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There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for decades, and how exactly

There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for decades, and how exactly this works. With a mountain of examples. So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through." Though of course this is the wrong reaction; it has always trickled through. Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols. Every piece of information is produced with interests for audiences; objectivity is a pink unicorn Santa Claus, something you really shouldn't believe exists after you're, like, 8. But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims, and who are not organizations whose literal existence depends on state licensing as a corporation. Not to say that there is no structural pressure in the independent realm; ideology still exists, years of socialization in the country of origin with their (often folly) "self-evidence" myths exist, the need to eat and make money somehow still exists. But the pressures are much, MUCH fewer than in the case of corporate and state news.

VieEnCode 4y ago
"But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims" I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.
- pjc50 4y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformation-supplements.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformat... (which of course will be immediately accused of bias, but he's not wrong about the facts of the extent to which those people are funded by supplements) It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-oborne-resignation-senior-writer-quits-telegraph-dramatically-over-hsbc-allegations/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    There's quite a few independent UK journalists who are refugees from editors that started spiking their stories. Jonathan Cook and John Pilger both had to leave The Guardian.
  - jpadkins 4y ago
    the nytimes link is /opinion/ which is held to a different to a different standard than standard news. I'm glad they at least label it as opinion. I think people reading opinion as news is part of the problem.
- bnralt 4y ago
  Audience capture is probably the biggest driving point behind media bias, whether the media is commercial or independent. Walter Lippmann put it wall 100 years ago [1]: > A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence. [1] Public Opinion, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    I'm not trying to dispute or detract from this point, but I'd also like to add that there is also a simple motivation behind media bias that can't be ignored: people wanting to shape public opinion to their own worldview - be they journalists or people who own the presses.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      I'd go even further and say the the motivation isn't specifically to shape public opinion to your view, but simply to present the content in a way that doesn't create cognitive dissonance with your personal view. If you personally don't believe that a piece of information is relevant, then you leave it out. That piece might not be relevant to your own view of the subject, but could be crucial to an opposing view.
    - 4y ago
recuter 4y ago
> But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists If Matt Taibi get Keshloggied it would not amaze me if his former colleagues bury the story or even spin it as a good thing. I don't predict he will actually get killed but ask yourself, would you be surprised if he was or does a part of you half expect it at this point? He certainly won't be working a corporate gig anytime soon. Where will his income come from in the future? Nevermind what is he going to do to make ends meet, how will he afford going places to interview people and perform research? You can't realistically be a journalist sitting around at home in your underwear (unless you work for the NYT writing provoking social criticisms about something you just watched on Netflix). And this is a very famous award winning guy with published books to his name from a time when people still used to read and pay for books. What is going to enable more people like this going forward? Seems like a pretty stressful life actually.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  The culture war is also a media project of the powerful and journalists who are dedicated to fighting it are serving their interests as much as anyone is. He'll be fine.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  Taibbi is making a great living by being a reactionary on podcasts and fringe outlets. Journalists are suckers. He hasn't done "journalism" in forever. Editorialism is where it's at.
  - woooooo 4y ago
    Taibbi is publishing a ton on the links between government agencies and Twitter right now, by doing the work of poring through thousands of emails. He's been doing it for months. His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.
    - lovich 4y ago
      Kinda seems like he’s more doing PR for musk than journalism. He’s posting stories aligning with musk’s interests on musk’s platform using data supplied by musk. I watched a debate panel with several journalists who were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had full access to everything because an engineer sat in the room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to believe that the database couldn’t have possibly been pre filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the journalist literally claimed that they couldn’t have possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase myocarditis that quickly. I know we’re in tech and have a closer understanding of technology than experts in other fields but it was kind of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the data they were being shown could be manipulated and I feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their credibility.
m463 4y ago
> it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge So that makes me wonder how this is getting out. Is it a news organization such as an opposing organization, or outspoken journalists? Is it democratized news reporting via forums and social media?
- kodah 4y ago
  In news there's journalism and there's reporting. This story is reporting, it doesn't use many adjectives and doesn't have much of a point beyond the statistics represented. It allows people to form their own opinions based on their own experiences around the details of this story. Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives. Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"
  - karpierz 4y ago
    Well let's steelman journalism a bit; journalism provides context. Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this morning." Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government is looking to roll back more regulations, which are expected to increase fatality rates by 6%."
