9 ms·

> 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, accu

> 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.
Retric 4y ago
Average doesn’t mean everyone all the time. Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization. Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.
- parineum 4y ago
  > Average doesn’t mean everyone all the time. But you don't have to be biased every time to be biased. Trust is based on consistency.
kthejoker2 4y ago
What sources do you personally trust?
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked, which allow or encourage open commenting with third party moderation so I can quickly see disagreement, etc. Mostly that means Substacks, these days.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked What makes the citation correct or trustworthy? Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?
    - fidgewidge 4y ago
      Turtles all the way down, yep. At some level you have to rely on heuristics and just make a judgement call, but the checking at the prior levels still has a lot of value.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Straight news reporting has no lower level, short of your going out and talking to the same kind of people the reporter did. Commentary can have such citations. Investigative journalism might have citable passages in part, but ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself (which won't be some hyperlink you can go check). Journalists create the things that others cite. If they could produce what they need mainly by reading and citing, they wouldn't be journalists.
        fidgewidge 4y ago
        News can be checked in lots of ways. If there's a factual claim about some public data, check it. If someone is assigned a job title, is that actually their job title? Does it contain internal contradictions? Does it make claims that contradict knowledge you already have, or things that were previously claimed? All those types of checks are ones I've done before to news stories and found they failed them. Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of something else and stuck his name into Google. That surfaced another news report about the murder. This is basic fact checking but the NYT didn't do it. The data was too good to check, so they didn't.
mlindner 4y ago
> - 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. On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal). Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative: > Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
- adolph 4y ago
  “There was message distortion,” former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told The Fact Checker in a telephone interview. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.” He said he was unaware of how Biden described the letter during the debate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-biden-laptop-claims-russian-disinfo/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-bi...
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Yes there's any number of sources one can dig up to support either argument that come from well trusted sources. Russia's known to want to disrupt elections anywhere they can however. They'll even spread in the media the _appearance_ that elections were distorted to muddy the waters further even if no election interference took place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Those are pretty much all problems at the level of the editors, not the individual journalists. > the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems. Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not if they are not specialized science reporters.
- oehpr 4y ago
  We shouldn't be blaming the pencils those journalists used either I suppose, the graphite didn't have an intent to deceive. But those pencils, like those journalists, operated in an environment that makes deception a goal, and the only product at the end of the line was a misleading one.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  It's individual journalists that take the grants, they take the interviews with discredited people, they refuse to cover one side of the story because they were convinced by the other side that they're on the Right Side Of History, etc. If you make editors responsible for all that then what are journalists? Robots? > Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not Yet volunteer bloggers regularly manage to not only read papers, they find specific problems with them. The core problem here is that journalism as a field culturally accepts very low standards, and has no interest in raising them. Journalists are trained not to think too hard about anything and to distrust anyone who does, which is why independent journalism has such a different flavor to it. During COVID you could go to the legacy media and read a headline like "Lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives" which would quote a press release from a university. Then a few hours later you could go read some blog by some random anonymous dude and get a list of five massive and obvious methodology errors that rendered the underlying paper deceptive propaganda, problems of the sort that you didn't need any expertise to notice. Normies see this and think maybe people who can't pull off amazing feats of investigation like reading publicly available PDFs shouldn't be journalists? In journalistic culture not only won't they do things like this, they train their readers and each other to systematically ignore such investigations because they aren't "credible sources". But that's so wrong. They are credible sources, because they systematically prove their claims and over time that creates more credibility than whatever photocopier for academic opinions is being presented by the newspapers today.
jawns 4y ago
I think your response represent a common trap that people fall into, where we treat "the media" as if it's one entity, whereas in fact it's many distinct entities with very different attributes. When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  Yes there are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. A lot of the problems with "the media" are really problems with standard journalistic practices and those are uniform.
- baidifnaoxi 4y ago
  You may be right - in theory. But existence of Journalist collaboration networks make this a moot point. Google JournOList and tell me there isn’t any coordination. Edit - one other point, so many articles are also sourced from Reuters and AP that the Media, while different companies all have the same source material.

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.

