6 ms·

As an aside, it's been fascinating reading the comments here about news media. People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verifie

by mvkel 10mo ago

As an aside, it's been fascinating reading the comments here about news media. People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified. They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information. They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters; never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge. They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors. It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?

HelloMcFly 10mo ago
In my experience (dramatized): Teachers: parents expects teachers to deliver personalized instruction to a classroom of 30+ while adhering to standardized testing targets. They are expected to act as surrogate parents yet threatened with lawsuits and suspensions when they attempt to enforce discipline. They are asked to spend their own money on supplies, but I think we've had enough levies to raise funds for our local district, haven't we? They are treated as lazy, agenda-driven agents by their community neighbors. They get the summers off, so I think I've heard enough about their "burnout". Doctors: patients demand certainty from a science based on probability. They expect empathetic listening but it must come within the fifteen-minute slots insurance and healthcare network financial officers dictate. Any story of a missed diagnosis is evidence of idiocy or contempt. Patients want pharmaceutical fixes for decades of poor lifestyle choices without side effects or changes to habits. They're all just paid for by the pharmaceutical industry anyway, so better if they just give me the prescription I saw a TV ad about. And why won't they just do what ChatGPT said they should do, anyway? Besides, they're all rich, right?
- lanthade 10mo ago
  Also doctors: Patients want schedules to run on-time but come in with a laundry list of concerns and will expect to be carefully listened to for 30 minutes during their 20 minute appointment. Medical systems insist on a 20 minute appointment even for complex cases or instances where translators are needed. Patients are non-compliant with discharge instructions and then get re-admitted which penalizes the MDs who discharged yet insurance pushes hospitals to discharge ASAP. I could go on and on...
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information. There's some cases where I rather someone put their name up or I don't want to hear it, the only exception is give me some damning proof? Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said. Regarding this specifially, I don't care enough, I am more curious about the legal case and how it will play out though.
- scelerat 10mo ago
  > Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said. This is where journalistic reputation comes in. Do you trust the journalistic entity providing the story? Do they have a history of being correct? Has information from anonymous sources in other stories proven to be true?
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    I don't go by that, it sounds like a recipe for disaster, too many stories propagated by major news orgs that were later retracted over the years.
    - bryanlarsen 10mo ago
      Such stories are notable and egregious because they're rare. They definitely do happen -- the NYT carrying water for Bush's Iraq war agenda to preserve access particularly bothers me. Perhaps a small number of such events are "too many", but they aren't common in reputable media.
      - exasperaited 10mo ago
        Right. Scooter Libby portrayed as a “Hill staffer”.
      - dragonwriter 10mo ago
BadCookie 10mo ago
And the biggest problem of all: They expect it to be free.
- dfee 10mo ago
  Even when I pay, I’m still bombarded with ads. And you’re never going to get all the angles from a single source. So short of paying a couple thousand dollars, and still getting ads, many people become cheap in exchange for the cheap experience pushed on them.
- y-curious 10mo ago
  I expect it to be free when the ad revenues are huge and the titles are “you WON’T believe what Elon said on Xitter!” clickbait. This is why substack exists
djeastm 10mo ago
Is any of this really any different than any other time in history, though?
- dlisboa 10mo ago
  Yes, absolutely. Journalism was in a much better standing a few decades ago.
  - mvkel 10mo ago
    That's a function of time and technology, and our demands as consumers, not journalistic skill. If a journalist has an entire day to gather facts and write the story before it's published in the newspaper the next day, it's going to be a lot more accurate than the realtime demands of "we are hearing reports of a bomb threat in the vicinity of..."
  - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > Journalism was in a much better standing a few decades ago Many more people paid for journalism a few decades ago. People who only consume free media are obviously going to see more junk.
- teddy-smith 10mo ago
  yeah I was going to say. Journalism has always been hated by those in power and by proxy their followers. Few profession I have more respect for than journalists and police. Most of them are trying to fight evil and make society better and are hated for it.
