6 ms·

when was this Golden Age of News Objectivity, then? because from where I'm standing, it sure seems like it was more of a Golden Age of There Only Being A Few Ac

when was this Golden Age of News Objectivity, then? because from where I'm standing, it sure seems like it was more of a Golden Age of There Only Being A Few Accessible Sources of News, Most If Not All of Whom Were On The Same Page When It Comes To Major Stories, i.e., The Time Before Smartphones. case in point: the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. the entire United States media apparatus united to gaslight the populace into consenting to an foreign-soil military invasion on incredibly shaky grounds, that were later proven to be completely false. they even gaslit us into disapproving of our own allies choosing to not join us in the invasion—remember "freedom fries"? yet the only lesson the majority of the public seemed to learn from this is "George W. Bush is a bad guy", which is also true, but misses the point entirely—plus, in recent years, now that's not even entirely true, because look, he's bffs with Michele Obama, see, he's not that bad of a guy, right? the cycle continues unabated.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I usually see it associated with Cronkite's era on TV, about '60-'80. Such strong association with him is part of why it smells like nostalgia and selective memory, to me. And, again, you'd find plenty of people who think he was biased and doing slanted anti-American reporting in the second of those two decades. I would hope most people wouldn't regard the '90s and '00s as part of any kind of even-imaginary golden era of reporting. I've got some half-formed notion of this sentiment coming from a kind of hang-over from WWII propaganda and tight media control involving much more direct action by US government through media, but haven't exactly researched it and wouldn't stand behind that firmly. Just a hunch. Broadly, my suspicion, if that does indeed have anything to do with it, is that the fallout of that propaganda effort coupled with a crushing victory for the US resulted in a durable credibility for sufficiently official-looking news personalities, that took some time (and the loss of a war in Vietnam, and a huge shift in politics that really took shape starting with Nixon's campaigns) to erode, but was never especially real, as in, wasn't strongly related to some actual difference in circumstances and quality in news media in postwar America compared with the first half of the century.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  I completely agree with your assessment, but my point was, in the 90s and 00s, we were still in the bubble. we still thought of our news media as being completely trustworthy. even the post-9/11 invasions being predicated upon news media consent manufacturing wasn't enough to shake us out of it—nobody blamed the news media, Bush (and some of his cabinet) "took the fall" for the whole thing. we can look back on it now and obviously it's almost hilarious how terribly complicit the news media was in manufacturing consent for war crimes, but at the time, we didn't think about it that way. nobody thought about it that way. it was The News, which we had trust in, because we (90s millennials) had grown up watching it, and so had our parents. the popular idea that the news is largely full of shit did not come about until Trump popularized the term "fake news", and then they threw it back at him, and so on and so forth. (hopefully it's uncontroversial to state that Trump would not have been likely to be elected if people didn't have smartphones with which to consume sources of news other than that of the mainstream legacy news media.) before that, people still generally trusted the news media, even while still actively having boots on the ground in the Middle East due to the previous round of gaslighting. both Obama administrations, as far as I can recall at least, were still in an era where most people more or less trusted the media. sure, maybe you weren't a fan of FOX News or MSNBC or whatever, but you still felt like, no matter what your political affiliation was, you could tune into a cable TV news program and more or less get the truth about what was going on in the world. I had a one-semester Current World Affairs class in high school in 2007, and we spent most of it watching cable news, reading newspapers, and talking about it, without any of the default critical position you'd (hopefully??) expect today.