6 ms·

Dropping Trust in US Media

53 points by DaveZale 1y ago

root_axis 1y ago
I'm not sure this really means anything. Everyone claims to hate the media but everyone uncritically trusts the media if it confirms their priors.
- DaveZale 1y ago
  confirmation bias?
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Right, so when then traditional media is replaced by freedom-truth-eagle.xyz which has none of the accountability that the former historically had, they get to spout much dumber and much less honest content for people to decide they want to trust. So it means a lot.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- daoboy 1y ago
  Much like everyone hates Congress and thinks they're all a bunch of crooks...except for their Congressman
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- all2 1y ago
  > everyone uncritically trusts the media if it confirms their priors I tend to question my assumptions when the media starts confirming them. If my opinions line up lock-step with an outlet's narrative, I figure I miss-stepped somewhere in my reasoning, ideas, or sources of information.
baggy_trough 1y ago
To reverse this, the media would have to try to be trustworthy rather than reinforcing The Message. That's against everything they believe in.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  What is "The Message"?
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    I suppose any agenda that they have vested interest in spreading from how I interpret the parent's comment. Though I am not really sure For what its worth, I have found that traditional media does a really bad job of being trustworthy and I sometimes watch for journalism things like tldr news global from youtube and atleast the one thing that I like about them is how they really went far and beyond and are public with their financials so that I know that their message can be trusted with and there is no financial ulterior motives of sorts for the most part. I just wanted to share them really as I think that I respect their transparency to be really honest because in my honest opinion transparency generally speaking brings trustworthiness.
  - baggy_trough 1y ago
    In olden times, the journalistic ideal was to report what happened as objectively as possible. Now that isn't seen as good at all. Stories should be reported through the lens of The Message. Most reporters are young progressive Democrats, and this is whatever helps promote their agenda at the time. I mean, not so long ago the newsroom editor of the San Francisco Chronicle explicitly came out against objectivity...
    - cosmicgadget 1y ago
      > "The consensus among younger journalists is that we got it all wrong… We are the problem. Objectivity has got to go," The San Francisco Chronicle editor-in-chief Emilio Garcia-Ruiz similarly expressed. "They are willing to share their lived experiences to call out bulls---, despite their status in the newsroom. There can sometimes be a chasm between them and the older veteran reporters." Also you might need to time box "olden times" considering what newspapers looked like before the 60s.
_wire_ 1y ago
Is this media? I don't trust it.
blindriver 1y ago
I first started mistrusting the media when I saw the scathing media reports from NYT and Kara Swisher over Uber that were completely wrong and diametrically opposed to what I saw with my own eyes. Being wrong is one thing, but the completely lack of willingness to correct themselves really opened my eyes. It was clear they had an agenda to hurt Uber as much as they could regardless of the facts. After that, everything I saw just reinforced this, especially during the Pandemic until I stopped believing the media altogether. The worst part was the media repeating lies that I could see were lies with my own eyes, and they were trying to gaslight me into submission. When it started to confuse my own children is where I drew the line and I am teaching them to disbelieve the media as well. I don't trust any media at all, whether or not it's confirming or dispelling my own beliefs. Anything I see I will always double check because I assume I'm being manipulated in one way or the other.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
thomassmith65 1y ago
However bad the US Media may be, the alternatives are so much worse. And the fact that the alternatives appear to be winning isn't a huge surprise, considering the mess the world is in.
- engineer_22 1y ago
  in the absence of truth, you must operate on faith alone
  - palmfacehn 1y ago
    Empiricism is overrated in the current era. Pure reason is underappreciated. A triangle has only three sides. Two parallel lines will never meet. Wikipedia edit wars and reliable sources can't change that. If you wish, you can go far by building from basics and catching inconsistencies. You can park it there, or you can speculate about the motives of those who would abuse reason.
- politeremark 1y ago
  [flagged]
- andrewmutz 1y ago
  The traditional news media has a track record that includes a ton of errors, but it is still far better than everything else. You open social media, and its a flood of content that does not accurately reflect the world.
  - cosmicgadget 1y ago
    I'd judge them not by the errors but by the willingness to issue retractions and corrections.
