7 ms·

> stuck on models that worked in the past, like "both sides"ing issues sort of reflexively. That works great with a lot of things like "how much should we tax c

> stuck on models that worked in the past, like "both sides"ing issues sort of reflexively. That works great with a lot of things like "how much should we tax companies?", but not so much for some more fundamental questions like whether someone supports democracy. As someone who worked for years as an investigative reporter, I feel like this comment fundamentally misunderstands what it is that journalistic organizations strive to do. Generally speaking, the goal is to report the facts about newsworthy events. They are not trying to tell people what to think, or even what the reporter thinks. That is what opinion pieces and editorials are for. Would you be more specific about what you think should be done differently? For example, in reporting about whether someone supports democracy?

davidw 2y ago
> Would you be more specific about what you think should be done differently? For example, in reporting about whether someone supports democracy? No, because I'm not a news person myself. I can see there's a problem, but I don't know how to fix it; I don't know the job or the business behind it well enough. I'd look to people like Jay Rosen and Margaret Sullivan for good critiques and perhaps some suggestions of what should be done differently. But it's tricky! Because not only is the reporting part of it struggling right now, the whole business aspect is in trouble as well, which compounds problems - like I mentioned with local news. And once again, I have no idea how anyone fixes that. Perhaps some enterprising person on Hacker News will figure out something that works, although I suspect it's more of a people problem than a technology one.
chrismcb 2y ago
I didn't know what the OP meant about "both siding" but I feel like the biggest problem is the lack of journalism, the lack of "report the facts."instead it is about supporting a particular narrative, about reporting only the facts that lend to that narrative, even going so far as to manufacturer them. As far as local newspapers, they just lost the ad war.
- xocnad 2y ago
  Can you provide some specific examples that inform your viewpoint?
  - sincerecook 2y ago
    Fiery but mostly peaceful protests, Biden's dementia is actually just a speech issue, Russia hacked our brains, peaceful Muslims (after a massacre), etc, etc.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      Isn't that just journalists not supporting your personal narrative? That isn't the measure of truth (and neither is mine).
      - mike_hearn 2y ago
        Biden having dementia isn't a personal narrative, it's a matter of fact that was clearly visible for years but most US based journalists refused to report on. The position you're staking out here is called postmodernism, and is based on the idea that there is no objective truth. There is only my truth and your truth. This is a highly ideological and contentious position, in fact to people who don't subscribe to postmodernism, postmodernism is an objectively untrue belief system. Biden shows all the symptoms of being in a state of advanced dementia. People who work with him say he's only cogent and capable of handling presidential business for a few hours a day at best, and that's probably an exaggeration. It is objectively true that he has dementia by the definitions of those words. When journalists refused to report that or pretended the problems were caused by other things, they weren't merely preferencing personal narratives of equal value to any other narrative, they were explicitly manipulating their readers in order to achieve their ideological goals via subterfuge. Which is why nobody rational trusts them anymore.
        mmooss 2y ago
        Spare me the postmodernism lecture and don't try to put me in your preconceived box. There is lots of ground between 'there is no objective reality' and assuming that you, mike_hearn, have some special access to to the Truth. If someone could have such special access, how do you know it's you and not me? It's not that voice saying you are right - everyone has it; it's part perceptual mechanism and part ego; why is your voice superior to mine? And we also know that political movements play to that voice, manipulate it, and then encourage it - 'you and I know the truth'. And aren't you the one just repeating an ideology? All you say I have heard many times as dogma of the current right-wing movement. And as you offer nothing else but insistence on it, is there any more to these claims? Where do you think for yourself and depart from it? What is your reasoning beyond 'nobody rational' would disagree with the movement - a strong signal of reason-by-mass-psychology. The essence of reason is another voice, which connects our intellect and knows, through experience and training, that the first voice is not trustworthy. It doesn't say, 'nobody rational would disagree with me'; it says, 'my perception and