12 ms·

I formerly worked as a news editor at a metro daily newspaper, and before that I worked at various other news outlets and magazines. Here's the reality: The av

by jawns 4y ago

I formerly worked as a news editor at a metro daily newspaper, and before that I worked at various other news outlets and magazines. Here's the reality: The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness. I worked with a bunch of really talented reporters and editors throughout my career, and almost without exception, they highly valued those things. Moreover, many have an anti-authoritarian bent, and that leads to a desire to expose corruption, rather than protect it. But ... * I've seen publishers kill stories because they thought it would make advertisers unhappy. * I've seen senior execs put pressure on editors to downplay stories that painted the region in a bad light. * I've seen a political campaign refuse to permit a certain reporter to attend their campaign events because they didn't like that the reporter wasn't acting like a PR tool. * I've seen budgets for "watchdog journalism" become slowly starved, in favor of clickbait. And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business (who are really trying to make money and exert influence). Granted, there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued, and unfortunately that's where a lot of eyeballs end up these days, because so many people just want their existing biases to be re-inforced. But what America really needs is more media literacy, so we can better distinguish the former from the latter. We, as a society, are SO BAD at this. Our B.S. detectors have lots of false positives and false negatives. We look to the wrong signals to determine whether a news report is trustworthy. We fail to evaluate information critically as long as it validates our pre-existing views. We have a hard time separating facts from opinions. This lack of media literacy is worrisome enough, but now we've got political leaders capitalizing on the fact that we're bad at this and actively trying to delegitimize the media (as if it's a single thing) because it serves their own purposes.