mesh 1y ago
Relevant read is Chomsky's and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent Basically, there has always been a strong bias and structural constraints toward US / elite views. I think the core question is why trust has gotten particularly bad over the last decade (I have some ideas, including one side particularly trying to weaken trust in it).
- lapetitejort 1y ago
  I would say nothing has changed except who "media" refers to. People who blindly trusted ABC now blindly trust Joe Rogan. They both support the elite.
- legitster 1y ago
  There's a couple of problems with Chomsky's book that make it hard to seriously recommend. The whole book was spent describing a "propaganda model" of news that begins and ends with corporate incentives, profits, and advertising. But he completely ignores the large number of non-profit, independently funded, or publicly owned news sources. And from experience they can exhibit some of the exact same systematized biases! Even without greedy owners. There's also a lot of conjectures about how news works that simply aren't true or have not existed in decades. He's more interested in pushing his "theory of everything" and making it generic enough to fit any situation anywhere. And the whole idea of using his credibility as a linguist to confidently push a punch of political theories well outside of his actual experience never sat right with me. There's also an irony that this book was written to combat the media in an era when it was highly trusted and respectable. Now that the media is completely distrusted in America, it's hard to also argue that it's a tool of the elites when it seems dismantling trust in the media is also a tool of elites (which some of his modern contemporaries now argue). I think the average person is better off reading books about Dick Cheney or the machinations of the War on Terror. You'll actually get a sense how clever people in the seats of power go about actually hijacking the media to take advantage of voters (and the elite!) for particular policy goals.
- BirAdam 1y ago
  I think the main reason is that places like Twitter provided real-time images of things happening around the world. All it takes is one influencer looking at a photo and talking about it for people to see that reporting is heavily biased. There were also just huge mistakes… like the Weather Channel saying things are terrible and the reporter guy appearing to be struggling to stand while two guys are just walking normally in the background.
cosmicgadget 1y ago
I wonder how much of this is the expansion of "media" from nightly news to 24-hour news, Fox News-style propaganda, and social media. It it's a shame that this impugns traditional journalism which is one of the last institutions that still believes in objective fact.
- legitster 1y ago
  My dad has watched the NBC nightly news every day for 30+ years. It's amazing how many of the national headlines can be condensed down into 22 minutes when you remove all of the talking heads, reactions, and noise. Is their coverage perfect? Does it go into detail? Absolutely not. But in the long run average it's remarkable how informed you can stay without filling your head without the extra nonsense.
  - fullshark 1y ago
    I follow https://join1440.com/ https://join1440.com/ for that reason. Yesterday's newsstories, condensed to the basic key elements. I really don't need to know the exact details of what's currently happening and can find out the next day once the noise is filtered away.
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    I'm from Germany originally, grew up on Tagesschau, 15 minutes at 8pm every night, what felt like at least 7 of those minutes were soccer results 3 divisions down.
  - distances 1y ago
    I stopped reading news, and I am now watching last evening's news broadcast (10-20 mins) always during breakfast. It totally is enough. Includes national and international main topics, and always one cultural topic too. Which I've started to appreciate as being part of the news.
  - anonymousiam 1y ago
    Exactly why I haven't watched TV news for over 40 years. I can read my RSS feeds for half an hour each morning and be more informed about world/national/financial events than anybody who got their news from TV. My feeds span ideologies too, so I can get the point of view from multiple viewpoints, recognizing the bias of each.
k310 1y ago
The media are owned by billionaires. Seldom is heard a critical word.
- legitster 1y ago
  ????? Criticism of billionaires and inequality is everywhere in the media.
  - palmfacehn 1y ago
    Billionaires often prefer the centralization which socialist narratives rationalize. It allows them to more easily capture wealth from the state. The central bank is a boon to Wall Street. The USDA is a boon to big agriculture. The central bank financing debt is a boon for the defense industry. The "Affordable Care Act" increased profits for health insurers. Regulations are often used to create artificial barriers to entry and prevent competition.
legitster 1y ago