knowledge are limited and I need to base my beliefs on much more'. The core of reason and rational thought is resolving a dilemma: how do we find truth if our perceptions and beliefs are unreliable? What's worked very well and is widely accepted is to use something outside ourselves: publicly verifiable fact. > objectively untrue > nobody rational Those words aren't evidence, they are just signals that it's a dogma. A rational discussion would bring in evidence, and talk about its strengths and weaknesses, and talk about the strengths and weaknesses in your ideas. It would include curiosity about others' ideas. I'm sure you have plenty of good ideas (and so do I), but it's impossible to explore anything if you won't. > journalists refused to report that I saw plenty of reporting about his age-related problems, for example in the New York Times and Fox News. Both got a lot of heat for it.
deathanatos 2y ago
> Generally speaking, the goal is to report the facts about newsworthy events. I disagree; I think "reporting the facts" has taken somewhat of a backseat in journalism these days. Instead, it is much more just "this is what each side says"; while one might argue that, yes, the quote of what each side said is itself a fact, it's a pretty poor quality fact, worse than witness testimony since the witnesses aren't under oath and if politicians, are well known to be unreliable. Worse, it feels as if it doesn't matter if one side is uttering absolute bullshit, it just gets quoted & printed, giving equal weight to each side's statements regardless of how absurd it might be. And because the truth is usually harder to put pithily and often takes longer to even determine, it usually loses out, and it becomes competition of "who can scream the loudest?" or first, or the most convincingly. (“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”) Deeper questions such as "what does science say?" or "what are the actual facts" (not just what people say the facts are) or "what would someone knowledgeable in these matters ask about this situation?" are left unreported. (And yes, I acknowledge that science itself can have inherent bias, or come to an erroneous result. But are you asking a physicist about the physics, or are you asking a politician about the physics? Are you making an attempt to get beyond the sound bite and determine the actual nuance to the topic, or is it the same "A screams A, B screams B" stances & the societal debate on the topic shall go nowhere?) > They are not trying to tell people what to think, or even what the reporter thinks. But by simply quoting people without putting things into the context of facts, the media becomes a mouthpiece for those being quoted, usually politicians. No, the reporting isn't telling us what to think, the politician is. For example, in one topic that I'm knowledgeable on¹, journalists routinely print what are lies, full stop, from one of the political parties. Now, again, "X say Y" is technically a fact, and could be printed. But I've seen it followed up with "Science has no evidence about Y" — which is patently false, and is at best a confused conclusion by the reporter (science has a strong result about Y — Y does not occur; but you if write "there is no evidence about Y", people read that as "we don't know", but we do know, and it's ¬Y.) Let's take another example, where I'm not an expert: the recent Korean air crash. Reading the reporting left me wondering things like "Why did the EMAS not arrest the aircraft? How did a bird strike take out the landing gear? If, e.g., there was a hydraulics failure in the landing gear, why did they not gravity drop the landing gear? ATC transcripts?" I saw no reporting even questioning any of those things; most of it was surface level: a crash occurred, here's the death toll thus far. Even simpler: 9/10 times a court is involved, there's no link to the ruling. Or, quite often, I can be reading article A, which makes claim 1, and I think "claim 1 is a surprising claim; I would not have expected claim 1 to be true". Thankfully, claim 1 is a link! And I click it … and the linked article does not support claim 1. But by having claim 1 be a link, the upstream article's claim feels legitimate and cited, when in reality … it isn't. ¹I don't want to name it, as it's a charged topic, and would certainly derail the thread.
valiant55 2y ago
For example, having a debate about climate change with one scientist from each side of the debate is insane because there's scientific consensus on only one side of that debate. Trying to cast equal light on both sides of a topic tips the scale in favor of the minority opinion. Or take some reporting about DT's insane idea to take over Greenland, treating it like a legitimate idea and polling people about their thoughts just further legitimatizes absolute insanity.
- pseudo0 2y ago
  What's so insane about buying Greenland? Offer the current population $2 million USD each if they vote to join, and it would only cost around $100 billion. That's a steal considering its strategic value.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    or you can offer every Russian $5 to vote to join - cheaper and much bigger strategic value