remote_phone 4y ago
Did you work during the Trump era? Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth. That’s when things went from bad to worse and I abandoned the mainstream media entirely.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  I was not a fan of trump, at all, but even I noticed this. If trump scratched his butt in public, figuratively speaking, the media jumped on him for it, and would then decline to cover any story about whether butt scratching (figuratively speaking) was ever appropriate. The media also cast his supporters in an incredibly dark light, which was worrying because that was roughly half of voters who voted for a major candidate. Media coverage was hysterical at times (at other times, their concerns seemed appropriate and valuable).
  - ss108 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - barbariangrunge 4y ago
      > Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them is sufficient to expose them as bad people You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people, as if they have no other motive than to do evil. I didn’t like him either, but give me a break and try to let go of that media narrative. His supporters were just people. Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight
      - at_a_remove 4y ago
        That's the "basket of deplorables" thinking. You'll hear less-dressed up terms like "garbage people," like someone ought to be thrown out with the trash, applied to huge populations. It's kind of wild.
      - bojo 4y ago
        Absolutely this. Media had my neighbor yelling in my face and threatening to fight me over our differences in opinion over masks. Objectively he's not a bad guy, and I told him that I think we have more in common than not, then went inside. We really need to stop this cycle of hate. I want to feel safe in my neighborhood and get along with folk. We don't need to agree, but we need to recognize that we are Americans and on the same damn side in the end.
jahsome 4y ago
Former journalist. I have ranted to friends and family for decades about the lack of media literacy and the lack of understanding for the newsgathering and reporting processes. I'm glad to see others continuing those rants because I gave up shortly after j school and transitioning careers. Media literacy should be mandated in school.
- DLTADragonHawk 4y ago
  Is there a good list of resources for media literacy you could recommend? I had been thinking of tackling this problem and am curious on journalist's take.
  - jahsome 4y ago
    I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with non profit trade groups, as they're generally full of people with very tight butts about journalistic integrity and fewer advertisers/grant committees to please. Honestly though the goal is to get a good lay of the land for both how a story goes from whiteboard/notebook brainstorm to print, and the general shape of the industry. Small but impactful example: headlines are often written by a different person than the article. This leads to a lot of conflict, which is healthy in terms of producing quality journalism, but potentially confusing for the consumer who may not understand why. The main goals would be - Understand the roles of reporters (gathering), editors (verification), managing editors (suits), publishers (sugar daddies) and their roles for a single given piece, and within the org at large - Media conglomerates disproportionately dominate local news. It's not just Fox and CNN or the NYT/WaPo, and the impact is far more damaging than the more obvious corporate influence). These days I tend to stay away from the news for the most part, in an attempt to retain sanity. You don't need 24 hours of news. I read up for about 2-3 hours a week and feel more informed than ever. Here are a few resources who probably can get you set in a better direction than I would: Columbia journalism review Nieman lab Poytner institute
- latchkey 4y ago
  > Media literacy should be mandated in school. Just try for basic literacy first. A Gallup analysis published in March 2020 looked at data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, 2014, and 2017. It found that 130 million adults in the country have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab. https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
dudul 4y ago
When was this? I appreciate you sharing your on the ground knowledge and insights, but if it was more than 20 years ago I would also cautiously imagine that the new generation of journalists may not behave the same.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Right, things seem to have gotten a lot worse.
skibidibipiti 4y ago
People should be more educated, but blaming misinformation on uninformed people is like blaming climate change on consumers for driving and not recycling. Why doesn't 'real' news get more views and better advertising money? Wouldn't a trustworthy brand be more valuable for advertizers? Why don't more media orgs have independent funding? Are there any reporter / user owned media?
- lubesGordi 4y ago
  I wouldn't say misinformation is caused by 'uninformed people,' it's just that people tend to click on garbage. It's a slide into tabloid-ness as media focuses on their marketing ROI.
- Retric 4y ago
  A major factor here is trustworthy news organizations are extremely vulnerable to being bought as propaganda platforms.
llanowarelves 4y ago
People need better media literacy, but that's still a type of "victim blaming" and there's a reason why in law we tend to go after producers more than consumers of a thing, due to effects of scale. What the (not all, and not all the time..) media does when they bait people into moral hazard could easily be categorized as a crime (harming the informational commons) in some cases. How do we know? Imagine if the news had to publish things the same way that you testify in a courtroom. Do you think they would be more or less truthful and due diligent than they currently are? Non-commercial speech to the public needs to be taken as seriously as it is when it's commercial (companies etc) speech to the public, and the unqualified unwarrantyable claims scrutinized just as much. Individual journalists can be great people but the net result of systemic malincentives is a problem that's being gamed. There's a reason why rich and powerful people buy up newspapers (and politicians for that matter) and it doesn't have to do solely with telling the truth. I am not "blaming" anyone for taking advantage of it, or complaining, but we can fix it.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  The issue whenever we discuss punishing journalists/news organizations for "not telling the truth" is that "the truth" is often hard to identify. We also have a classic "who watches the watchmen?" problem, where we have to decide who gets determine the "real" truth. That can get real dicey really quickly. I find the lesser of two evils is to lean towards "well they can publish what they want, by and large" (obviously we have libel and slander laws and such). I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    I agree and you are very correct that the "truth" is a hard problem. But that's why we go the other direction: we know what a lie looks like (even if unintentional). This works great in court, and has a method to it. Falsification is scientific. Libel and slander laws do a good job in a narrow domain (personal reputation). And that's why I use the word "truthful" (spirit of the thing) not "truth" (itself) because like science, ideally we are just falsifying. Scientific truth (of everything, itself) is some asymptotic holy grail end state that we never reach, but hopefully are approaching by falsifying over time.
spacemadness 4y ago
This is exactly what it looks like to me as a layman—that editors/publishers are the real problem. They choose what stories to run and the edits to those stories, but also choose what type of journalists to hire and fire, which helps guide toward a certain narrative or bias. The latter point is basically what Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent if I recall.
fidgewidge 4y ago
> The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness The average journalist thinks they value the truth, accuracy and fairness. Observed behavior is very different to this flattering self portrait which is why they aren't trusted. Actual behaviors of real journalists that create distrust which can't be blamed on advertisers or editors: - Accepting large grants from billionaire foundations that are tied to pushing specific agendas and views. Example: look at how much money the Gates Foundation gives out in journalism grants tied to his personal agenda. - Publishing stories that contain obvious "errors" (invariably convenient for their pre-existing agenda). Example: the NYT published a front page that consisted solely of the names of 1000 people who had supposedly died of COVID. It was meant to scare people and it took some rando on twitter about half an hour to notice that the 6th name on the list was of a person who had been murdered. - Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory. - Point blank refusal to challenge certain types of sources because they think it's immoral to do so. Example: the BBC decided some years ago that climate change was "settled science" and that it was morally wrong to report on anything that might reduce faith in the "consensus". This is the opposite of the classical conception of journalism (challenging authority, digging up scandals, get both sides of the story etc). - Relying heavily on sources that are widely known to be discredited. Example: Fauci stated early on in COVID that he lied about masks in official statements to the press, specifically to manipulate people's behavior. This did not stop the press using him as a trusted authoritative source. Another example: the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems. There's way more.
- spopejoy 4y ago
  The OP's point is a subtler one, which seeks to explore _why_ journalists do what they do in the first place. Sure, it's charitable: they are undoubtedly some who seek to go "straight to the top" by aping whatever bias their editors favor etc. But there's far more news out there to report than just the clickbaity subjects you seem to favor -- Russiagate, Bill Gates, COVID, climate change -- and the folks doing it deserve credit. The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level. Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.
cm2187 4y ago
None of the reasons you mention cover what I observe every day in news (tv and printed) from all sides: stories not fitting the narrative being sinkholed, hit pieces on political opponents, puff pieces on friendly political figures, half of the truth always being presented (never both sides of an argument). The ideological bias is obvious and I don't believe this is honest journalists being coerced into this behaviour. In fact things like the various NYT drama spread over twitter when someone writes anything that deviates from the dogma shows this seems to be coming from the newsroom, not the editors or advertisers. Journalists are welcome to burn their own reputation, it is theirs. But don't blame others.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  The OP's bullet points are a real "softball" picture of the dynamics of the press and journalism (though the press is not necessarily more corrupt than a lot of institutions, it just claims more). Notably, the OP doesn't mention "cultivating sources" in their bullet points and that's a big source of corruption of individual journalists. In more detail: one of the most valuable thing a given political reporter on either a local or national level can get is "scoop", the opportunity to break a story first. The valuable source of scoops is ... the very people in power at whatever level the reporter is operating on. So a reporter wants to have these powerful people like them. And that effort to be liked can easily result in the reporter spinning a story to the liking of these people. This dynamic is discussed fairly often in analyses of the press I think.
akira2501 4y ago
> But what America really needs is more media literacy You describe a mountain of problems _inside_ your own industry, and yet you walk away with the idea that it's the public that needs extraordinary change to account for this. I appreciate your point of view, but I think your conclusion is horribly biased.
- layer8 4y ago
  The question is, which change would be more practical and more realistic. Is there any plausible world where media literacy wouldn’t be an important skill?
- SamuelAdams 4y ago
  Both can happen at the same time, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
bjornsing 4y ago
> there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued After learning the Bayesian way of thinking I feel more and more certain that this whole “objective news” idea is just plain wrong. There simply is no objective description of reality at that level of abstraction. Note though that this is not the usual postmodern viewpoint: reality is not a social construct, or at least that construct is heavily constrained. There is still untruths and outright lies.
javier123454321 4y ago
I mean, that's the whole argument of Chomsky's manufacturing consent. It's not that there are people at the top dictating what does and does not get published, rather that there is a system of incentives in mainstream news outlets that discourage dissent from mainstream politically favorable opinions. Sure, as an up and coming New York Times reporter, you can stick to your guns and want to report on controversial issues, but if it's really controversial and against the consensus of most of your liberal colleagues, then you might just not be up for that promotion. If someone thinks that's not true, ask yourself: do you really think that reporting on vaccine anomaly data, or Ukraine corruption will get you more or less upward mobility than reporting on shooting hot air baloons or whatever media orchestrated distraction is happening at the moment in the NYT?
nitwit005 4y ago
> And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business At this point the news companies are all desperately concealing the fact that they barely have reporters, and are mostly getting news from a wire feed or parent company.