Retric 4y ago

Average doesn’t mean everyone all the time. Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization. Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.

parineum 4y ago
> Average doesn’t mean everyone all the time. But you don't have to be biased every time to be biased. Trust is based on consistency.

kthejoker2 4y ago

What sources do you personally trust?

fidgewidge 4y ago
The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked, which allow or encourage open commenting with third party moderation so I can quickly see disagreement, etc. Mostly that means Substacks, these days.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked What makes the citation correct or trustworthy? Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    Turtles all the way down, yep. At some level you have to rely on heuristics and just make a judgement call, but the checking at the prior levels still has a lot of value.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Straight news reporting has no lower level, short of your going out and talking to the same kind of people the reporter did. Commentary can have such citations. Investigative journalism might have citable passages in part, but ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself (which won't be some hyperlink you can go check). Journalists create the things that others cite. If they could produce what they need mainly by reading and citing, they wouldn't be journalists.
      - fidgewidge 4y ago
        News can be checked in lots of ways. If there's a factual claim about some public data, check it. If someone is assigned a job title, is that actually their job title? Does it contain internal contradictions? Does it make claims that contradict knowledge you already have, or things that were previously claimed? All those types of checks are ones I've done before to news stories and found they failed them. Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of something else and stuck his name into Google. That surfaced another news report about the murder. This is basic fact checking but the NYT didn't do it. The data was too good to check, so they didn't.

mlindner 4y ago

> - 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. On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal). Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative: > Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

adolph 4y ago
“There was message distortion,” former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told The Fact Checker in a telephone interview. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.” He said he was unaware of how Biden described the letter during the debate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-biden-laptop-claims-russian-disinfo/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-bi...
- mlindner 4y ago
  Yes there's any number of sources one can dig up to support either argument that come from well trusted sources. Russia's known to want to disrupt elections anywhere they can however. They'll even spread in the media the _appearance_ that elections were distorted to muddy the waters further even if no election interference took place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

Those are pretty much all problems at the level of the editors, not the individual journalists. > the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems. Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not if they are not specialized science reporters.

oehpr 4y ago
We shouldn't be blaming the pencils those journalists used either I suppose, the graphite didn't have an intent to deceive. But those pencils, like those journalists, operated in an environment that makes deception a goal, and the only product at the end of the line was a misleading one.
fidgewidge 4y ago
It's individual journalists that take the grants, they take the interviews with discredited people, they refuse to cover one side of the story because they were convinced by the other side that they're on the Right Side Of History, etc. If you make editors responsible for all that then what are journalists? Robots? > Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not Yet volunteer bloggers regularly manage to not only read papers, they find specific problems with them. The core problem here is that journalism as a field culturally accepts very low standards, and has no interest in raising them. Journalists are trained not to think too hard about anything and to distrust anyone who does, which is why independent journalism has such a different flavor to it. During COVID you could go to the legacy media and read a headline like "Lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives" which would quote a press release from a university. Then a few hours later you could go read some blog by some random anonymous dude and get a list of five massive and obvious methodology errors that rendered the underlying paper deceptive propaganda, problems of the sort that you didn't need any expertise to notice. Normies see this and think maybe people who can't pull off amazing feats of investigation like reading publicly available PDFs shouldn't be journalists? In journalistic culture not only won't they do things like this, they train their readers and each other to systematically ignore such investigations because they aren't "credible sources". But that's so wrong. They are credible sources, because they systematically prove their claims and over time that creates more credibility than whatever photocopier for academic opinions is being presented by the newspapers today.

jawns 4y ago

I think your response represent a common trap that people fall into, where we treat "the media" as if it's one entity, whereas in fact it's many distinct entities with very different attributes. When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.

fidgewidge 4y ago
Yes there are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. A lot of the problems with "the media" are really problems with standard journalistic practices and those are uniform.
baidifnaoxi 4y ago
You may be right - in theory. But existence of Journalist collaboration networks make this a moot point. Google JournOList and tell me there isn’t any coordination. Edit - one other point, so many articles are also sourced from Reuters and AP that the Media, while different companies all have the same source material.