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mmooss 2y ago
  > having a debate about climate change with one scientist from each side of the debate is insane I haven't seen such a debate in serious journalism in a long time. I think that's a non-existant problem, but could you point to examples?
- tim333 2y ago
  >having a debate about climate change with one scientist from each side of the debate is insane It depends what aspect you are debating. Is it happening is one sided but how fast, what we should do about etc is not.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Finding scientists who disagree with one or more climate change narratives is easy; it's actually the media who decided one day that they must stop talking to such people because there is "consensus", which is obviously doublethink. If there's consensus then you don't need to make an explicit decision to silence one side, because there is only one side to begin with. You yourself admit that this is true when your post goes from talking about a "consensus on only one side" to there being a "minority opinion" i.e. no consensus. But if you simply decide to report the majority opinion on any topic then you're once again engaged in circular reasoning, as the majority opinion will be affected by whatever you report. There isn't any way to do honest journalism on complex topics other than to actually report all sides of the issue, including disagreement by minorities, including if you believe those minorities are wrong. The media used to do "both sides" because that's what it takes to be trusted, when they stopped doing that trust in them started to decline. Ironically, this totally one sided kind of reporting leading to mistrust is what Bezos is now trying to fix. Far too late, but he is at least trying.
JohnBooty 2y ago
Generally speaking, the goal is to report the facts about newsworthy events. They are not trying to tell people what to think I think (good) reporters are going to do this in the micro, yeah. Taking a slightly broader view, though, surely we can see that there is a myriad of implicit editorialization in any publication, no matter how factual they are. There can be no "neutral" media because the people controlling it still make a wide range of choices regarding those facts. They make choices regarding which stories and beats receive funding and staffing, the presentation of those facts (which stories are at the top of page 1, which ones are buried on page 83 next to the obituaries?) and which facts are not reported. Imagine a newspaper that only investigates the private lives of Political Party A, looking for fraud or salacious incidents. We then draw attention to them and put them "above the fold." We do not tell lies either privately or publicly and follow strict journalistic guidelines. You can see where this is going: the catch is that we never investigate Political Party B. Not exactly a balanced presentation of the truth, even though we never lie.
- davidw 2y ago
  Right - and big enough news outlets can even "make their own weather". This investigation of "circular reporting" at the NYT is pretty illustrative: https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-inconsistent-narrative-selection-and-framing-that-tends-to-favor-republicans/ https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Despite unavoidable bias, there's a clear line that journalists often cross where they present something in a way that they had to know was misleading. I'm not talking choice of what stories to cover or how prominent to make them but writing things like "X is increasing" when they really just cherry picked a time interval over which it increased it's otherwise been decreasing but they don't mention that. They can also omit obviously relevant information which would oppose the general impression they're trying to present. Or they'll add qualifiers that show doubt in information they don't like but not to information that supports the political belief they're trying to push. There's also the practice of making naked assertions with the obvious intent to persuade people like "X is false" instead of "source Y said that X was false". I think this kind of stuff is why they're widely disrespected.
burner999888 2y ago
“They are not trying to tell people what to think, or even what the reporter thinks.” What a joke. Literally 80% of MSM reporting is framed from a leftist viewpoint of what’s right/wrong. For years now it plays dirty by leaving out key facts or misrepresenting a situation to favor lefist ideology (e.g. “1 Killed after Tesla Cybertruck Battery Explodes” headline rather than “Explosive Device Detonated from Vehicle…”, since the media now hates Elon since he helped Trump win). I can often feel the seething hatred of the right coming off the words written by the journalist. It’s crazy to me that people on the left are blind to this. You should really re-analyze your level of objectivity if you don’t see this (or maybe read all the “Twitter Files”, etc released on X over the past year or 2).