Expressed vs revealed preferences. Our reliance on mass media is at an all-time high. The president attacks the media every single day. But then asked why he wanted to deploy troops to Portland: "because of what I saw on TV". The amount of media outlets has exploded. However, there are fewer journalists than ever "on the beat" - independent researchers, beat reporters, local journalists, industry experts, etc. So most of our original quality reporting is coming from a small set of national sources, and then spun every which in the second-hand media channels. Not figuring ways to monetize news back in the early days I think will prove to be one of the biggest failures of the internet as a collective technology.
- danaris 1y ago
  "Revealed preferences" are like "the free market". They make sense in theory, or when you've got a wide array of competing choices that people can pick between at will. When you have monopoly, duopoly, or oligopoly; when all the options in the market come with (or without) X feature (unless you spend a large amount of extra time, money, and/or effort); when, in short, people's choices are significantly constrained... ...the idea that you can determine "what people really want" based on what they pick is bullshit.
CyberMacGyver 1y ago
Whenever you see media replace it with social media and it will get to the root of the issue. So if you hear Main Stream Media is a problem then you know Main Steam Social Media is much worse.
- verdverm 1y ago
  I've been using Big Social as the lingua franca, liken it to Big Oil and similar
jmuguy 1y ago
I trust that I can get the news from US Media, and I trust my own critical thinking to understand that the news has always been and will always be biased in one way or another. That bias can shift also, for instance I would say the NY Times is much more conservative now, even while being held up as this big liberal institution.
- thegrim33 1y ago
  >>the NY Times is much more conservative now Well, here's the current, at this moment, nytimes front page stories: - Negative story about Trump - Negative story about Trump's immigration policy - FUD story about how bad division has become (ironic) - Negative story about Trump - Negative story about Trump / energy department - Negative story about Trump's healthcare plans .. stopped scrolling at this point when I reach a slew of Israel headlines Yup, checks out, it's definitely conservative. With all those anti-trump, anti-conservative stories on the front page every single day of the year, without fail. I'm sure if I offered you $10,000 to reply with a single pro-conservative headline that they've published in the last 10 years you could surely cash in on that bet, you know, with how pro-conservative they are now. Should be a sure bet.
  - cosmicgadget 1y ago
    I like that Trump has not only acquired the GOP brand but also the conservative brand. There was a time that a bonkers deficit, violations of personal freedoms, domestic troop deployments, and expansive executive power was antithetical to conservatism. Now, it's whatever he says it is.
    - rufus_foreman 1y ago
      >> There was a time that a bonkers deficit, violations of personal freedoms, domestic troop deployments, and expansive executive power was antithetical to conservatism President Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division into a US city to escort some kids to school. That was a domestic troop deployment. Was that antithetical to conservatism? Was Eisenhower no true conservative?
the__alchemist 1y ago
All of the national media organizations are bottom-feeder trash. They share the same rotsting topics like that conservative guy who was murdered, I/P etc. shared narrative for entertainment. A taste for violence, and tribal politics. Even BBC does it!
pkaye 1y ago
This poll is also interesting. Business executives are rated higher than members of congress and slightly below TV reporters. https://news.gallup.com/poll/655106/americans-ratings-professions-stay-historically-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/655106/americans-ratings-profes...
glonq 1y ago
Is anybody who identifies strongly with a political party is interested in hearing fair or balanced news? I had presumed that they just want to hear confirmation, and are likely to stray far beyond their favorite echo chambers.
- fullshark 1y ago
  And considering the only people really interested in the news are partisans, there's really no market for objective news, except maybe if you are in the C-suite.
- hn_throw_250926 1y ago
  When Kagi released their news thing it was all trump related bullshit. If thats how you launch a news product then just fucking kill me.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  As news publishing becomes less profitable, it becomes more dependent on patronage - often political.
- tptacek 1y ago
  I think this is a pretty important point; one thing that has changed over the last 20 years is the degree of polarization.
- hvb2 1y ago
  > Is anybody who identifies strongly with a political party is interested in hearing fair or balanced news? Yes. Same for conflicting opinions. Since this is HN I'll use a software analogy: I love it when people tell me how bad my idea is because they'll follow that up with theirs. And that's how we all learn. To put that in real life US politics: we've made politics something you don't talk about because we fear disagreement and thus we slowly drift apart...
- lapcat 1y ago