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      >Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your premise which proves with any certainty that the increased speed limits are the cause of the change in accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it as part of the basic record of events we call "news", rather than as part of the opinion discourse. This was even a good faith example. If you were trying to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.
kleiba 4y ago
> With a mountain of examples It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.
- NDizzle 4y ago
  <Norm Macdonald meme> "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?"
  - dylan604 4y ago
    That was one of the lessons that stuck with me from the first time a teacher actually admitted that "history is written by the winners".
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky is a great start. Messengers of the Right and Dark Money are also great.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    manufacturing consent isn't evidence. Its pop philosophy.
- Teever 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film) "Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"
- golemotron 4y ago
  Russia has been just about the lose the war for close to a year now.
  - 4y ago
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
> There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for __millennia__, and how exactly this works. Fixed it. There are historical evidence that this has gone on in some form or fashion in ancient empires (e.g., Roman, Egyptian, Chinese), be it written or the town crier. There have always been people who knew this was going on, spoke up, but were considered crackpot, conspiracy theorist, or simply beheaded.
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Saying "this has always happened" loses what's interesting and relevant about the mass media tranformations that began around the early 20th century and now dominant our media culture (see Manufacturing Consent).
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I think it's interesting that this is a highly upvoted comment considering it leans on sociology as an academic study as a source of truth for its claim. The social sciences have long been harangued by HN for not being "real science", but I've seen exceptionally little pushback to the claim above. Why is this? [To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of what forces influence media that influence people. I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.]
- giantg2 4y ago
  At least to me, it seems people push back on sociology claims that focus on individuals or member groups, not so much on organizations like companies. Part of this I believe is due to the personal nature. Part is because it can be seen as stereotyping, or has poor study design. This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception. HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either. The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.
tgv 4y ago
This is such a black and white spin. First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements. Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
- giantg2 4y ago
  It seems spot on to me. "they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting." This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    Are not "intend to mislead" and lying synonyms? Misleading without intent may not be, but if you mislead with intent you are lying.
    - anonym29 4y ago
      Lying? Of course not! It's just paid marketing for a sponsor's ideological position! /s
    - ptero 4y ago
      I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors might be way off, but I think those two things are quite different. Lying is making statements that the speaker knows are false. An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court. To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on. Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.
yks 4y ago
> don't apply to independent journalists What a naïveté. Independent journalists are even more beholden to their audiences, if they start talking up something those audiences don’t like, their incomes dwindle. I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence.
- user3939382 4y ago
  > I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    And both of those position changes feed INTO their 'Independent' thinker audiences not contradict with them.
    - user3939382 4y ago
      Yeah they're pandering to people who value the truth. /s Your comment makes no sense with Matt Taibbi's statements. I'm not sure you understand what he said and corrected.
      - ROTMetro 4y ago
        Not those that value truth. They are pandering to contrarians and people who need the world to make sense and have order hence all the nefarious plots behind everything. Do you mean when he apologized for adamantly saying that Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and it was only 'dishonest types' that were pushing the narrative that Russia was going to invade? I mean, when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong in such a biased (an anti-discourse) way I kinda stop following anything old boy says so you are going to have to give me more details about what specific walk back of his you are referring to?
jasmer 4y ago
The media is mostly in service for themselves. The 'powers that be' bias is a bit different and takes mant forms. Aka institutional powers (aka Dem/GOP), individual institutional powers (aka stop a story from embarrassing a colleague Executive), Natoinal bias (aka stories during wartime are not quite the same), 'Civil/Public' bias (aka stories about vaccines during a pandemic), Corporate Institutions (aka advertisers, don't want to upset them). Funny enought those tend not to be the one's we get the most in a huff for, rather, we fixate more in the ideological narrative stuff because it's more visible. You don't really see the 'national bias' at all unless you're outside of the country. You don't see the 'corporate bias' bedcause it tends to be displayed in terms of 'stories that don't exist'. All of that said we should strive to be better.
Julesman 4y ago
Thanks for this. Nice to see it at the top of the conversation. Two words: Operation Mockingbird. The big news outlets get daily intelligence briefs. This isn't even controversial. But the real problem within that setting is self-censorship. You don't get the job unless you've proven than you know what not to say. Many credible books on that topic to read.
- pas 4y ago
  Two words: evidence where? > Many credible books on that topic to read. Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!