by jawns 4y ago

remote_phone 4y ago

Did you work during the Trump era? Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth. That’s when things went from bad to worse and I abandoned the mainstream media entirely.

barbariangrunge 4y ago
I was not a fan of trump, at all, but even I noticed this. If trump scratched his butt in public, figuratively speaking, the media jumped on him for it, and would then decline to cover any story about whether butt scratching (figuratively speaking) was ever appropriate. The media also cast his supporters in an incredibly dark light, which was worrying because that was roughly half of voters who voted for a major candidate. Media coverage was hysterical at times (at other times, their concerns seemed appropriate and valuable).
- ss108 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - barbariangrunge 4y ago
    > Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them is sufficient to expose them as bad people You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people, as if they have no other motive than to do evil. I didn’t like him either, but give me a break and try to let go of that media narrative. His supporters were just people. Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight
    - at_a_remove 4y ago
      That's the "basket of deplorables" thinking. You'll hear less-dressed up terms like "garbage people," like someone ought to be thrown out with the trash, applied to huge populations. It's kind of wild.
    - bojo 4y ago
      Absolutely this. Media had my neighbor yelling in my face and threatening to fight me over our differences in opinion over masks. Objectively he's not a bad guy, and I told him that I think we have more in common than not, then went inside. We really need to stop this cycle of hate. I want to feel safe in my neighborhood and get along with folk. We don't need to agree, but we need to recognize that we are Americans and on the same damn side in the end.

jahsome 4y ago

Former journalist. I have ranted to friends and family for decades about the lack of media literacy and the lack of understanding for the newsgathering and reporting processes. I'm glad to see others continuing those rants because I gave up shortly after j school and transitioning careers. Media literacy should be mandated in school.