  > Is anybody who identifies strongly with a political party is interested in hearing fair or balanced news? What does "fair or balanced" even mean? I don't identify with any political party. What I want is truthful and accurate news. I don't want an equal number of Democrat and Republican reporters, for example, as if that somehow made good news. "Fair and balanced" was the catchphrase of FOX News, which is anything but truthful and accurate. Ironically, FOX News eventually dropped even that slogan, remiscent of how Google eventually dropped "Don't be evil".
lydiaharrison12 1y ago
[dead]
incomingpain 1y ago
2020 republican trust was 10%, it's now 8%. 2% drop isnt much. I'm Canadian but my trust in the US media is perhaps 1-2% tops. What's shocking is that democrats are above 50%. I'm blown away by that number. I think this might be a key root cause of polarization for you americans. Democrats absolutely should not be trusting the media that much.
animitronix 1y ago
This is what happens when you optimize for rage-bait driven clicks rather than the truth.
tsegratis 1y ago
> With confidence fractured along partisan and generational lines... the root cause, i think, is a devaluation of truth; for "truth" in the name of partisan lines this is so so common: "we know this is not true, but we advance it to improve our position or virtue signal etc" this was, i think, foundational to the collapse of society at the beginning of the 1900s -- we "believe this" because we get other peoples property or otherwise advance our cause being truthful costs us, and people are no-longer so willing to pay the root cause of that, i would say is they have walked away from Jesus who pays his life for our benefit; only people who live like that can be trusted to tell the truth
seneca 1y ago
Great opportunity to point to organizations like allsides.com who do a good job attempting to counter media bias. It's worth taking a pass over their coverage of any major politicized event in order to see the different slants.
ranger207 1y ago
IMO this is caused by the ease of creating non-mainstream media sources with the internet. Before the internet there were only a handful of media sources (the "mainstream media") and since ~everone got ~all their news from them, society mostly agreed on the same news facts. This doesn't mean that the media of the time was always true and unbiased, just that people looked at it less critically. Now that there's alternative sources, people can find ones that better align with their beliefs, even if those sources and their beliefs are incorrect. Inevitably any source is going to be wrong some of the time, so evidence of mainstream media being wrong is treated as reasons not to trust them. As the underdog, alternative media gets a looser pass in most people's minds and are held to a lower standard. If people get sucked far enough into an echo chamber that they no longer regularly see opposing viewpoints then it's possible they don't criticise their sources at all as they look like they're always true. The solution to this isn't fact checking, banning disinformation, or forcing unbiased media, because that creates an impossible standard that nobody will be able to reach all the time (which will cause the standard to degrade as exceptions are passed over). Instead, it's to cultivate media literacy: who's reporting this, why are they reporting this, why are they choosing these facts to highlight, why do they deemphasize facts reported by other sources, what's their long term bias and affiliation, and what are they trying to get you to believe. You need to apply those questions to every source and trust none of them implicitly, at least because nobody's perfect.
palmfacehn 1y ago
I've noticed that most reports fit the following format. 2-5 minutes of selective reporting of the headline issue. Then, "For more, we're joined by [credentialed think tank expert]". At this point the gloves come off and the rest of the session is editorializing. I'm not watching to hear what happened anymore. Something happened, that much I can accept. What exactly happened is up for debate. I watch exclusively to see what they're trying to sell me. I'm more interested in the agenda and narrative the presenters are attempting to frame. After this is established I can consider the incentives of the factions or actors involved.
dylan604 1y ago
Back in the 80s, the fairness doctrine was dropped from broadcast regulations. After that, the proliferation of opinion based "news" programming started. Fox News would not have been born with an intact fairness doctrine. Once Fox News was around, the other broadcasters followed suit. I'd imagine Murrow rolled in his grave
- rufus_foreman 1y ago
  >> Fox News would not have been born with an intact fairness doctrine Fox News launched exclusively on cable. The fairness doctrine applied to broadcast TV and radio, not cable. There are local Fox stations now on broadcast TV but Fox could have born just fine under the fairness doctrine.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    Preceding Fox News was talk radio
nomendos 1y ago
As "all birds know" US has the best MSM "the money can buy" and three letter orgs and NGOs extensively manipulate? The paid swamp in Washington is has made and facilitated it. Any surprise?