  - bilekas 4y ago
    Seymour Hersh is the Journalist/Investigative Reporter and he does not mess around. Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger outlets would not publish it without source information etc and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking to his word of "Not revealing sources".
    - pas 4y ago
      That's appeal to authority. And it's a good hypothesis, we shouldn't discount it, but ... also not take it as gospel. It's pretty clear that to get to the bottom of this we either need some leak or enough politicians in Congress who take this seriously, and get people to testify under oath. (Of course it'd be a good start to hold accountable those who lie to Congress, like Keith Alexander and James Clapper.)
    - barbazoo 4y ago
      Was someone able to verify that this was in fact written by him? I remember that being an open question when it got posted initially.
    - blue_pants 4y ago
      It may be interesting to read this[0] OSINT analysis of Hersh's claims. [0] https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113 https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113
GoblinSlayer 4y ago
Objectivity is easy to access if you're not totally censored. Propaganda works by concealing alternative opinions - once you know the trick, it's easy to hack, even a weak effort can work.
- giantg2 4y ago
  Sounds weird, but one of the easiest paths to objectivity is not to seek objective sources. One can look at multiple sources with obvious opposing spins to form your own understanding. Even the sources labeled as most objective tend to miss the nuance behind the main few arguments.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    I gave up on the dream of "objective news" when I was about 18. I had been taught that The Times was the most objective news organ here; it did carry an aura and style that seemed objective. I realized that what the objective "facts" are turns out to depend on your point-of-view, and it's harder to know what that point-of-view is if the organ is pretending to be "objective". Ever since, I've preferred to get my news from sources that wear their bias on their sleeve.
    - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
      If the skew is persistent, it should be possible to identify.
- screwturner68 4y ago
  We've just gotten to the point where views are not cross pollinated. Local news is not really local are much as it's controlled by a couple of companies with their own agenda so the same view is presented over and over and over again. In addition they've convinced the populace that the other side is evil so people have become tribal and only watch "their news" and that just feeds the loop. They don't have to conceal anything, it can be right there in front of them and it won't matter because they won't believe it because their tribe tells them it's a lie.
croes 4y ago
What is "the media" that lied about every? It's not one uniform block, it's thousands of people with different intensions and knowledge.
- NDizzle 4y ago
  Well, since you asked for it, here you go. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ
  - croes 4y ago
    And that's still not "the media" but only a part of it.
    - NDizzle 4y ago
      What part of the media is that in the united states? Ballpark estimate... Is that the 80% or the 20%, in other words?
      - croes 4y ago
        How many stations are in the Youtube clips? The US has over 7000 stations
        NDizzle 4y ago
        Do you think syndication of at least Fox, CBS, and ABC stops and starts with the specific clips that were gathered for this video clip? There are 7,000 stations... are you saying the fact that VH1 isn't saying this particular message means, "not all media..." What a disingenuous argument. Proceed, I won't stop you.
Spooky23 4y ago
That’s just cynical blah blah that ignores the pretty obvious cause. It’s pretty easy why trust in media has eroded in my lifetime (I’m a 40 something). We deregulated and allowed for consolidation of ownership of print, broadcast and eventually online media. That changed the dynamic. People will always correctly call out right wing talk radio as an example but the problems with media are more subtle as well. Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. If you were around in the 90s, you’ll remember how the OJ Simpson drama was a transformational event - which would not have happened in 1982. Serious journalism gave way to circus. Our wiser predecessors learned in the 1920s and 1930s of the danger of mass media. Right wing nutcases like Father Coughlin, demagogues like Huey Long, America First, and more extreme left wing labor activists bear a strong resemblance to the characters in modern media.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.
jmyeet 4y ago
Once people acept media bias the next jump they make that this is a partisan issue. It's easy to understand why, particularly now when there are major news outlets who deliberately lie. But the problem is way more insidious and pervasive than performative partisan issues, which are generally manufactured culture wars. Those issues serve two purposes: 1. To make people angry and keep them angry. Angry people are "engaged"; and 2. To sow division and prevent class solidarity. One of the most wildly successful examples of propaganda is the idea of the middle class. This serves to demonize the so-called "lower classes", typically labeling them as lazy, criminal, morally bankrupt and drains on the state. There are only two classes: labor and capital owners. Yet propaganda has been so successful that labor will defend the interests of billionaires to the detriment of their own interests. The number of people who would die on the hill of opposing Musk and Bezos paying slightly more taxes is depressing. Media is a key tool in this endeavour. It's why you see wall-to-wall coverage of the China balloon (which literally does not matter at all) and a virtual media blackout of the environmental catastrophe and massive corporate failings that underpin the East Palestine train derailment. Media represents and advocates for corporate interests and systemic interests.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago
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anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols. In the years before the internet we had newsletters and amateur radio. https://media.tenor.com/9k_DNT8tBA4AAAAd/simpsons-i-wish-to-subscribe-to-your-newsletter.gif https://media.tenor.com/9k_DNT8tBA4AAAAd/simpsons-i-wish-to-... Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. Even among the non-postal "decentralized" distribution protocols. The old saying that people become leery of media reporting when they see how their own specialty is botched applies to even the credentialed bloggers when they step out of their lane just a bit. I've personally noticed fact reporting biases when, for instance, reading a story on the same event from Fox News and CNN. But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore. The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore. > But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap. Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    > With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore. Definitely agree. But it's also difficult to fact check even if you do distrust. Even educated bloggers and readers can have difficulty accurately interpreting information, and what that information indicates, if technological advances make their knowledgebase outdated. > Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that. In some cases, such as when the source of particular facts all originate from the same person, sure. Or when everyone's article is just a rewrite of the AP News or Reuters release. But in the general case we all can know who won the superbowl, and by what margin and what plays.
ROTMetro 4y ago
[flagged]
Forgeties79 4y ago
The issue, to me at least, is what people are choosing to trust/believe instead. I find they're not being critical and looking at multiple sources, they're just instead putting their faith in other untrustworthy groups (see: Alex Jones).
onetimeusename 4y ago
I don't really believe that non profit news is any more objective if that is what you mean by independent. They are beholden to their donors who can afford it. This will often be large foundations set up by corporations and extremely rich people. There is even a tax incentive that a corporation or foundation/trust can use to get a tax break while ensuring that the non-profit publishes things that align with their own opinions. I actually think the "charity" sector that operates in journalism and politics is extremely corrupt and serves no public interest. I actually don't think it's possible to solve the problem of funding being able to influence journalism. Although there are independent journalists like on substack (which could be what you mean) I am not convinced that is much different from corporate media except the journalist is more like an LLC or sole proprietorship.
- kornhole 4y ago
  Independent does not mean objective. Independent journalists are generally not dependent on corporations, states, or publishing organizations to fund their reporting. Independence is a gradient rather than black or white. If he does publish something through a MSM outlet, he is generally paid for the piece published. Substack is one of many examples where funding is direct from readers or patrons. Good independent journalists are transparent about their biases since everybody has them.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  Maybe some non profit news organizations are objective? I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA. Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  There are plenty of for profit podcasters & writers out there that make money and honest living with small paypal subscriptions (before patreon was even a thing), plus small one-time donors and the like. Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1. They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources. So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through." Trickle through to HALF the population. Frankly it's shocking that 50% don't think information they receive is a component of some narrative.
dlkf 4y ago
The media is full of shit, but compared to the academic sociologists you’re referencing it’s not that bad.
fortuna86 4y ago
> literal mountains of sociological studies Which ones prove systemic, deliberate deception?
y-curious 4y ago
Just wanted to say that I like your points and you write very well. What is your background?
xyzzyz 4y ago
> So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through." But most sociologists are totally in on the game. It used to be that the mainstream media narrative was opposite of what the sociologists preferred people to believe, and at the time you had academics talk about Manufactured Consent, and False Consciousness etc. These days, the press is more aligned with academics, so they prefer to keep it shush. Here is an explicit example, published just a few weeks ago: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X221150987 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X2211509... > The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents From the abstract: > Low-income Black fathers have been portrayed in the media and in research as uninvolved and disengaged from their children. The current study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 2578) to examine adolescents’ reports of relationships and interaction with their biological fathers. The results showed there were no significant differences among Black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, and Other fathers for adolescents’ perceptions of closeness or interaction with fathers. Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers. The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers. Imagine reading a paper which “debunks” a “myth” of lack of involvement of women in corporate boards or C-level position, which simply excludes companies that have zero women on boards or as C-level officers from consideration. It would be hard to view it as anything other than deliberate deception. This sort of ignoring of obvious factors is, however, extremely common in published sociology research, and the academic community is extremely good at pretending to not notice deliberately lousy scholarship, when it aligns well with political opinions of 90% sociologists, and attacks anyone who tries to bring attention to it.
- l3mure 4y ago
  > Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers. There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study. > The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers. Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this. [1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/documents/reichman_et_al_2001.pdf https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/d...
joe_the_user 4y ago
The problem is that the popular, "scandalized" understanding of "the media lie!!" doesn't have the nuance of sociological and political theories. The sociologist notes will note that the media serves the interests of the powerful while still reporting some number of facts. The most extreme of the scandalized public will say "the media lies - they say X so Y must be true and X must be a plot". This produces a whole of truly bizarre thinking (often on the right but no doubt on the left as well).
abstrakraft 4y ago
So would it be fair to say that you're in the half that believes in the misleading?