DLTADragonHawk 4y ago
Is there a good list of resources for media literacy you could recommend? I had been thinking of tackling this problem and am curious on journalist's take.
- jahsome 4y ago
  I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with non profit trade groups, as they're generally full of people with very tight butts about journalistic integrity and fewer advertisers/grant committees to please. Honestly though the goal is to get a good lay of the land for both how a story goes from whiteboard/notebook brainstorm to print, and the general shape of the industry. Small but impactful example: headlines are often written by a different person than the article. This leads to a lot of conflict, which is healthy in terms of producing quality journalism, but potentially confusing for the consumer who may not understand why. The main goals would be - Understand the roles of reporters (gathering), editors (verification), managing editors (suits), publishers (sugar daddies) and their roles for a single given piece, and within the org at large - Media conglomerates disproportionately dominate local news. It's not just Fox and CNN or the NYT/WaPo, and the impact is far more damaging than the more obvious corporate influence). These days I tend to stay away from the news for the most part, in an attempt to retain sanity. You don't need 24 hours of news. I read up for about 2-3 hours a week and feel more informed than ever. Here are a few resources who probably can get you set in a better direction than I would: Columbia journalism review Nieman lab Poytner institute
latchkey 4y ago
> Media literacy should be mandated in school. Just try for basic literacy first. A Gallup analysis published in March 2020 looked at data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, 2014, and 2017. It found that 130 million adults in the country have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab. https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...

dudul 4y ago

When was this? I appreciate you sharing your on the ground knowledge and insights, but if it was more than 20 years ago I would also cautiously imagine that the new generation of journalists may not behave the same.

karaterobot 4y ago
Right, things seem to have gotten a lot worse.

skibidibipiti 4y ago

People should be more educated, but blaming misinformation on uninformed people is like blaming climate change on consumers for driving and not recycling. Why doesn't 'real' news get more views and better advertising money? Wouldn't a trustworthy brand be more valuable for advertizers? Why don't more media orgs have independent funding? Are there any reporter / user owned media?

lubesGordi 4y ago
I wouldn't say misinformation is caused by 'uninformed people,' it's just that people tend to click on garbage. It's a slide into tabloid-ness as media focuses on their marketing ROI.
Retric 4y ago
A major factor here is trustworthy news organizations are extremely vulnerable to being bought as propaganda platforms.

llanowarelves 4y ago

People need better media literacy, but that's still a type of "victim blaming" and there's a reason why in law we tend to go after producers more than consumers of a thing, due to effects of scale. What the (not all, and not all the time..) media does when they bait people into moral hazard could easily be categorized as a crime (harming the informational commons) in some cases. How do we know? Imagine if the news had to publish things the same way that you testify in a courtroom. Do you think they would be more or less truthful and due diligent than they currently are? Non-commercial speech to the public needs to be taken as seriously as it is when it's commercial (companies etc) speech to the public, and the unqualified unwarrantyable claims scrutinized just as much. Individual journalists can be great people but the net result of systemic malincentives is a problem that's being gamed. There's a reason why rich and powerful people buy up newspapers (and politicians for that matter) and it doesn't have to do solely with telling the truth. I am not "blaming" anyone for taking advantage of it, or complaining, but we can fix it.

Forgeties79 4y ago
The issue whenever we discuss punishing journalists/news organizations for "not telling the truth" is that "the truth" is often hard to identify. We also have a classic "who watches the watchmen?" problem, where we have to decide who gets determine the "real" truth. That can get real dicey really quickly. I find the lesser of two evils is to lean towards "well they can publish what they want, by and large" (obviously we have libel and slander laws and such). I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  I agree and you are very correct that the "truth" is a hard problem. But that's why we go the other direction: we know what a lie looks like (even if unintentional). This works great in court, and has a method to it. Falsification is scientific. Libel and slander laws do a good job in a narrow domain (personal reputation). And that's why I use the word "truthful" (spirit of the thing) not "truth" (itself) because like science, ideally we are just falsifying. Scientific truth (of everything, itself) is some asymptotic holy grail end state that we never reach, but hopefully are approaching by falsifying over time.

spacemadness 4y ago

This is exactly what it looks like to me as a layman—that editors/publishers are the real problem. They choose what stories to run and the edits to those stories, but also choose what type of journalists to hire and fire, which helps guide toward a certain narrative or bias. The latter point is basically what Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent if I recall.

