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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) reporter

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.
- mmooss 2y ago
  Like poor journalism, that's a speculative narrative. Things could work that way, and like all human endeavors journalism has many flaws, but I don't see evidence that it characterizes journalism as a whole. I think there is wide disrespect for two reasons: Most of all, it suits powerful people to spread disrespect of news media, because it challenges and often undermines their power. Every time journalists report something undesireable to someone powerful - which is the core job of journalism - the powerful person attacks the journalist rather than address the issue. Some powerful people want to reduce or eliminate journalism more broadly. Without journalism, what will challenge the powerful? How will you know what they are doing? It's time to stop finding problems, and start thinking of consequences. What replaces serious journalism?
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    Maybe there's some fancy newspaper where they aren't knowingly misleading their readers, but the popular ones clearly are. It could even be fine if they were strongly biased in, say, which political families they dig up dirt on, but still not knowingly mislead their readers. That's more of a personal insult and shows they're trying to lead people to wrong beliefs, not just to reveal the problems with that political family. Maybe the solution is critical thinking as part of the culture so we'll be immune to those journalist tricks.

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.

mmooss 2y ago
Like poor journalism, that's a speculative narrative. Things could work that way, and like all human endeavors journalism has many flaws, but I don't see evidence that it characterizes journalism as a whole. I think there is wide disrespect for two reasons: Most of all, it suits powerful people to spread disrespect of news media, because it challenges and often undermines their power. Every time journalists report something undesireable to someone powerful - which is the core job of journalism - the powerful person attacks the journalist rather than address the issue. Some powerful people want to reduce or eliminate journalism more broadly. Without journalism, what will challenge the powerful? How will you know what they are doing? It's time to stop finding problems, and start thinking of consequences. What replaces serious journalism?
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Maybe there's some fancy newspaper where they aren't knowingly misleading their readers, but the popular ones clearly are. It could even be fine if they were strongly biased in, say, which political families they dig up dirt on, but still not knowingly mislead their readers. That's more of a personal insult and shows they're trying to lead people to wrong beliefs, not just to reveal the problems with that political family. Maybe the solution is critical thinking as part of the culture so we'll be immune to those journalist tricks.