  - tehjoker 10mo ago
    That’s because the journalists of today that work for corporate outlets frame stories in ways that benefit power and police area agents of power, namely the business owners.
- mvkel 10mo ago
  Great point, and no! Same with "truth." What is it? History is written by the victor.
justin66 10mo ago
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard? Morale is not low amongst journalists because the job is tough, it's low because they're being fired all over the place, pay has decreased, and corporatism is making the whole thing pretty mediocre.
- elicash 10mo ago
  I think there some jobs where community acknowledgment of "oh wow you do THAT job, thank you" can make up for lower pay. I think in states that have low teacher pay, for example, many think it's worth it so long as it comes with acknowledgment of the hard work and dedication -- which, of course, it often doesn't. The counter-argument is probably that if it were truly acknowledged, then the pay itself would be higher. But I don't think it's the case that the average person in Florida thinks less of teachers than someone in New York. (I'm including cost of living adjustments in making this comparison btw.) I don't disagree with the items you lay out, and maybe the ones you list are most important. But I do think "respect" belongs on the list, too.
- danielmarkbruce 10mo ago
  "corporatism" - come on now. The reason why news was decent and the job was decent for a good amount of time was that newspapers were a natural monopoly. Fat, juicy profits and "owned" cities meant the owners could just say "I don't really care, just print approximately the truth and don't alienate readers across the broad spectrum that we have".... "oh, and I guess pay the journalists decently too, because I'm swimming in money"
  - justin66 10mo ago
    > newspapers were a natural monopoly I don't know why anyone would believe that.
    - danielmarkbruce 10mo ago
      Because the vast majority of towns and small cities had 1 main newspaper. Bigger cities had 2 or 3. It was money as far as the eye could see for the owners.
JKCalhoun 10mo ago
"Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?" Teachers, but point taken.
- LanceH 10mo ago
  Referees, who are seemingly out to make both sides lose.
  - DonHopkins 10mo ago
    Yeah but sports aren't essential to society, and it really doesn't matter who wins, beyond fanning the flames of tribalism and religious proxy battles and advertising endorsements and gambling and hooliganism. But education and journalism are deeply and essentially beneficial to society. Referees could just as well be replaced by a coin toss or AI or participation trophies (like FIFA Peace Prizes), and society would be just fine without them. Their salaries are much better spent on journalists and teachers, and schools should spend much less on their sports programs and scholarships, and much more on their faculty and research and writing and journalism programs, to actually benefit students who are there to learn instead of just playing games.
    - psunavy03 10mo ago
      Ah yes, let's get rid of sports and art and anything that isn't "strictly necessary." Such a wonderful life that would be with nothing to live for.
      - DonHopkins 10mo ago
        If all you have to live for is sports, then you desperately need more education and better journalism and mental health care. I'm not saying get rid of them, and I didn't mention art or music or exercise, which are far more useful and enriching than sports. Just don't sacrifice much more important things for sports, like so many high schools and colleges and universities do. Our society is NOT existentially suffering from a lack of referees, as much as a lack of good teachers and journalists. Get your priorities straight. It really doesn't matter if your sportsball team wins or loses, but it does extremely matter if your children are educated and informed or not.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
no_wizard 10mo ago
As far as the anonymous sourcing goes, that has to do with the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible. There is a real trust problem Journalism will need to overcome and some of it is self inflicted
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible Source?
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  Fake sources (outside the gossip and celebrity columns and a couple of cheap tabloids in any given country) is essentially a non-issue even now. “non-credible” anonymous sources: that’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It is in any government’s interest to downplay the authority of any off-the-record leak source, but political parties that rail the hardest against anonymous sources generally have more to hide, and generally those stories prove substantively true in the long run. It is still rare for any newspaper to predicate a story on a single uncorroborated anonymous source. If you have examples it would be interesting.
  - philistine 10mo ago