53 points by DaveZale 1y ago

I'm not sure this really means anything. Everyone claims to hate the media but everyone uncritically trusts the media if it confirms their priors.

DaveZale 1y ago
confirmation bias?
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Right, so when then traditional media is replaced by freedom-truth-eagle.xyz which has none of the accountability that the former historically had, they get to spout much dumber and much less honest content for people to decide they want to trust. So it means a lot.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
daoboy 1y ago
Much like everyone hates Congress and thinks they're all a bunch of crooks...except for their Congressman
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
all2 1y ago
> everyone uncritically trusts the media if it confirms their priors I tend to question my assumptions when the media starts confirming them. If my opinions line up lock-step with an outlet's narrative, I figure I miss-stepped somewhere in my reasoning, ideas, or sources of information.

baggy_trough 1y ago

To reverse this, the media would have to try to be trustworthy rather than reinforcing The Message. That's against everything they believe in.

cosmicgadget 1y ago
What is "The Message"?
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  I suppose any agenda that they have vested interest in spreading from how I interpret the parent's comment. Though I am not really sure For what its worth, I have found that traditional media does a really bad job of being trustworthy and I sometimes watch for journalism things like tldr news global from youtube and atleast the one thing that I like about them is how they really went far and beyond and are public with their financials so that I know that their message can be trusted with and there is no financial ulterior motives of sorts for the most part. I just wanted to share them really as I think that I respect their transparency to be really honest because in my honest opinion transparency generally speaking brings trustworthiness.
- baggy_trough 1y ago
  In olden times, the journalistic ideal was to report what happened as objectively as possible. Now that isn't seen as good at all. Stories should be reported through the lens of The Message. Most reporters are young progressive Democrats, and this is whatever helps promote their agenda at the time. I mean, not so long ago the newsroom editor of the San Francisco Chronicle explicitly came out against objectivity...
  - cosmicgadget 1y ago
    > "The consensus among younger journalists is that we got it all wrong… We are the problem. Objectivity has got to go," The San Francisco Chronicle editor-in-chief Emilio Garcia-Ruiz similarly expressed. "They are willing to share their lived experiences to call out bulls---, despite their status in the newsroom. There can sometimes be a chasm between them and the older veteran reporters." Also you might need to time box "olden times" considering what newspapers looked like before the 60s.

_wire_ 1y ago

Is this media? I don't trust it.

blindriver 1y ago

I first started mistrusting the media when I saw the scathing media reports from NYT and Kara Swisher over Uber that were completely wrong and diametrically opposed to what I saw with my own eyes. Being wrong is one thing, but the completely lack of willingness to correct themselves really opened my eyes. It was clear they had an agenda to hurt Uber as much as they could regardless of the facts. After that, everything I saw just reinforced this, especially during the Pandemic until I stopped believing the media altogether. The worst part was the media repeating lies that I could see were lies with my own eyes, and they were trying to gaslight me into submission. When it started to confuse my own children is where I drew the line and I am teaching them to disbelieve the media as well. I don't trust any media at all, whether or not it's confirming or dispelling my own beliefs. Anything I see I will always double check because I assume I'm being manipulated in one way or the other.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

thomassmith65 1y ago

However bad the US Media may be, the alternatives are so much worse. And the fact that the alternatives appear to be winning isn't a huge surprise, considering the mess the world is in.

engineer_22 1y ago
in the absence of truth, you must operate on faith alone
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  Empiricism is overrated in the current era. Pure reason is underappreciated. A triangle has only three sides. Two parallel lines will never meet. Wikipedia edit wars and reliable sources can't change that. If you wish, you can go far by building from basics and catching inconsistencies. You can park it there, or you can speculate about the motives of those who would abuse reason.
politeremark 1y ago
[flagged]
andrewmutz 1y ago
The traditional news media has a track record that includes a ton of errors, but it is still far better than everything else. You open social media, and its a flood of content that does not accurately reflect the world.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  I'd judge them not by the errors but by the willingness to issue retractions and corrections.