VieEnCode 4y ago

"But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims" I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.

pjc50 4y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformation-supplements.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformat... (which of course will be immediately accused of bias, but he's not wrong about the facts of the extent to which those people are funded by supplements) It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-oborne-resignation-senior-writer-quits-telegraph-dramatically-over-hsbc-allegations/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  There's quite a few independent UK journalists who are refugees from editors that started spiking their stories. Jonathan Cook and John Pilger both had to leave The Guardian.
- jpadkins 4y ago
  the nytimes link is /opinion/ which is held to a different to a different standard than standard news. I'm glad they at least label it as opinion. I think people reading opinion as news is part of the problem.
bnralt 4y ago
Audience capture is probably the biggest driving point behind media bias, whether the media is commercial or independent. Walter Lippmann put it wall 100 years ago [1]: > A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence. [1] Public Opinion, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I'm not trying to dispute or detract from this point, but I'd also like to add that there is also a simple motivation behind media bias that can't be ignored: people wanting to shape public opinion to their own worldview - be they journalists or people who own the presses.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    I'd go even further and say the the motivation isn't specifically to shape public opinion to your view, but simply to present the content in a way that doesn't create cognitive dissonance with your personal view. If you personally don't believe that a piece of information is relevant, then you leave it out. That piece might not be relevant to your own view of the subject, but could be crucial to an opposing view.
  - 4y ago

recuter 4y ago

> But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists If Matt Taibi get Keshloggied it would not amaze me if his former colleagues bury the story or even spin it as a good thing. I don't predict he will actually get killed but ask yourself, would you be surprised if he was or does a part of you half expect it at this point? He certainly won't be working a corporate gig anytime soon. Where will his income come from in the future? Nevermind what is he going to do to make ends meet, how will he afford going places to interview people and perform research? You can't realistically be a journalist sitting around at home in your underwear (unless you work for the NYT writing provoking social criticisms about something you just watched on Netflix). And this is a very famous award winning guy with published books to his name from a time when people still used to read and pay for books. What is going to enable more people like this going forward? Seems like a pretty stressful life actually.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
The culture war is also a media project of the powerful and journalists who are dedicated to fighting it are serving their interests as much as anyone is. He'll be fine.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Taibbi is making a great living by being a reactionary on podcasts and fringe outlets. Journalists are suckers. He hasn't done "journalism" in forever. Editorialism is where it's at.
- woooooo 4y ago
  Taibbi is publishing a ton on the links between government agencies and Twitter right now, by doing the work of poring through thousands of emails. He's been doing it for months. His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.
  - lovich 4y ago
    Kinda seems like he’s more doing PR for musk than journalism. He’s posting stories aligning with musk’s interests on musk’s platform using data supplied by musk. I watched a debate panel with several journalists who were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had full access to everything because an engineer sat in the room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to believe that the database couldn’t have possibly been pre filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the journalist literally claimed that they couldn’t have possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase myocarditis that quickly. I know we’re in tech and have a closer understanding of technology than experts in other fields but it was kind of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the data they were being shown could be manipulated and I feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their credibility.

m463 4y ago

> it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge So that makes me wonder how this is getting out. Is it a news organization such as an opposing organization, or outspoken journalists? Is it democratized news reporting via forums and social media?

kodah 4y ago
In news there's journalism and there's reporting. This story is reporting, it doesn't use many adjectives and doesn't have much of a point beyond the statistics represented. It allows people to form their own opinions based on their own experiences around the details of this story. Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives. Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"
- karpierz 4y ago
  Well let's steelman journalism a bit; journalism provides context. Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this morning." Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government is looking to roll back more regulations, which are expected to increase fatality rates by 6%."
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    >Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your premise which proves with any certainty that the increased speed limits are the cause of the change in accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it as part of the basic record of events we call "news", rather than as part of the opinion discourse. This was even a good faith example. If you were trying to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.

kleiba 4y ago

> With a mountain of examples It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.

