to feel.
• glonq 4y ago
  "A man is judged by the company he keeps" My local news [hi, Global BC!] can't do much better nowadays than to scrape up ambulance chasers, loan sharks, MLM, and dodgy pharma as advertisers.
• wrp 4y ago
  Anyone here remember the The MacNeil/Lehrer Report (1975–1983)? There should be an archive of their broadcasts online so people could see what quality reporting looked like.
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I can't personally speak to the quality of the news before I became aware of it around the 1990s or so as a teenager. At the time, the New York Times was held up as the gleaming standard of the fourth estate. Sure, TV news was still television, but it did have some aspect of "trust". The anchors were "real (white) men with experience" in suits. With GRAVITAS. These were my formative experiences of the decline of the fourth estate: 1) The New York Times shilling for the second Iraq war shamelessly, with no criticism of that Colin Powell con job. The NYT has never regained any credibility as an independent news source since then. 2) the rise of FoxNews, and eventually, MSNBC and all other crap. 3) Watching private equity buyouts of newspapers and consolidation of media empires with no pushback from regulatory agencies, and watching them collapse into insipid entertainment shows (Natalee Holloway). I remember some kinda-embarrassing news coming about that was immediately preempted by 24 hour coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's overdose. It seemed very suspicious how each and every news source blared constant coverage of that for days after: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/02/anna-nicole-smiths-death-biggest-news-event-recent-history/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/02/anna-nicole-smi... And it worked, I don't even remember what I thought was REALLY going on that disappeared from the headlines when she OD'd. I can't even find out to this day what conspiratorial undercurrent it covered up. 4) Al Gore getting mocked and grilled by the press in the 2000 election, while George Bush skated by with the aw shucks frat boy act. I'm not saying Al Gore was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but he was a global warming advocate at a time that we really needed a global warming advocate in power, even if the deadlock would have done nothing. Instead, we got George Bush. After the fact the media self-excused themselves because they were "angry that Billy Boy Clinton lied", even if true, is a shocking indictment of the US fourth estate. IMO global warming is the long running litmus test of the failure of US media, especially compared to the EU media in my politically aware lifetime. Willfully ignored, downplayed, or mocked for 25 years, while the EU media would mention it constantly. This could kill hundreds of millions of people in the next century. Next would be shameful oversight of the Iraq/Afghanistan forever war. Which killed possibly millions of people. Then would be the unquestioning support of the forever war on drugs (imprisonment, racist enforcement, police empowerment, no treatment for addicts, and destroying of functioning Latin American governments as a result). Millions of lives ruined. Finally, a complete lack of support for universal healthcare (which kills... millions of people). Regardless, as information began to flow more freely from the internet, the fourth estate has responded by abandoning its morals and values. I'll say this for the Randolph Hearst era, as I read it there were lots of small muckraking newspapers that helped push the agenda of workers rights and workplace safety around the turn of the century. I don't see anything like that coming out of the formally trained "fourth estate". They all just want big jobs and money from the zombie news conglomerates that control the oligarchical propaganda money. In the end, the internet served mainly as a fine grained means for the shadow powers to test and determine how much they could get away with. In the "golden days" there was paranoia and fear of the truth. In the late 90s / aughts, they discovered how much lack of shame they could get away with. Now in the 2010s+, they have the tools of social media and mass fine-grained propaganda. If you can't tell, I think the "fourth estate" is a mockery. Where once it may have served what they hold themselves up as, gleaming guardians of truth and light in the darkness, now they are the darkness. Journalists that work for any large media conglomerate are total sellouts. I suppose some of them tell themselves they "sneak in" the truth, maybe they can sleep at night with that. Somehow my education involved a lot of "question authority" and "critical thinking". It was all public education (except college), and I had similar parents / adult figures, but I have heard that historically such education, even in America, was reserved for the rich or privileged. I did go to "rich" suburb public high school, so college prep was the emphasis, and that probably came along with it. I would suspect if such education is more universal than my experience, it is actively under assault. I can't think of a better side effect of "teach to the test" than "we don't have time for critical thinking". Critical thinking is all that keeps one's head above water in the sea of manipulated "news". If one takes the view that the destruction of the fourth estate is a brilliant means by the dark cabal of oligarchs to destroy the light of truth (and profit in the process, genius bastards), and that they've won, the next front is education and academia. Thus for-profit universities, funding manipulation, no child left behind, vouchers/charters, dropping funding of humanities, pricing it to oblivion, inflitrating an MBA management class to all universities, etc. In reality, the smoke filled room of bellowing men isn't all that complicated. The US and World are seeing reduced competition and cartel/monopoly conditions is practically every "market". "Free Market Capitalism" iterative game theory results in local maxima stabilizations in cartels, once some market advantage is obtained and there is no protection from regulatory capture, dumping, cheap credit leverage, etc except another company of sufficient size. The evil hooded cabal is winning.