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I think some of that's the difference between high school and college. Even today's more even-tempered history and civics classes in high school really downplay problems in our history and our systems, overall, including problems with the media, but as soon as you hit your first serious media studies textbook or course or just slip into a subculture that's into that sort of thing so assumes some familiarity with it as a background (politics nerds, certain flavors of history buffs, basically any leftist movement) you get a rather different idea of how things are going, and have gone, and realize that contemporary media criticism is part of a long tradition that's advanced similar complaints and made similar observations about structural problems with the media (access-related conflict of interest, slant via selection of what's "newsworthy", bias toward reporting violence or the otherwise shocking, ownership- or advertiser-related conflict of interest, susceptibility to lazily repeating propaganda from official sources, et c.) for pretty much the entire time this has been a field of study. High school history class might cover e.g. yellow journalism as some temporary historical phenomenon, but won't usually dig into, say, the fact that the idea of "unbiased reporting" or "just presenting the facts" or "we report, you decide" are all kinda questionable to begin with—which facts? Which stories? When and how ought media provide context for a story, or leave it out? I can lie with facts all day long, it's not even hard. Half the lies on the actually-kinda-news segments of Fox News (yeah, sorry, still picking on them because they're an easy target) are just them reporting things without the context that makes it plainly a non-story—they're "just" reporting the facts, but it's slanted as hell, and they're deliberately implying things that aren't true by leaving out the context you need to tell that they're wrong. Take it another direction, and you can lie by providing the wrong context (not a lie in the sense of an outright falsehood! Just selective presentation). The history of media as largely explicitly partisan for much of the country's history will likely also barely be covered, and will almost certainly not be connected to the current state of media. ... but not everyone ends up seeing that expanded view. Maybe what I'm not accounting for is a recent popularization of a kind of shitty, partial, divorced-from-scholarship-and-history version of that POV, through the mechanisms and circumstances you mention, the holding of which might convince someone that this is a recent development, for lack of the rest of that context. "Now the media lies sometimes! That's new!" I don't think the media landscape's wholly unchanging, and do thing some things like the loss of the fairness doctrine and our allowing some pretty incredible levels of media ownership consolidation has had some ill effects (though the death of the fairness doctrine would have little effect on the Internet, anyway, and the main outcome of losing it was the rise of partisan commentary and opinion without balancing counter-point, not more-slanted news—basically, it allowed the current much-maligned "media bubble" effect to get a running start way back in the 1980s, well before the rise of the Web as something normal people used, but that was mostly accomplished through commentary shows, not reporting). I'm just skeptical that we were ever a ton better off in terms of, specifically, news media honesty and integrity than we are now. > I had a one-semester Current World Affairs class in high school in 2007, and we spent most of it watching cable news, reading newspapers, and talking about it, without any of the default critical position you'd (hopefully??) expect today. Schools have to be damned careful how they treat current events. Parents get pissed off in a hurry over some really, really dumb shit, like "acknowledging basic things about reality that definitely shouldn't be controversial" sorts of shit, and if there's one thing schools hate dealing with, it's pissed-off parents. Start analyzing slant in media reporting in high school, as a teacher, and you're courting a reprimand even if you do your job perfectly and entirely objectively (somehow). "The closest thing to a widely-agreed-upon-to-be-neutral source we can find, presented with minimal commentary" is often the best they can realistically manage, and even that will get angry phone calls from time to time.
boomboomsubban 4y ago