NDizzle 4y ago
<Norm Macdonald meme> "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?"
- dylan604 4y ago
  That was one of the lessons that stuck with me from the first time a teacher actually admitted that "history is written by the winners".
thundergolfer 4y ago
Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky is a great start. Messengers of the Right and Dark Money are also great.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  manufacturing consent isn't evidence. Its pop philosophy.
Teever 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film) "Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"
golemotron 4y ago
Russia has been just about the lose the war for close to a year now.
- 4y ago

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

> There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for __millennia__, and how exactly this works. Fixed it. There are historical evidence that this has gone on in some form or fashion in ancient empires (e.g., Roman, Egyptian, Chinese), be it written or the town crier. There have always been people who knew this was going on, spoke up, but were considered crackpot, conspiracy theorist, or simply beheaded.

thundergolfer 4y ago
Saying "this has always happened" loses what's interesting and relevant about the mass media tranformations that began around the early 20th century and now dominant our media culture (see Manufacturing Consent).

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

I think it's interesting that this is a highly upvoted comment considering it leans on sociology as an academic study as a source of truth for its claim. The social sciences have long been harangued by HN for not being "real science", but I've seen exceptionally little pushback to the claim above. Why is this? [To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of what forces influence media that influence people. I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.]

giantg2 4y ago
At least to me, it seems people push back on sociology claims that focus on individuals or member groups, not so much on organizations like companies. Part of this I believe is due to the personal nature. Part is because it can be seen as stereotyping, or has poor study design. This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception. HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either. The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.

tgv 4y ago

This is such a black and white spin. First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements. Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.

giantg2 4y ago
It seems spot on to me. "they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting." This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  Are not "intend to mislead" and lying synonyms? Misleading without intent may not be, but if you mislead with intent you are lying.
  - anonym29 4y ago
    Lying? Of course not! It's just paid marketing for a sponsor's ideological position! /s
  - ptero 4y ago
    I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors might be way off, but I think those two things are quite different. Lying is making statements that the speaker knows are false. An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court. To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on. Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.

yks 4y ago

> don't apply to independent journalists What a naïveté. Independent journalists are even more beholden to their audiences, if they start talking up something those audiences don’t like, their incomes dwindle. I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence.

user3939382 4y ago
> I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  And both of those position changes feed INTO their 'Independent' thinker audiences not contradict with them.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    Yeah they're pandering to people who value the truth. /s Your comment makes no sense with Matt Taibbi's statements. I'm not sure you understand what he said and corrected.
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      Not those that value truth. They are pandering to contrarians and people who need the world to make sense and have order hence all the nefarious plots behind everything. Do you mean when he apologized for adamantly saying that Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and it was only 'dishonest types' that were pushing the narrative that Russia was going to invade? I mean, when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong in such a biased (an anti-discourse) way I kinda stop following anything old boy says so you are going to have to give me more details about what specific walk back of his you are referring to?

jasmer 4y ago

The media is mostly in service for themselves. The 'powers that be' bias is a bit different and takes mant forms. Aka institutional powers (aka Dem/GOP), individual institutional powers (aka stop a story from embarrassing a colleague Executive), Natoinal bias (aka stories during wartime are not quite the same), 'Civil/Public' bias (aka stories about vaccines during a pandemic), Corporate Institutions (aka advertisers, don't want to upset them). Funny enought those tend not to be the one's we get the most in a huff for, rather, we fixate more in the ideological narrative stuff because it's more visible. You don't really see the 'national bias' at all unless you're outside of the country. You don't see the 'corporate bias' bedcause it tends to be displayed in terms of 'stories that don't exist'. All of that said we should strive to be better.

Julesman 4y ago

Thanks for this. Nice to see it at the top of the conversation. Two words: Operation Mockingbird. The big news outlets get daily intelligence briefs. This isn't even controversial. But the real problem within that setting is self-censorship. You don't get the job unless you've proven than you know what not to say. Many credible books on that topic to read.

pas 4y ago
Two words: evidence where? > Many credible books on that topic to read. Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!
- bilekas 4y ago
  Seymour Hersh is the Journalist/Investigative Reporter and he does not mess around. Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger outlets would not publish it without source information etc and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking to his word of "Not revealing sources".
  - pas 4y ago
    That's appeal to authority. And it's a good hypothesis, we shouldn't discount it, but ... also not take it as gospel. It's pretty clear that to get to the bottom of this we either need some leak or enough politicians in Congress who take this seriously, and get people to testify under oath. (Of course it'd be a good start to hold accountable those who lie to Congress, like Keith Alexander and James Clapper.)
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    Was someone able to verify that this was in fact written by him? I remember that being an open question when it got posted initially.
  - blue_pants 4y ago
    It may be interesting to read this[0] OSINT analysis of Hersh's claims. [0] https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113 https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113