- bediger4000 2y ago
  Strangely, it looks to me like 70% of MSM reporting is from a conservative viewpoint. I mean, we had WaPo and LA Times refuse to endorse Harris, how is that liberal? How do we reconcile this?
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    It probably starts when folks like the parent-poster provide a clear definition for "leftist", preferably something that isn't "anyone who sounds like they'd vote for a Democrat." https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289
  - burner999888 2y ago
    WaPo has endorsed Democrats literally every single election dating back to 1988. So you now consider them “conservative” since they refused to endorse Harris? How on Earth did you make that jump? They didn’t endorse because Bezos (and Polymarket) knew she was gonna lose and was trying to buy some political capital after he allowed his newspaper to unfairly and violently bash Trump for years. The lead editor quit over it in a hissy fit after Bezos temporarily put a lid on the absurdity going on inside there. Wouldn’t be surprised if the non-endorsal was a quid-pro-quo with Trump in exchange for Trump not axing or messing with Bezos’ many govt contracts. The main problem here isn’t even the media, it’s people like you who are still refusing to acknowledge or understand the actual state of the propaganda machine MSM. How could you possibly reconcile this when you don’t even see issue because of your cognitive dissonance?
healsdata 2y ago
Let's look at the coverage of California's requirement that Type 48 license holders provide drug testing kits to patrons. Because the article/reporter wanted to provide a look into both sides of the issue (those who like the requirementand those who don't) they included this quote: "While I've heard about drink spiking, I suspect that it's extremely rare, at least here in the Palm Desert area." If the reporter had been providing all the facts, they would have immediately followed that with the rate of occurrence of drink spiking. If it was "extremely rare", they could have then followed up with a government official's thoughts on why the requirement is necessary even if the drink spiking is "extremely rare". There was no such information provided, leaving the reader with one man's opinion that is clearly only conjecture but given credibility by being included in the article. In an effort to present both sides, but surely on a deadline that prevented proper research, they left the reader with the idea that drink spiking is rare and that the government is simply overreaching.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > they would have immediately followed that with the rate of occurrence of drink spiking I would be surprised if that data existed. How could that be measured?
  - defrost 2y ago
    Mainly indirect measures; reports at womens centres for example- not all spiking events are reported by any means .. but a rise in reports likely follows a rise in spiking (or the effectiveness of a recent campaign to report such things). Consistent sampling of the dregs tray at various bars would be an indicator, as would sewerage sampling (as used to track other drug use). Conceivably spiking rates might also be reflected in certain types of bathroom grafitti or social media posts.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      I would expect that nobody has that data, not that the reporter omitted it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
poisonborz 2y ago
Facts are uninteresting. Our highly empirical world produces more facts by the minute, and people get a natural resistance. You can line up 10 facts and maybe indicate some truth. Viewers can come up with 10 different fact (a fact for them at least) against this. It is the narrative that forms opinions. Single impactful facts can move public opinion, but to produce those you don't need some big conglomerate with hundreds of employees. > They are not trying to tell people what to think, or even what the reporter thinks. There is increasingly small amount of venues with this kind of attitude (regional TV or some EU state media comes to mind) and besides this never being really true (what is report-worthy?) it's so mind numbingly boring that no wonder it's dying out. In a world where people can customize content 100% to their preference it is a naive concept.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  a fact for them at least this is an opinion, not a fact and there is huge difference between the two. and this is at the core of this shit we are currently in with no end in sight…
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> the goal is to report the facts about newsworthy events The main point remains -- who is going to do this now, with local news a shell of its former self, and national news orgs circling the drain, and tech companies caring about clicks (and click-bait "news").