    https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/?embedded... Bloomberg has come out with the linked story in 2021. They have never provided any other detail; no other journalist has been able to corroborate anything advanced in the story. Through grapevines, we've been able to ascertain that Bloomberg based the whole story on a single source that they massively misunderstood. That story is the worst case scenario, and thank god, it's extremely rare to find such a blunder. Reading the comments here, you'd think half the reporting in the world is exactly as wrong as that one single thing.
    - exasperaited 10mo ago
johnwheeler 10mo ago
That's their problem. They're trying to give people what they want instead of being objective. They're supposed to be objective. What's that you say? Their objectivity is not rewarded? Well, neither is this.
- signforsign 10mo ago
  Journalistic ethics speaks about impartiality, not objectivity, and that has always brought me comfort. I'm dismayed by young uns talking about a joke being objectively funny, or one movie in a series being objectively better than another. It is an Anti-literate trend.
  - johnwheeler 10mo ago
    Is this your cheeky and coy way of saying that objectivity is not possible? What's really the difference between impartiality and objectivity in this context? Sounds like you're just being a wordsmith.
    - mvkel 10mo ago
      Correct, objectivity is not possible. Human observation is never perfectly neutral. What we call "objective" is usually just invisible judgment that aligns with our priors. An observer's choices about what to include, exclude, measure, or frame shape reality long before conclusions appear. Scientific facts are just theories that haven't been proven wrong yet.
tracker1 10mo ago
I want journalists to try to answer the 6 W's and make an effort to represent the stated positions of all parties mentioned. At least with that effort, you can have at least a chance at seeing what bias is in play. Most "journalism" fails on this metric by a wide margin.
mhurron 10mo ago
> Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard? Almost all, to varying degrees, with the expectation increasing the more you deal with people that are outside that field. People seriously underestimate the challenges and difficulties of things they have little experience with while overestimating their ability to do it. 'How hard can it be to ask someone who knows what's going on and write that anyway?'
xnx 10mo ago
And they want it for free
CoastalCoder 10mo ago
Are you sure that a lot of individuals hold those contradictory positions? Or do the contradictions only exist across multiple persons? (Tangent: anyone know if there's a term for this fallacy? I.e., claiming that an attribute exists for some/all of a group's members, when in fact that attribute only applies to the collective itself?)
jjk166 10mo ago
> People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified. Not contradictory. People want information to be verified quickly. That's the job. The person who can do it the fastest gets the scoop. Publishing unverified stuff isn't doing the job faster, it's not doing the job. You can get away with cheating for a bit, as you can probably guess what's going to wind up getting verified most of the time, but that's all the more reason to punish cheaters when they eventually are caught. And even then, publishing rumors and speculation are fine so long as they are clearly noted as such. It is only when unverified statements are treated as facts that there is a problem. > They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information. You're not supposed to cite an anonymous source saying there are bodies buried; you're supposed to learn where the bodies are buried from the anonymous sources and then show the bodies as evidence. There is no need for an appeal to authority when you have proof. If a story relies on cited sources they should be named, and if no one is willing to go on the record then you shouldn't be relying on cited sources. Also we should be pushing for strong whistleblower protections, especially reporting when whistleblowers are retaliated against. > They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters Who is asking for either raw data streams or that the news act as filters? People expect evidence (ie things that can be verified) and analysis (ie context for the evidence presented). Omitting unreliable evidence is fine, but people complain when the standard for reliable evidence changes without good reason. > never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge. If you publish actual facts, they will remain facts no matter what new facts emerge. Truth never contradicts truth, it only expands the story. It is perfectly fine to have incomplete facts, you better have a damn good reason if you have false facts. > They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors. No one wants neutrality, they want integrity. You can enthusiastically report that your side is right any day of the week so long as you're also willing to report when they're wrong. It's when evidence is chosen to fit the narrative rather than the narrative developed around the evidence that there's a problem. > It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Morale should be low in an industry driven to compromise it's standards and race to the bottom, and the worst offenders are the most highly rewarded. This should be an impetus for change.