GoblinSlayer 4y ago

Objectivity is easy to access if you're not totally censored. Propaganda works by concealing alternative opinions - once you know the trick, it's easy to hack, even a weak effort can work.

giantg2 4y ago
Sounds weird, but one of the easiest paths to objectivity is not to seek objective sources. One can look at multiple sources with obvious opposing spins to form your own understanding. Even the sources labeled as most objective tend to miss the nuance behind the main few arguments.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I gave up on the dream of "objective news" when I was about 18. I had been taught that The Times was the most objective news organ here; it did carry an aura and style that seemed objective. I realized that what the objective "facts" are turns out to depend on your point-of-view, and it's harder to know what that point-of-view is if the organ is pretending to be "objective". Ever since, I've preferred to get my news from sources that wear their bias on their sleeve.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    If the skew is persistent, it should be possible to identify.
screwturner68 4y ago
We've just gotten to the point where views are not cross pollinated. Local news is not really local are much as it's controlled by a couple of companies with their own agenda so the same view is presented over and over and over again. In addition they've convinced the populace that the other side is evil so people have become tribal and only watch "their news" and that just feeds the loop. They don't have to conceal anything, it can be right there in front of them and it won't matter because they won't believe it because their tribe tells them it's a lie.

croes 4y ago

What is "the media" that lied about every? It's not one uniform block, it's thousands of people with different intensions and knowledge.

NDizzle 4y ago
Well, since you asked for it, here you go. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ
- croes 4y ago
  And that's still not "the media" but only a part of it.
  - NDizzle 4y ago
    What part of the media is that in the united states? Ballpark estimate... Is that the 80% or the 20%, in other words?
    - croes 4y ago
      How many stations are in the Youtube clips? The US has over 7000 stations
      - NDizzle 4y ago
        Do you think syndication of at least Fox, CBS, and ABC stops and starts with the specific clips that were gathered for this video clip? There are 7,000 stations... are you saying the fact that VH1 isn't saying this particular message means, "not all media..." What a disingenuous argument. Proceed, I won't stop you.

Spooky23 4y ago

That’s just cynical blah blah that ignores the pretty obvious cause. It’s pretty easy why trust in media has eroded in my lifetime (I’m a 40 something). We deregulated and allowed for consolidation of ownership of print, broadcast and eventually online media. That changed the dynamic. People will always correctly call out right wing talk radio as an example but the problems with media are more subtle as well. Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. If you were around in the 90s, you’ll remember how the OJ Simpson drama was a transformational event - which would not have happened in 1982. Serious journalism gave way to circus. Our wiser predecessors learned in the 1920s and 1930s of the danger of mass media. Right wing nutcases like Father Coughlin, demagogues like Huey Long, America First, and more extreme left wing labor activists bear a strong resemblance to the characters in modern media.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.

jmyeet 4y ago

Once people acept media bias the next jump they make that this is a partisan issue. It's easy to understand why, particularly now when there are major news outlets who deliberately lie. But the problem is way more insidious and pervasive than performative partisan issues, which are generally manufactured culture wars. Those issues serve two purposes: 1. To make people angry and keep them angry. Angry people are "engaged"; and 2. To sow division and prevent class solidarity. One of the most wildly successful examples of propaganda is the idea of the middle class. This serves to demonize the so-called "lower classes", typically labeling them as lazy, criminal, morally bankrupt and drains on the state. There are only two classes: labor and capital owners. Yet propaganda has been so successful that labor will defend the interests of billionaires to the detriment of their own interests. The number of people who would die on the hill of opposing Musk and Bezos paying slightly more taxes is depressing. Media is a key tool in this endeavour. It's why you see wall-to-wall coverage of the China balloon (which literally does not matter at all) and a virtual media blackout of the environmental catastrophe and massive corporate failings that underpin the East Palestine train derailment. Media represents and advocates for corporate interests and systemic interests.