mesh 1y ago

Relevant read is Chomsky's and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent Basically, there has always been a strong bias and structural constraints toward US / elite views. I think the core question is why trust has gotten particularly bad over the last decade (I have some ideas, including one side particularly trying to weaken trust in it).

lapetitejort 1y ago
I would say nothing has changed except who "media" refers to. People who blindly trusted ABC now blindly trust Joe Rogan. They both support the elite.
legitster 1y ago
There's a couple of problems with Chomsky's book that make it hard to seriously recommend. The whole book was spent describing a "propaganda model" of news that begins and ends with corporate incentives, profits, and advertising. But he completely ignores the large number of non-profit, independently funded, or publicly owned news sources. And from experience they can exhibit some of the exact same systematized biases! Even without greedy owners. There's also a lot of conjectures about how news works that simply aren't true or have not existed in decades. He's more interested in pushing his "theory of everything" and making it generic enough to fit any situation anywhere. And the whole idea of using his credibility as a linguist to confidently push a punch of political theories well outside of his actual experience never sat right with me. There's also an irony that this book was written to combat the media in an era when it was highly trusted and respectable. Now that the media is completely distrusted in America, it's hard to also argue that it's a tool of the elites when it seems dismantling trust in the media is also a tool of elites (which some of his modern contemporaries now argue). I think the average person is better off reading books about Dick Cheney or the machinations of the War on Terror. You'll actually get a sense how clever people in the seats of power go about actually hijacking the media to take advantage of voters (and the elite!) for particular policy goals.
BirAdam 1y ago
I think the main reason is that places like Twitter provided real-time images of things happening around the world. All it takes is one influencer looking at a photo and talking about it for people to see that reporting is heavily biased. There were also just huge mistakes… like the Weather Channel saying things are terrible and the reporter guy appearing to be struggling to stand while two guys are just walking normally in the background.

cosmicgadget 1y ago

I wonder how much of this is the expansion of "media" from nightly news to 24-hour news, Fox News-style propaganda, and social media. It it's a shame that this impugns traditional journalism which is one of the last institutions that still believes in objective fact.

legitster 1y ago
My dad has watched the NBC nightly news every day for 30+ years. It's amazing how many of the national headlines can be condensed down into 22 minutes when you remove all of the talking heads, reactions, and noise. Is their coverage perfect? Does it go into detail? Absolutely not. But in the long run average it's remarkable how informed you can stay without filling your head without the extra nonsense.
- fullshark 1y ago
  I follow https://join1440.com/ https://join1440.com/ for that reason. Yesterday's newsstories, condensed to the basic key elements. I really don't need to know the exact details of what's currently happening and can find out the next day once the noise is filtered away.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  I'm from Germany originally, grew up on Tagesschau, 15 minutes at 8pm every night, what felt like at least 7 of those minutes were soccer results 3 divisions down.
- distances 1y ago
  I stopped reading news, and I am now watching last evening's news broadcast (10-20 mins) always during breakfast. It totally is enough. Includes national and international main topics, and always one cultural topic too. Which I've started to appreciate as being part of the news.
- anonymousiam 1y ago
  Exactly why I haven't watched TV news for over 40 years. I can read my RSS feeds for half an hour each morning and be more informed about world/national/financial events than anybody who got their news from TV. My feeds span ideologies too, so I can get the point of view from multiple viewpoints, recognizing the bias of each.

k310 1y ago

The media are owned by billionaires. Seldom is heard a critical word.

legitster 1y ago
????? Criticism of billionaires and inequality is everywhere in the media.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  Billionaires often prefer the centralization which socialist narratives rationalize. It allows them to more easily capture wealth from the state. The central bank is a boon to Wall Street. The USDA is a boon to big agriculture. The central bank financing debt is a boon for the defense industry. The "Affordable Care Act" increased profits for health insurers. Regulations are often used to create artificial barriers to entry and prevent competition.

legitster 1y ago

Expressed vs revealed preferences. Our reliance on mass media is at an all-time high. The president attacks the media every single day. But then asked why he wanted to deploy troops to Portland: "because of what I saw on TV". The amount of media outlets has exploded. However, there are fewer journalists than ever "on the beat" - independent researchers, beat reporters, local journalists, industry experts, etc. So most of our original quality reporting is coming from a small set of national sources, and then spun every which in the second-hand media channels. Not figuring ways to monetize news back in the early days I think will prove to be one of the biggest failures of the internet as a collective technology.