by mvkel 10mo ago

HelloMcFly 10mo ago

In my experience (dramatized): Teachers: parents expects teachers to deliver personalized instruction to a classroom of 30+ while adhering to standardized testing targets. They are expected to act as surrogate parents yet threatened with lawsuits and suspensions when they attempt to enforce discipline. They are asked to spend their own money on supplies, but I think we've had enough levies to raise funds for our local district, haven't we? They are treated as lazy, agenda-driven agents by their community neighbors. They get the summers off, so I think I've heard enough about their "burnout". Doctors: patients demand certainty from a science based on probability. They expect empathetic listening but it must come within the fifteen-minute slots insurance and healthcare network financial officers dictate. Any story of a missed diagnosis is evidence of idiocy or contempt. Patients want pharmaceutical fixes for decades of poor lifestyle choices without side effects or changes to habits. They're all just paid for by the pharmaceutical industry anyway, so better if they just give me the prescription I saw a TV ad about. And why won't they just do what ChatGPT said they should do, anyway? Besides, they're all rich, right?

lanthade 10mo ago
Also doctors: Patients want schedules to run on-time but come in with a laundry list of concerns and will expect to be carefully listened to for 30 minutes during their 20 minute appointment. Medical systems insist on a 20 minute appointment even for complex cases or instances where translators are needed. Patients are non-compliant with discharge instructions and then get re-admitted which penalizes the MDs who discharged yet insurance pushes hospitals to discharge ASAP. I could go on and on...

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information. There's some cases where I rather someone put their name up or I don't want to hear it, the only exception is give me some damning proof? Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said. Regarding this specifially, I don't care enough, I am more curious about the legal case and how it will play out though.

scelerat 10mo ago
> Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said. This is where journalistic reputation comes in. Do you trust the journalistic entity providing the story? Do they have a history of being correct? Has information from anonymous sources in other stories proven to be true?
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  I don't go by that, it sounds like a recipe for disaster, too many stories propagated by major news orgs that were later retracted over the years.
  - bryanlarsen 10mo ago
    Such stories are notable and egregious because they're rare. They definitely do happen -- the NYT carrying water for Bush's Iraq war agenda to preserve access particularly bothers me. Perhaps a small number of such events are "too many", but they aren't common in reputable media.
    - exasperaited 10mo ago
      Right. Scooter Libby portrayed as a “Hill staffer”.
    - dragonwriter 10mo ago

BadCookie 10mo ago

And the biggest problem of all: They expect it to be free.

dfee 10mo ago
Even when I pay, I’m still bombarded with ads. And you’re never going to get all the angles from a single source. So short of paying a couple thousand dollars, and still getting ads, many people become cheap in exchange for the cheap experience pushed on them.
y-curious 10mo ago
I expect it to be free when the ad revenues are huge and the titles are “you WON’T believe what Elon said on Xitter!” clickbait. This is why substack exists

djeastm 10mo ago

Is any of this really any different than any other time in history, though?

dlisboa 10mo ago
Yes, absolutely. Journalism was in a much better standing a few decades ago.
- mvkel 10mo ago
  That's a function of time and technology, and our demands as consumers, not journalistic skill. If a journalist has an entire day to gather facts and write the story before it's published in the newspaper the next day, it's going to be a lot more accurate than the realtime demands of "we are hearing reports of a bomb threat in the vicinity of..."
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > Journalism was in a much better standing a few decades ago Many more people paid for journalism a few decades ago. People who only consume free media are obviously going to see more junk.
teddy-smith 10mo ago
yeah I was going to say. Journalism has always been hated by those in power and by proxy their followers. Few profession I have more respect for than journalists and police. Most of them are trying to fight evil and make society better and are hated for it.
- tehjoker 10mo ago
  That’s because the journalists of today that work for corporate outlets frame stories in ways that benefit power and police area agents of power, namely the business owners.
mvkel 10mo ago
Great point, and no! Same with "truth." What is it? History is written by the victor.