Slava_Propanei 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago

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anonymouskimmer 4y ago

> Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols. In the years before the internet we had newsletters and amateur radio. https://media.tenor.com/9k_DNT8tBA4AAAAd/simpsons-i-wish-to-subscribe-to-your-newsletter.gif https://media.tenor.com/9k_DNT8tBA4AAAAd/simpsons-i-wish-to-... Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. Even among the non-postal "decentralized" distribution protocols. The old saying that people become leery of media reporting when they see how their own specialty is botched applies to even the credentialed bloggers when they step out of their lane just a bit. I've personally noticed fact reporting biases when, for instance, reading a story on the same event from Fox News and CNN. But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.

marcosdumay 4y ago
> Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore. The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore. > But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap. Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore. Definitely agree. But it's also difficult to fact check even if you do distrust. Even educated bloggers and readers can have difficulty accurately interpreting information, and what that information indicates, if technological advances make their knowledgebase outdated. > Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that. In some cases, such as when the source of particular facts all originate from the same person, sure. Or when everyone's article is just a rewrite of the AP News or Reuters release. But in the general case we all can know who won the superbowl, and by what margin and what plays.

ROTMetro 4y ago

[flagged]

Forgeties79 4y ago

The issue, to me at least, is what people are choosing to trust/believe instead. I find they're not being critical and looking at multiple sources, they're just instead putting their faith in other untrustworthy groups (see: Alex Jones).

onetimeusename 4y ago

I don't really believe that non profit news is any more objective if that is what you mean by independent. They are beholden to their donors who can afford it. This will often be large foundations set up by corporations and extremely rich people. There is even a tax incentive that a corporation or foundation/trust can use to get a tax break while ensuring that the non-profit publishes things that align with their own opinions. I actually think the "charity" sector that operates in journalism and politics is extremely corrupt and serves no public interest. I actually don't think it's possible to solve the problem of funding being able to influence journalism. Although there are independent journalists like on substack (which could be what you mean) I am not convinced that is much different from corporate media except the journalist is more like an LLC or sole proprietorship.

kornhole 4y ago
Independent does not mean objective. Independent journalists are generally not dependent on corporations, states, or publishing organizations to fund their reporting. Independence is a gradient rather than black or white. If he does publish something through a MSM outlet, he is generally paid for the piece published. Substack is one of many examples where funding is direct from readers or patrons. Good independent journalists are transparent about their biases since everybody has them.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
Maybe some non profit news organizations are objective? I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA. Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.
IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
There are plenty of for profit podcasters & writers out there that make money and honest living with small paypal subscriptions (before patreon was even a thing), plus small one-time donors and the like. Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1. They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources. So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.

nonethewiser 4y ago

> So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through." Trickle through to HALF the population. Frankly it's shocking that 50% don't think information they receive is a component of some narrative.

dlkf 4y ago

The media is full of shit, but compared to the academic sociologists you’re referencing it’s not that bad.

fortuna86 4y ago

> literal mountains of sociological studies Which ones prove systemic, deliberate deception?

y-curious 4y ago

Just wanted to say that I like your points and you write very well. What is your background?

xyzzyz 4y ago

> So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through." But most sociologists are totally in on the game. It used to be that the mainstream media narrative was opposite of what the sociologists preferred people to believe, and at the time you had academics talk about Manufactured Consent, and False Consciousness etc. These days, the press is more aligned with academics, so they prefer to keep it shush. Here is an explicit example, published just a few weeks ago: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X221150987 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X2211509... > The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents From the abstract: > Low-income Black fathers have been portrayed in the media and in research as uninvolved and disengaged from their children. The current study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 2578) to examine adolescents’ reports of relationships and interaction with their biological fathers. The results showed there were no significant differences among Black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, and Other fathers for adolescents’ perceptions of closeness or interaction with fathers. Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers. The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers. Imagine reading a paper which “debunks” a “myth” of lack of involvement of women in corporate boards or C-level position, which simply excludes companies that have zero women on boards or as C-level officers from consideration. It would be hard to view it as anything other than deliberate deception. This sort of ignoring of obvious factors is, however, extremely common in published sociology research, and the academic community is extremely good at pretending to not notice deliberately lousy scholarship, when it aligns well with political opinions of 90% sociologists, and attacks anyone who tries to bring attention to it.

l3mure 4y ago
> Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers. There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study. > The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers. Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this. [1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/documents/reichman_et_al_2001.pdf https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/d...

joe_the_user 4y ago

The problem is that the popular, "scandalized" understanding of "the media lie!!" doesn't have the nuance of sociological and political theories. The sociologist notes will note that the media serves the interests of the powerful while still reporting some number of facts. The most extreme of the scandalized public will say "the media lies - they say X so Y must be true and X must be a plot". This produces a whole of truly bizarre thinking (often on the right but no doubt on the left as well).

abstrakraft 4y ago

So would it be fair to say that you're in the half that believes in the misleading?