danaris 1y ago
"Revealed preferences" are like "the free market". They make sense in theory, or when you've got a wide array of competing choices that people can pick between at will. When you have monopoly, duopoly, or oligopoly; when all the options in the market come with (or without) X feature (unless you spend a large amount of extra time, money, and/or effort); when, in short, people's choices are significantly constrained... ...the idea that you can determine "what people really want" based on what they pick is bullshit.

CyberMacGyver 1y ago

Whenever you see media replace it with social media and it will get to the root of the issue. So if you hear Main Stream Media is a problem then you know Main Steam Social Media is much worse.

verdverm 1y ago
I've been using Big Social as the lingua franca, liken it to Big Oil and similar

jmuguy 1y ago

I trust that I can get the news from US Media, and I trust my own critical thinking to understand that the news has always been and will always be biased in one way or another. That bias can shift also, for instance I would say the NY Times is much more conservative now, even while being held up as this big liberal institution.

thegrim33 1y ago
>>the NY Times is much more conservative now Well, here's the current, at this moment, nytimes front page stories: - Negative story about Trump - Negative story about Trump's immigration policy - FUD story about how bad division has become (ironic) - Negative story about Trump - Negative story about Trump / energy department - Negative story about Trump's healthcare plans .. stopped scrolling at this point when I reach a slew of Israel headlines Yup, checks out, it's definitely conservative. With all those anti-trump, anti-conservative stories on the front page every single day of the year, without fail. I'm sure if I offered you $10,000 to reply with a single pro-conservative headline that they've published in the last 10 years you could surely cash in on that bet, you know, with how pro-conservative they are now. Should be a sure bet.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  I like that Trump has not only acquired the GOP brand but also the conservative brand. There was a time that a bonkers deficit, violations of personal freedoms, domestic troop deployments, and expansive executive power was antithetical to conservatism. Now, it's whatever he says it is.
  - rufus_foreman 1y ago
    >> There was a time that a bonkers deficit, violations of personal freedoms, domestic troop deployments, and expansive executive power was antithetical to conservatism President Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division into a US city to escort some kids to school. That was a domestic troop deployment. Was that antithetical to conservatism? Was Eisenhower no true conservative?

the__alchemist 1y ago

All of the national media organizations are bottom-feeder trash. They share the same rotsting topics like that conservative guy who was murdered, I/P etc. shared narrative for entertainment. A taste for violence, and tribal politics. Even BBC does it!

pkaye 1y ago

This poll is also interesting. Business executives are rated higher than members of congress and slightly below TV reporters. https://news.gallup.com/poll/655106/americans-ratings-professions-stay-historically-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/655106/americans-ratings-profes...

glonq 1y ago

Is anybody who identifies strongly with a political party is interested in hearing fair or balanced news? I had presumed that they just want to hear confirmation, and are likely to stray far beyond their favorite echo chambers.

fullshark 1y ago
And considering the only people really interested in the news are partisans, there's really no market for objective news, except maybe if you are in the C-suite.
hn_throw_250926 1y ago
When Kagi released their news thing it was all trump related bullshit. If thats how you launch a news product then just fucking kill me.
HPsquared 1y ago
As news publishing becomes less profitable, it becomes more dependent on patronage - often political.
tptacek 1y ago
I think this is a pretty important point; one thing that has changed over the last 20 years is the degree of polarization.
hvb2 1y ago
> Is anybody who identifies strongly with a political party is interested in hearing fair or balanced news? Yes. Same for conflicting opinions. Since this is HN I'll use a software analogy: I love it when people tell me how bad my idea is because they'll follow that up with theirs. And that's how we all learn. To put that in real life US politics: we've made politics something you don't talk about because we fear disagreement and thus we slowly drift apart...
lapcat 1y ago
> Is anybody who identifies strongly with a political party is interested in hearing fair or balanced news? What does "fair or balanced" even mean? I don't identify with any political party. What I want is truthful and accurate news. I don't want an equal number of Democrat and Republican reporters, for example, as if that somehow made good news. "Fair and balanced" was the catchphrase of FOX News, which is anything but truthful and accurate. Ironically, FOX News eventually dropped even that slogan, remiscent of how Google eventually dropped "Don't be evil".