justin66 10mo ago

> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard? Morale is not low amongst journalists because the job is tough, it's low because they're being fired all over the place, pay has decreased, and corporatism is making the whole thing pretty mediocre.

elicash 10mo ago
I think there some jobs where community acknowledgment of "oh wow you do THAT job, thank you" can make up for lower pay. I think in states that have low teacher pay, for example, many think it's worth it so long as it comes with acknowledgment of the hard work and dedication -- which, of course, it often doesn't. The counter-argument is probably that if it were truly acknowledged, then the pay itself would be higher. But I don't think it's the case that the average person in Florida thinks less of teachers than someone in New York. (I'm including cost of living adjustments in making this comparison btw.) I don't disagree with the items you lay out, and maybe the ones you list are most important. But I do think "respect" belongs on the list, too.
danielmarkbruce 10mo ago
"corporatism" - come on now. The reason why news was decent and the job was decent for a good amount of time was that newspapers were a natural monopoly. Fat, juicy profits and "owned" cities meant the owners could just say "I don't really care, just print approximately the truth and don't alienate readers across the broad spectrum that we have".... "oh, and I guess pay the journalists decently too, because I'm swimming in money"
- justin66 10mo ago
  > newspapers were a natural monopoly I don't know why anyone would believe that.
  - danielmarkbruce 10mo ago
    Because the vast majority of towns and small cities had 1 main newspaper. Bigger cities had 2 or 3. It was money as far as the eye could see for the owners.

JKCalhoun 10mo ago

"Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?" Teachers, but point taken.

LanceH 10mo ago
Referees, who are seemingly out to make both sides lose.
- DonHopkins 10mo ago
  Yeah but sports aren't essential to society, and it really doesn't matter who wins, beyond fanning the flames of tribalism and religious proxy battles and advertising endorsements and gambling and hooliganism. But education and journalism are deeply and essentially beneficial to society. Referees could just as well be replaced by a coin toss or AI or participation trophies (like FIFA Peace Prizes), and society would be just fine without them. Their salaries are much better spent on journalists and teachers, and schools should spend much less on their sports programs and scholarships, and much more on their faculty and research and writing and journalism programs, to actually benefit students who are there to learn instead of just playing games.
  - psunavy03 10mo ago
    Ah yes, let's get rid of sports and art and anything that isn't "strictly necessary." Such a wonderful life that would be with nothing to live for.
    - DonHopkins 10mo ago
      If all you have to live for is sports, then you desperately need more education and better journalism and mental health care. I'm not saying get rid of them, and I didn't mention art or music or exercise, which are far more useful and enriching than sports. Just don't sacrifice much more important things for sports, like so many high schools and colleges and universities do. Our society is NOT existentially suffering from a lack of referees, as much as a lack of good teachers and journalists. Get your priorities straight. It really doesn't matter if your sportsball team wins or loses, but it does extremely matter if your children are educated and informed or not.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

no_wizard 10mo ago

As far as the anonymous sourcing goes, that has to do with the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible. There is a real trust problem Journalism will need to overcome and some of it is self inflicted

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible Source?
exasperaited 10mo ago
Fake sources (outside the gossip and celebrity columns and a couple of cheap tabloids in any given country) is essentially a non-issue even now. “non-credible” anonymous sources: that’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It is in any government’s interest to downplay the authority of any off-the-record leak source, but political parties that rail the hardest against anonymous sources generally have more to hide, and generally those stories prove substantively true in the long run. It is still rare for any newspaper to predicate a story on a single uncorroborated anonymous source. If you have examples it would be interesting.
- philistine 10mo ago
  https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/?embedded... Bloomberg has come out with the linked story in 2021. They have never provided any other detail; no other journalist has been able to corroborate anything advanced in the story. Through grapevines, we've been able to ascertain that Bloomberg based the whole story on a single source that they massively misunderstood. That story is the worst case scenario, and thank god, it's extremely rare to find such a blunder. Reading the comments here, you'd think half the reporting in the world is exactly as wrong as that one single thing.
  - exasperaited 10mo ago

johnwheeler 10mo ago

That's their problem. They're trying to give people what they want instead of being objective. They're supposed to be objective. What's that you say? Their objectivity is not rewarded? Well, neither is this.