davidw 2y ago

> Would you be more specific about what you think should be done differently? For example, in reporting about whether someone supports democracy? No, because I'm not a news person myself. I can see there's a problem, but I don't know how to fix it; I don't know the job or the business behind it well enough. I'd look to people like Jay Rosen and Margaret Sullivan for good critiques and perhaps some suggestions of what should be done differently. But it's tricky! Because not only is the reporting part of it struggling right now, the whole business aspect is in trouble as well, which compounds problems - like I mentioned with local news. And once again, I have no idea how anyone fixes that. Perhaps some enterprising person on Hacker News will figure out something that works, although I suspect it's more of a people problem than a technology one.

chrismcb 2y ago

I didn't know what the OP meant about "both siding" but I feel like the biggest problem is the lack of journalism, the lack of "report the facts."instead it is about supporting a particular narrative, about reporting only the facts that lend to that narrative, even going so far as to manufacturer them. As far as local newspapers, they just lost the ad war.

xocnad 2y ago
Can you provide some specific examples that inform your viewpoint?
- sincerecook 2y ago
  Fiery but mostly peaceful protests, Biden's dementia is actually just a speech issue, Russia hacked our brains, peaceful Muslims (after a massacre), etc, etc.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    Isn't that just journalists not supporting your personal narrative? That isn't the measure of truth (and neither is mine).
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Biden having dementia isn't a personal narrative, it's a matter of fact that was clearly visible for years but most US based journalists refused to report on. The position you're staking out here is called postmodernism, and is based on the idea that there is no objective truth. There is only my truth and your truth. This is a highly ideological and contentious position, in fact to people who don't subscribe to postmodernism, postmodernism is an objectively untrue belief system. Biden shows all the symptoms of being in a state of advanced dementia. People who work with him say he's only cogent and capable of handling presidential business for a few hours a day at best, and that's probably an exaggeration. It is objectively true that he has dementia by the definitions of those words. When journalists refused to report that or pretended the problems were caused by other things, they weren't merely preferencing personal narratives of equal value to any other narrative, they were explicitly manipulating their readers in order to achieve their ideological goals via subterfuge. Which is why nobody rational trusts them anymore.
      - mmooss 2y ago
        Spare me the postmodernism lecture and don't try to put me in your preconceived box. There is lots of ground between 'there is no objective reality' and assuming that you, mike_hearn, have some special access to to the Truth. If someone could have such special access, how do you know it's you and not me? It's not that voice saying you are right - everyone has it; it's part perceptual mechanism and part ego; why is your voice superior to mine? And we also know that political movements play to that voice, manipulate it, and then encourage it - 'you and I know the truth'. And aren't you the one just repeating an ideology? All you say I have heard many times as dogma of the current right-wing movement. And as you offer nothing else but insistence on it, is there any more to these claims? Where do you think for yourself and depart from it? What is your reasoning beyond 'nobody rational' would disagree with the movement - a strong signal of reason-by-mass-psychology. The essence of reason is another voice, which connects our intellect and knows, through experience and training, that the first voice is not trustworthy. It doesn't say, 'nobody rational would disagree with me'; it says, 'my perception and knowledge are limited and I need to base my beliefs on much more'. The core of reason and rational thought is resolving a dilemma: how do we find truth if our perceptions and beliefs are unreliable? What's worked very well and is widely accepted is to use something outside ourselves: publicly verifiable fact. > objectively untrue > nobody rational Those words aren't evidence, they are just signals that it's a dogma. A rational discussion would bring in evidence, and talk about its strengths and weaknesses, and talk about the strengths and weaknesses in your ideas. It would include curiosity about others' ideas. I'm sure you have plenty of good ideas (and so do I), but it's impossible to explore anything if you won't. > journalists refused to report that I saw plenty of reporting about his age-related problems, for example in the New York Times and Fox News. Both got a lot of heat for it.

deathanatos 2y ago

> Generally speaking, the goal is to report the facts about newsworthy events. I disagree; I think "reporting the facts" has taken somewhat of a backseat in journalism these days. Instead, it is much more just "this is what each side says"; while one might argue that, yes, the quote of what each side said is itself a fact, it's a pretty poor quality fact, worse than witness testimony since the witnesses aren't under oath and if politicians, are well known to be unreliable. Worse, it feels as if it doesn't matter if one side is uttering absolute bullshit, it just gets quoted & printed, giving equal weight to each side's statements regardless of how absurd it might be. And because the truth is usually harder to put pithily and often takes longer to even determine, it usually loses out, and it becomes competition of "who can scream the loudest?" or first, or the most convincingly. (“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”) Deeper questions such as "what does science say?" or "what are the actual facts" (not just what people say the facts are) or "what would someone knowledgeable in these matters ask about this situation?" are left unreported. (And yes, I acknowledge that science itself can have inherent bias, or come to an erroneous result. But are you asking a physicist about the physics, or are you asking a politician about the physics? Are you making an attempt to get beyond the sound bite and determine the actual nuance to the topic, or is it the same "A screams A, B screams B" stances & the societal debate on the topic shall go nowhere?) > They are not trying to tell people what to think, or even what the reporter thinks. But by simply quoting people without putting things into the context of facts, the media becomes a mouthpiece for those being quoted, usually politicians. No, the reporting isn't telling us what to think, the politician is. For example, in one topic that I'm knowledgeable on¹, journalists routinely print what are lies, full stop, from one of the political parties. Now, again, "X say Y" is technically a fact, and could be printed. But I've seen it followed up with "Science has no evidence about Y" — which is patently false, and is at best a confused conclusion by the reporter (science has a strong result about Y — Y does not occur; but you if write "there is no evidence about Y", people read that as "we don't know", but we do know, and it's ¬Y.) Let's take another example, where I'm not an expert: the recent Korean air crash. Reading the reporting left me wondering things like "Why did the EMAS not arrest the aircraft? How did a bird strike take out the landing gear? If, e.g., there was a hydraulics failure in the landing gear, why did they not gravity drop the landing gear? ATC transcripts?" I saw no reporting even questioning any of those things; most of it was surface level: a crash occurred, here's the death toll thus far. Even simpler: 9/10 times a court is involved, there's no link to the ruling. Or, quite often, I can be reading article A, which makes claim 1, and I think "claim 1 is a surprising claim; I would not have expected claim 1 to be true". Thankfully, claim 1 is a link! And I click it … and the linked article does not support claim 1. But by having claim 1 be a link, the upstream article's claim feels legitimate and cited, when in reality … it isn't. ¹I don't want to name it, as it's a charged topic, and would certainly derail the thread.