>case in point: the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. the entire United States media apparatus united to gaslight the populace into consenting to an foreign-soil military invasion on incredibly shaky grounds, that were later proven to be completely false The invasion of Afghanistan was over their harboring of Bin Laden, and there's very strong evidence he was there until shortly after the start of the war. I have plenty of criticism of the Afghanistan war, for starters the invasion was illegal under international law, but the "reason" we invaded was likely true.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  bro they gaslit the whole country into being islamophobes for a solid few years there so we'd agree with the invasion of Afghanistan, predicated upon a former CIA asset supposedly having had some hand in 9/11, and then got us to invade Iraq because of unsubstantiated and ultimately false claims as to the existence of "WMDs," and then, afterward, they told us how shamefully evil we were for having spent half of the 00s being islamophobes (which was the case only because they gaslit us into being as such). and we just rolled with it, blamed Bush at the end and called it a day, because hey, look, this hip young black senator is running for office and he's gonna Hope and Change everything and make it better (which didn't end up happening). the news media has not been a force for good in my entire lifetime, but almost nobody (myself included) started seriously questioning it until a few years ago.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    >bro they gaslit the whole country into being islamophobes for a solid few years there so we'd agree with the invasion of Afghanistan, predicated upon a former CIA asset supposedly having had some hand in 9/11 The invasion of Afghanistan started like a month after 9/11, and there's basically no evidence Bin Laden himself had CIA connections. The Afghans that harbored him did, but not Bin Laden. I am very critical of the US in these matters, but in a discussion about the importance of facts you should aim to be factual.
    - adamrezich 4y ago
AlbertCory 4y ago
Please reread the point about Victorian porn, and how that "proves" sexual mores have never changed (it doesn't). If we actually wanted to argue this: citing a few stories from back when, in which one really cannot discern the reporter's politics, will not do it. You can just argue, "that's one example. Look, here's this biased shit from the same period, see? Nothing's changed!" No, if we wanted to argue if things have changed, we'd have to find someone who practiced journalism back then (as I did not). OR - we'd look at what the Journalism schools were teaching, except that many working journalists didn't get degrees in Journalism. OR maybe the manuals that media outlets gave to their reporters, if such things existed. As for "post-9/11", you're already 30-40 years too late.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I'd actually be pretty interested in a kind of statistical study of new media bias over the decades. I think that'd be hard as hell to construct, owing in part to there being a lot of ways news media can introduce bias, some of which are really hard to spot without a great deal of context, but it might be interesting. I do think some of the shift has been not in the availability of quality news media, but in the kind of news media people actually "consume". It's not like doctor's waiting rooms were playing 24/7 cable "news" in 1965—because there was no such thing, and because the doctor's office waiting room probably didn't have a TV in it. AP Wire and several news periodicals and a few papers of more-or-less decent quality do exist, but if you don't seek them out your ambient, if you will, exposure to "news" will mostly be shit, that much I'd agree with. I do think there's been some "the medium is the message" effect in news becoming a 24/7/365 product rather than something more focused, but I also think that's more on top of or in addition to the decent aspects of older news media, not instead of. But, you might be right, and I might be wrong. Maybe our news media really was wildly better than it is now, in a narrow window of time in post-war America. Or maybe we're just interpreting "100 'units' of news available, 40 of which are pretty good" versus "10,000 'units' of news available, 1,000 of which are pretty good" differently—depending on one's perspective, either of those could be regarded as worse than the other. Or—I can see this being the case, for sure—maybe I'm not giving enough weight to what's popular, versus what's available, when evaluating differences in the news media landscape. What's popular now is, kinda, a product that didn't even exist before the late '80s or so. A new category of news that needs, as raw material, almost more "news" than actually exists, and needs to compete with hyper-palatable available-on-tap entertainment, for eyeballs and attention. Maybe the expansion of entertainment-availability in general deserves some consideration, when it comes to what media's like now. Maybe too many options are a bad thing, actually (see: Fox News insiders fretting that reporting the truth might lose them some of their audience, and so, money—because there are plenty of other outlets willing to lie, readily available at the click of a mouse)