fidgewidge 4y ago

> The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness The average journalist thinks they value the truth, accuracy and fairness. Observed behavior is very different to this flattering self portrait which is why they aren't trusted. Actual behaviors of real journalists that create distrust which can't be blamed on advertisers or editors: - Accepting large grants from billionaire foundations that are tied to pushing specific agendas and views. Example: look at how much money the Gates Foundation gives out in journalism grants tied to his personal agenda. - Publishing stories that contain obvious "errors" (invariably convenient for their pre-existing agenda). Example: the NYT published a front page that consisted solely of the names of 1000 people who had supposedly died of COVID. It was meant to scare people and it took some rando on twitter about half an hour to notice that the 6th name on the list was of a person who had been murdered. - Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory. - Point blank refusal to challenge certain types of sources because they think it's immoral to do so. Example: the BBC decided some years ago that climate change was "settled science" and that it was morally wrong to report on anything that might reduce faith in the "consensus". This is the opposite of the classical conception of journalism (challenging authority, digging up scandals, get both sides of the story etc). - Relying heavily on sources that are widely known to be discredited. Example: Fauci stated early on in COVID that he lied about masks in official statements to the press, specifically to manipulate people's behavior. This did not stop the press using him as a trusted authoritative source. Another example: the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems. There's way more.

spopejoy 4y ago
The OP's point is a subtler one, which seeks to explore _why_ journalists do what they do in the first place. Sure, it's charitable: they are undoubtedly some who seek to go "straight to the top" by aping whatever bias their editors favor etc. But there's far more news out there to report than just the clickbaity subjects you seem to favor -- Russiagate, Bill Gates, COVID, climate change -- and the folks doing it deserve credit. The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level. Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.

cm2187 4y ago

None of the reasons you mention cover what I observe every day in news (tv and printed) from all sides: stories not fitting the narrative being sinkholed, hit pieces on political opponents, puff pieces on friendly political figures, half of the truth always being presented (never both sides of an argument). The ideological bias is obvious and I don't believe this is honest journalists being coerced into this behaviour. In fact things like the various NYT drama spread over twitter when someone writes anything that deviates from the dogma shows this seems to be coming from the newsroom, not the editors or advertisers. Journalists are welcome to burn their own reputation, it is theirs. But don't blame others.

joe_the_user 4y ago
The OP's bullet points are a real "softball" picture of the dynamics of the press and journalism (though the press is not necessarily more corrupt than a lot of institutions, it just claims more). Notably, the OP doesn't mention "cultivating sources" in their bullet points and that's a big source of corruption of individual journalists. In more detail: one of the most valuable thing a given political reporter on either a local or national level can get is "scoop", the opportunity to break a story first. The valuable source of scoops is ... the very people in power at whatever level the reporter is operating on. So a reporter wants to have these powerful people like them. And that effort to be liked can easily result in the reporter spinning a story to the liking of these people. This dynamic is discussed fairly often in analyses of the press I think.

akira2501 4y ago

> But what America really needs is more media literacy You describe a mountain of problems _inside_ your own industry, and yet you walk away with the idea that it's the public that needs extraordinary change to account for this. I appreciate your point of view, but I think your conclusion is horribly biased.

layer8 4y ago
The question is, which change would be more practical and more realistic. Is there any plausible world where media literacy wouldn’t be an important skill?
SamuelAdams 4y ago
Both can happen at the same time, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

bjornsing 4y ago

> there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued After learning the Bayesian way of thinking I feel more and more certain that this whole “objective news” idea is just plain wrong. There simply is no objective description of reality at that level of abstraction. Note though that this is not the usual postmodern viewpoint: reality is not a social construct, or at least that construct is heavily constrained. There is still untruths and outright lies.

javier123454321 4y ago

I mean, that's the whole argument of Chomsky's manufacturing consent. It's not that there are people at the top dictating what does and does not get published, rather that there is a system of incentives in mainstream news outlets that discourage dissent from mainstream politically favorable opinions. Sure, as an up and coming New York Times reporter, you can stick to your guns and want to report on controversial issues, but if it's really controversial and against the consensus of most of your liberal colleagues, then you might just not be up for that promotion. If someone thinks that's not true, ask yourself: do you really think that reporting on vaccine anomaly data, or Ukraine corruption will get you more or less upward mobility than reporting on shooting hot air baloons or whatever media orchestrated distraction is happening at the moment in the NYT?

nitwit005 4y ago

> And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business At this point the news companies are all desperately concealing the fact that they barely have reporters, and are mostly getting news from a wire feed or parent company.