lydiaharrison12 1y ago

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incomingpain 1y ago

2020 republican trust was 10%, it's now 8%. 2% drop isnt much. I'm Canadian but my trust in the US media is perhaps 1-2% tops. What's shocking is that democrats are above 50%. I'm blown away by that number. I think this might be a key root cause of polarization for you americans. Democrats absolutely should not be trusting the media that much.

animitronix 1y ago

This is what happens when you optimize for rage-bait driven clicks rather than the truth.

tsegratis 1y ago

> With confidence fractured along partisan and generational lines... the root cause, i think, is a devaluation of truth; for "truth" in the name of partisan lines this is so so common: "we know this is not true, but we advance it to improve our position or virtue signal etc" this was, i think, foundational to the collapse of society at the beginning of the 1900s -- we "believe this" because we get other peoples property or otherwise advance our cause being truthful costs us, and people are no-longer so willing to pay the root cause of that, i would say is they have walked away from Jesus who pays his life for our benefit; only people who live like that can be trusted to tell the truth

seneca 1y ago

Great opportunity to point to organizations like allsides.com who do a good job attempting to counter media bias. It's worth taking a pass over their coverage of any major politicized event in order to see the different slants.

ranger207 1y ago

IMO this is caused by the ease of creating non-mainstream media sources with the internet. Before the internet there were only a handful of media sources (the "mainstream media") and since ~everone got ~all their news from them, society mostly agreed on the same news facts. This doesn't mean that the media of the time was always true and unbiased, just that people looked at it less critically. Now that there's alternative sources, people can find ones that better align with their beliefs, even if those sources and their beliefs are incorrect. Inevitably any source is going to be wrong some of the time, so evidence of mainstream media being wrong is treated as reasons not to trust them. As the underdog, alternative media gets a looser pass in most people's minds and are held to a lower standard. If people get sucked far enough into an echo chamber that they no longer regularly see opposing viewpoints then it's possible they don't criticise their sources at all as they look like they're always true. The solution to this isn't fact checking, banning disinformation, or forcing unbiased media, because that creates an impossible standard that nobody will be able to reach all the time (which will cause the standard to degrade as exceptions are passed over). Instead, it's to cultivate media literacy: who's reporting this, why are they reporting this, why are they choosing these facts to highlight, why do they deemphasize facts reported by other sources, what's their long term bias and affiliation, and what are they trying to get you to believe. You need to apply those questions to every source and trust none of them implicitly, at least because nobody's perfect.

palmfacehn 1y ago

I've noticed that most reports fit the following format. 2-5 minutes of selective reporting of the headline issue. Then, "For more, we're joined by [credentialed think tank expert]". At this point the gloves come off and the rest of the session is editorializing. I'm not watching to hear what happened anymore. Something happened, that much I can accept. What exactly happened is up for debate. I watch exclusively to see what they're trying to sell me. I'm more interested in the agenda and narrative the presenters are attempting to frame. After this is established I can consider the incentives of the factions or actors involved.

dylan604 1y ago

Back in the 80s, the fairness doctrine was dropped from broadcast regulations. After that, the proliferation of opinion based "news" programming started. Fox News would not have been born with an intact fairness doctrine. Once Fox News was around, the other broadcasters followed suit. I'd imagine Murrow rolled in his grave

rufus_foreman 1y ago
>> Fox News would not have been born with an intact fairness doctrine Fox News launched exclusively on cable. The fairness doctrine applied to broadcast TV and radio, not cable. There are local Fox stations now on broadcast TV but Fox could have born just fine under the fairness doctrine.
- dylan604 1y ago
  Preceding Fox News was talk radio

nomendos 1y ago

As "all birds know" US has the best MSM "the money can buy" and three letter orgs and NGOs extensively manipulate? The paid swamp in Washington is has made and facilitated it. Any surprise?