yamtaddle 4y ago

I usually see it associated with Cronkite's era on TV, about '60-'80. Such strong association with him is part of why it smells like nostalgia and selective memory, to me. And, again, you'd find plenty of people who think he was biased and doing slanted anti-American reporting in the second of those two decades. I would hope most people wouldn't regard the '90s and '00s as part of any kind of even-imaginary golden era of reporting. I've got some half-formed notion of this sentiment coming from a kind of hang-over from WWII propaganda and tight media control involving much more direct action by US government through media, but haven't exactly researched it and wouldn't stand behind that firmly. Just a hunch. Broadly, my suspicion, if that does indeed have anything to do with it, is that the fallout of that propaganda effort coupled with a crushing victory for the US resulted in a durable credibility for sufficiently official-looking news personalities, that took some time (and the loss of a war in Vietnam, and a huge shift in politics that really took shape starting with Nixon's campaigns) to erode, but was never especially real, as in, wasn't strongly related to some actual difference in circumstances and quality in news media in postwar America compared with the first half of the century.

adamrezich 4y ago
I completely agree with your assessment, but my point was, in the 90s and 00s, we were still in the bubble. we still thought of our news media as being completely trustworthy. even the post-9/11 invasions being predicated upon news media consent manufacturing wasn't enough to shake us out of it—nobody blamed the news media, Bush (and some of his cabinet) "took the fall" for the whole thing. we can look back on it now and obviously it's almost hilarious how terribly complicit the news media was in manufacturing consent for war crimes, but at the time, we didn't think about it that way. nobody thought about it that way. it was The News, which we had trust in, because we (90s millennials) had grown up watching it, and so had our parents. the popular idea that the news is largely full of shit did not come about until Trump popularized the term "fake news", and then they threw it back at him, and so on and so forth. (hopefully it's uncontroversial to state that Trump would not have been likely to be elected if people didn't have smartphones with which to consume sources of news other than that of the mainstream legacy news media.) before that, people still generally trusted the news media, even while still actively having boots on the ground in the Middle East due to the previous round of gaslighting. both Obama administrations, as far as I can recall at least, were still in an era where most people more or less trusted the media. sure, maybe you weren't a fan of FOX News or MSNBC or whatever, but you still felt like, no matter what your political affiliation was, you could tune into a cable TV news program and more or less get the truth about what was going on in the world. I had a one-semester Current World Affairs class in high school in 2007, and we spent most of it watching cable news, reading newspapers, and talking about it, without any of the default critical position you'd (hopefully??) expect today.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I think some of that's the difference between high school and college. Even today's more even-tempered history and civics classes in high school really downplay problems in our history and our systems, overall, including problems with the media, but as soon as you hit your first serious media studies textbook or course or just slip into a subculture that's into that sort of thing so assumes some familiarity with it as a background (politics nerds, certain flavors of history buffs, basically any leftist movement) you get a rather different idea of how things are going, and have gone, and realize that contemporary media criticism is part of a long tradition that's advanced similar complaints and made similar observations about structural problems with the media (access-related conflict of interest, slant via selection of what's "newsworthy", bias toward reporting violence or the otherwise shocking, ownership- or advertiser-related conflict of interest, susceptibility to lazily repeating propaganda from official sources, et c.) for pretty much the entire time this has been a field of study. High school history class might cover e.g. yellow journalism as some temporary historical phenomenon, but won't usually dig into, say, the fact that the idea of "unbiased reporting" or "just presenting the facts" or "we report, you decide" are all kinda questionable to begin with—which facts? Which stories? When and how ought media provide context for a story, or leave it out? I can lie with facts all day long, it's not even hard. Half the lies on the actually-kinda-news segments of Fox News (yeah, sorry, still picking on them because they're an easy target) are just them reporting things without the context that makes it plainly a non-story—they're "just" reporting the facts, but it's slanted as hell, and they're deliberately implying things that aren't true by leaving out the context you need to tell that they're wrong. Take it another direction, and you can lie by providing the wrong context (not a lie in the sense of an outright falsehood! Just selective presentation). The history of media as largely explicitly partisan for much of the country's history will likely also barely be covered, and will almost certainly not be connected to the current state of media. ... but not everyone ends up seeing that expanded view. Maybe what I'm not accounting for is a recent popularization of a kind of shitty, partial, divorced-from-scholarship-and-history version of that POV, through the mechanisms and circumstances you mention, the holding of which might convince someone that this is a recent development, for lack of the rest of that context. "Now the media lies sometimes! That's new!" I don't think the media landscape's wholly unchanging, and do thing some things like the loss of the fairness doctrine and our allowing some pretty incredible levels of media ownership consolidation has had some ill effects (though the death of the fairness doctrine would have little effect on the Internet, anyway, and the main outcome of losing it was the rise of partisan commentary and opinion without balancing counter-point, not more-slanted news—basically, it allowed the current much-maligned "media bubble" effect to get a running start way back in the 1980s, well before the rise of the Web as something normal people used, but that was mostly accomplished through commentary shows, not reporting). I'm just skeptical that we were ever a ton better off in terms of, specifically, news media honesty and integrity than we are now. > I had a one-semester Current World Affairs class in high school in 2007, and we spent most of it watching cable news, reading newspapers, and talking about it, without any of the default critical position you'd (hopefully??) expect today. Schools have to be damned careful how they treat current events. Parents get pissed off in a hurry over some really, really dumb shit, like "acknowledging basic things about reality that definitely shouldn't be controversial" sorts of shit, and if there's one thing schools hate dealing with, it's pissed-off parents. Start analyzing slant in media reporting in high school, as a teacher, and you're courting a reprimand even if you do your job perfectly and entirely objectively (somehow). "The closest thing to a widely-agreed-upon-to-be-neutral source we can find, presented with minimal commentary" is often the best they can realistically manage, and even that will get angry phone calls from time to time.