valiant55 2y ago

For example, having a debate about climate change with one scientist from each side of the debate is insane because there's scientific consensus on only one side of that debate. Trying to cast equal light on both sides of a topic tips the scale in favor of the minority opinion. Or take some reporting about DT's insane idea to take over Greenland, treating it like a legitimate idea and polling people about their thoughts just further legitimatizes absolute insanity.

pseudo0 2y ago
What's so insane about buying Greenland? Offer the current population $2 million USD each if they vote to join, and it would only cost around $100 billion. That's a steal considering its strategic value.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  or you can offer every Russian $5 to vote to join - cheaper and much bigger strategic value
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mmooss 2y ago
> having a debate about climate change with one scientist from each side of the debate is insane I haven't seen such a debate in serious journalism in a long time. I think that's a non-existant problem, but could you point to examples?
tim333 2y ago
>having a debate about climate change with one scientist from each side of the debate is insane It depends what aspect you are debating. Is it happening is one sided but how fast, what we should do about etc is not.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Finding scientists who disagree with one or more climate change narratives is easy; it's actually the media who decided one day that they must stop talking to such people because there is "consensus", which is obviously doublethink. If there's consensus then you don't need to make an explicit decision to silence one side, because there is only one side to begin with. You yourself admit that this is true when your post goes from talking about a "consensus on only one side" to there being a "minority opinion" i.e. no consensus. But if you simply decide to report the majority opinion on any topic then you're once again engaged in circular reasoning, as the majority opinion will be affected by whatever you report. There isn't any way to do honest journalism on complex topics other than to actually report all sides of the issue, including disagreement by minorities, including if you believe those minorities are wrong. The media used to do "both sides" because that's what it takes to be trusted, when they stopped doing that trust in them started to decline. Ironically, this totally one sided kind of reporting leading to mistrust is what Bezos is now trying to fix. Far too late, but he is at least trying.

JohnBooty 2y ago

Generally speaking, the goal is to report the facts about newsworthy events. They are not trying to tell people what to think I think (good) reporters are going to do this in the micro, yeah. Taking a slightly broader view, though, surely we can see that there is a myriad of implicit editorialization in any publication, no matter how factual they are. There can be no "neutral" media because the people controlling it still make a wide range of choices regarding those facts. They make choices regarding which stories and beats receive funding and staffing, the presentation of those facts (which stories are at the top of page 1, which ones are buried on page 83 next to the obituaries?) and which facts are not reported. Imagine a newspaper that only investigates the private lives of Political Party A, looking for fraud or salacious incidents. We then draw attention to them and put them "above the fold." We do not tell lies either privately or publicly and follow strict journalistic guidelines. You can see where this is going: the catch is that we never investigate Political Party B. Not exactly a balanced presentation of the truth, even though we never lie.

davidw 2y ago
Right - and big enough news outlets can even "make their own weather". This investigation of "circular reporting" at the NYT is pretty illustrative: https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-inconsistent-narrative-selection-and-framing-that-tends-to-favor-republicans/ https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
foxglacier 2y ago
Despite unavoidable bias, there's a clear line that journalists often cross where they present something in a way that they had to know was misleading. I'm not talking choice of what stories to cover or how prominent to make them but writing things like "X is increasing" when they really just cherry picked a time interval over which it increased it's otherwise been decreasing but they don't mention that. They can also omit obviously relevant information which would oppose the general impression they're trying to present. Or they'll add qualifiers that show doubt in information they don't like but not to information that supports the political belief they're trying to push. There's also the practice of making naked assertions with the obvious intent to persuade people like "X is false" instead of "source Y said that X was false". I think this kind of stuff is why they're widely disrespected.