signforsign 10mo ago
Journalistic ethics speaks about impartiality, not objectivity, and that has always brought me comfort. I'm dismayed by young uns talking about a joke being objectively funny, or one movie in a series being objectively better than another. It is an Anti-literate trend.
- johnwheeler 10mo ago
  Is this your cheeky and coy way of saying that objectivity is not possible? What's really the difference between impartiality and objectivity in this context? Sounds like you're just being a wordsmith.
  - mvkel 10mo ago
    Correct, objectivity is not possible. Human observation is never perfectly neutral. What we call "objective" is usually just invisible judgment that aligns with our priors. An observer's choices about what to include, exclude, measure, or frame shape reality long before conclusions appear. Scientific facts are just theories that haven't been proven wrong yet.

tracker1 10mo ago

I want journalists to try to answer the 6 W's and make an effort to represent the stated positions of all parties mentioned. At least with that effort, you can have at least a chance at seeing what bias is in play. Most "journalism" fails on this metric by a wide margin.

mhurron 10mo ago

> Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard? Almost all, to varying degrees, with the expectation increasing the more you deal with people that are outside that field. People seriously underestimate the challenges and difficulties of things they have little experience with while overestimating their ability to do it. 'How hard can it be to ask someone who knows what's going on and write that anyway?'

xnx 10mo ago

And they want it for free

CoastalCoder 10mo ago

Are you sure that a lot of individuals hold those contradictory positions? Or do the contradictions only exist across multiple persons? (Tangent: anyone know if there's a term for this fallacy? I.e., claiming that an attribute exists for some/all of a group's members, when in fact that attribute only applies to the collective itself?)

jjk166 10mo ago

> People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified. Not contradictory. People want information to be verified quickly. That's the job. The person who can do it the fastest gets the scoop. Publishing unverified stuff isn't doing the job faster, it's not doing the job. You can get away with cheating for a bit, as you can probably guess what's going to wind up getting verified most of the time, but that's all the more reason to punish cheaters when they eventually are caught. And even then, publishing rumors and speculation are fine so long as they are clearly noted as such. It is only when unverified statements are treated as facts that there is a problem. > They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information. You're not supposed to cite an anonymous source saying there are bodies buried; you're supposed to learn where the bodies are buried from the anonymous sources and then show the bodies as evidence. There is no need for an appeal to authority when you have proof. If a story relies on cited sources they should be named, and if no one is willing to go on the record then you shouldn't be relying on cited sources. Also we should be pushing for strong whistleblower protections, especially reporting when whistleblowers are retaliated against. > They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters Who is asking for either raw data streams or that the news act as filters? People expect evidence (ie things that can be verified) and analysis (ie context for the evidence presented). Omitting unreliable evidence is fine, but people complain when the standard for reliable evidence changes without good reason. > never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge. If you publish actual facts, they will remain facts no matter what new facts emerge. Truth never contradicts truth, it only expands the story. It is perfectly fine to have incomplete facts, you better have a damn good reason if you have false facts. > They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors. No one wants neutrality, they want integrity. You can enthusiastically report that your side is right any day of the week so long as you're also willing to report when they're wrong. It's when evidence is chosen to fit the narrative rather than the narrative developed around the evidence that there's a problem. > It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Morale should be low in an industry driven to compromise it's standards and race to the bottom, and the worst offenders are the most highly rewarded. This should be an impetus for change.