boomboomsubban 4y ago

>case in point: the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. the entire United States media apparatus united to gaslight the populace into consenting to an foreign-soil military invasion on incredibly shaky grounds, that were later proven to be completely false The invasion of Afghanistan was over their harboring of Bin Laden, and there's very strong evidence he was there until shortly after the start of the war. I have plenty of criticism of the Afghanistan war, for starters the invasion was illegal under international law, but the "reason" we invaded was likely true.

adamrezich 4y ago
bro they gaslit the whole country into being islamophobes for a solid few years there so we'd agree with the invasion of Afghanistan, predicated upon a former CIA asset supposedly having had some hand in 9/11, and then got us to invade Iraq because of unsubstantiated and ultimately false claims as to the existence of "WMDs," and then, afterward, they told us how shamefully evil we were for having spent half of the 00s being islamophobes (which was the case only because they gaslit us into being as such). and we just rolled with it, blamed Bush at the end and called it a day, because hey, look, this hip young black senator is running for office and he's gonna Hope and Change everything and make it better (which didn't end up happening). the news media has not been a force for good in my entire lifetime, but almost nobody (myself included) started seriously questioning it until a few years ago.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  >bro they gaslit the whole country into being islamophobes for a solid few years there so we'd agree with the invasion of Afghanistan, predicated upon a former CIA asset supposedly having had some hand in 9/11 The invasion of Afghanistan started like a month after 9/11, and there's basically no evidence Bin Laden himself had CIA connections. The Afghans that harbored him did, but not Bin Laden. I am very critical of the US in these matters, but in a discussion about the importance of facts you should aim to be factual.
  - adamrezich 4y ago

AlbertCory 4y ago

Please reread the point about Victorian porn, and how that "proves" sexual mores have never changed (it doesn't). If we actually wanted to argue this: citing a few stories from back when, in which one really cannot discern the reporter's politics, will not do it. You can just argue, "that's one example. Look, here's this biased shit from the same period, see? Nothing's changed!" No, if we wanted to argue if things have changed, we'd have to find someone who practiced journalism back then (as I did not). OR - we'd look at what the Journalism schools were teaching, except that many working journalists didn't get degrees in Journalism. OR maybe the manuals that media outlets gave to their reporters, if such things existed. As for "post-9/11", you're already 30-40 years too late.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I'd actually be pretty interested in a kind of statistical study of new media bias over the decades. I think that'd be hard as hell to construct, owing in part to there being a lot of ways news media can introduce bias, some of which are really hard to spot without a great deal of context, but it might be interesting. I do think some of the shift has been not in the availability of quality news media, but in the kind of news media people actually "consume". It's not like doctor's waiting rooms were playing 24/7 cable "news" in 1965—because there was no such thing, and because the doctor's office waiting room probably didn't have a TV in it. AP Wire and several news periodicals and a few papers of more-or-less decent quality do exist, but if you don't seek them out your ambient, if you will, exposure to "news" will mostly be shit, that much I'd agree with. I do think there's been some "the medium is the message" effect in news becoming a 24/7/365 product rather than something more focused, but I also think that's more on top of or in addition to the decent aspects of older news media, not instead of. But, you might be right, and I might be wrong. Maybe our news media really was wildly better than it is now, in a narrow window of time in post-war America. Or maybe we're just interpreting "100 'units' of news available, 40 of which are pretty good" versus "10,000 'units' of news available, 1,000 of which are pretty good" differently—depending on one's perspective, either of those could be regarded as worse than the other. Or—I can see this being the case, for sure—maybe I'm not giving enough weight to what's popular, versus what's available, when evaluating differences in the news media landscape. What's popular now is, kinda, a product that didn't even exist before the late '80s or so. A new category of news that needs, as raw material, almost more "news" than actually exists, and needs to compete with hyper-palatable available-on-tap entertainment, for eyeballs and attention. Maybe the expansion of entertainment-availability in general deserves some consideration, when it comes to what media's like now. Maybe too many options are a bad thing, actually (see: Fox News insiders fretting that reporting the truth might lose them some of their audience, and so, money—because there are plenty of other outlets willing to lie, readily available at the click of a mouse)