burner999888 2y ago

“They are not trying to tell people what to think, or even what the reporter thinks.” What a joke. Literally 80% of MSM reporting is framed from a leftist viewpoint of what’s right/wrong. For years now it plays dirty by leaving out key facts or misrepresenting a situation to favor lefist ideology (e.g. “1 Killed after Tesla Cybertruck Battery Explodes” headline rather than “Explosive Device Detonated from Vehicle…”, since the media now hates Elon since he helped Trump win). I can often feel the seething hatred of the right coming off the words written by the journalist. It’s crazy to me that people on the left are blind to this. You should really re-analyze your level of objectivity if you don’t see this (or maybe read all the “Twitter Files”, etc released on X over the past year or 2).

bediger4000 2y ago
Strangely, it looks to me like 70% of MSM reporting is from a conservative viewpoint. I mean, we had WaPo and LA Times refuse to endorse Harris, how is that liberal? How do we reconcile this?
- Terr_ 2y ago
  It probably starts when folks like the parent-poster provide a clear definition for "leftist", preferably something that isn't "anyone who sounds like they'd vote for a Democrat." https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289
- burner999888 2y ago
  WaPo has endorsed Democrats literally every single election dating back to 1988. So you now consider them “conservative” since they refused to endorse Harris? How on Earth did you make that jump? They didn’t endorse because Bezos (and Polymarket) knew she was gonna lose and was trying to buy some political capital after he allowed his newspaper to unfairly and violently bash Trump for years. The lead editor quit over it in a hissy fit after Bezos temporarily put a lid on the absurdity going on inside there. Wouldn’t be surprised if the non-endorsal was a quid-pro-quo with Trump in exchange for Trump not axing or messing with Bezos’ many govt contracts. The main problem here isn’t even the media, it’s people like you who are still refusing to acknowledge or understand the actual state of the propaganda machine MSM. How could you possibly reconcile this when you don’t even see issue because of your cognitive dissonance?

healsdata 2y ago

Let's look at the coverage of California's requirement that Type 48 license holders provide drug testing kits to patrons. Because the article/reporter wanted to provide a look into both sides of the issue (those who like the requirementand those who don't) they included this quote: "While I've heard about drink spiking, I suspect that it's extremely rare, at least here in the Palm Desert area." If the reporter had been providing all the facts, they would have immediately followed that with the rate of occurrence of drink spiking. If it was "extremely rare", they could have then followed up with a government official's thoughts on why the requirement is necessary even if the drink spiking is "extremely rare". There was no such information provided, leaving the reader with one man's opinion that is clearly only conjecture but given credibility by being included in the article. In an effort to present both sides, but surely on a deadline that prevented proper research, they left the reader with the idea that drink spiking is rare and that the government is simply overreaching.

mmooss 2y ago
> they would have immediately followed that with the rate of occurrence of drink spiking I would be surprised if that data existed. How could that be measured?
- defrost 2y ago
  Mainly indirect measures; reports at womens centres for example- not all spiking events are reported by any means .. but a rise in reports likely follows a rise in spiking (or the effectiveness of a recent campaign to report such things). Consistent sampling of the dregs tray at various bars would be an indicator, as would sewerage sampling (as used to track other drug use). Conceivably spiking rates might also be reflected in certain types of bathroom grafitti or social media posts.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    I would expect that nobody has that data, not that the reporter omitted it.

deleted 2y ago

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poisonborz 2y ago

Facts are uninteresting. Our highly empirical world produces more facts by the minute, and people get a natural resistance. You can line up 10 facts and maybe indicate some truth. Viewers can come up with 10 different fact (a fact for them at least) against this. It is the narrative that forms opinions. Single impactful facts can move public opinion, but to produce those you don't need some big conglomerate with hundreds of employees. > They are not trying to tell people what to think, or even what the reporter thinks. There is increasingly small amount of venues with this kind of attitude (regional TV or some EU state media comes to mind) and besides this never being really true (what is report-worthy?) it's so mind numbingly boring that no wonder it's dying out. In a world where people can customize content 100% to their preference it is a naive concept.

bdangubic 2y ago
a fact for them at least this is an opinion, not a fact and there is huge difference between the two. and this is at the core of this shit we are currently in with no end in sight…

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> the goal is to report the facts about newsworthy events The main point remains -- who is going to do this now, with local news a shell of its former self, and national news orgs circling the drain, and tech companies caring about clicks (and click-bait "news").