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The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report
by MarkusQ 9mo ago
The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and eventually torn to shreds.
- jauntywundrkind 9mo agoWrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth. If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists. The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.
- amiga386 9mo agoTruth or not, newspapers fund themselves by flattering their readers' opinions. Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y. Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support X. The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad things, and always take the opportunity to fuck each other over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the partisan journals, who just don't bother reporting all the skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.
- MarkusQ 9mo agoSadly, this is true. Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful, but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.
- alwa 9mo agoI guess the hope is that, in a healthy media ecosystem, anything important enough to have a constituency gets reported truthfully and legally fact-checked by somebody. The public are still free to care which truthful things they care about (or want to pay attention to)—and part of the job of politics is still to try to direct attention toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of truth-finding gets done. That, I think, is the loss.
- MarkusQ 9mo ago> Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth. I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part. I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather than pushing an agenda. > If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth. But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a direction you happen to like today. If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their thumbs on the scale.
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- jeffbee 9mo agoThe newspaper industry has never been neutral. It has always been on the side of its owners. Whether that surfaced as warmongering, real estate hucksterism, flogging migration, reforming the entire nation to accommodate the car, or inventing white flight, newspapers always stood on the side of their owners' profits, not from the newspaper itself but from the owners' actual lines of business.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- calvinmorrison 9mo agoJournalists have always pretended to be some sort of righteous class. Upon closer examination you'll find they always are focused on conveying certain facts and steering the conversation. This is mostly a self perpetuated mythological construction that is not related to reality.
- akimbostrawman 9mo agothey just can't help themselves as they see themselves above the regular public that needs to be educated. same can be said about the modern science community that has been thoroughly ideologically captured.
- calvinmorrison 9mo agoI feel nothing but schadenfreude.
- 9dev 9mo agoI don’t understand this sentiment. Journalists are humans too, with their own opinions that invariably shape their work. That doesn’t invalidate all their work though, and it’s vital for a democracy to have a spectrum of opinions floating around, and citizens getting in contact with that spectrum. Big newspapers and media outlets are the only institutions able and persistent enough to dig through things like the Epstein files. With them going down, we loose yet another guardrail, some more checks and balances.
- akimbostrawman 8mo agoI remember how vital they where in shaping public opinion with WMD. Truly a win for democracy. Journalism for quite sometime has little to do with informing and more manipulating. If not for money then political/personal agendas. Sadly for most people it's only clear in retrospect.
- hobs 9mo agoFox News seems to be going strong, so I don't think this holds - we see the rise of the right wing shady and sloppy news dominating the market because its cheap, fast, and appeals to the public's basal natures. No tug of war there, they do not care about integrity or reporting and thus make bank.
- add-sub-mul-div 9mo agoIt's very cable-news-brained to believe there always have to be two sides that are equally viable and that the only respectable unbiased stance is in the middle, dragged by the Overton window wherever it happens to go.
- toolazytologin 9mo agoIt’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.
- kibwen 9mo agoI'm not sure if I'd call the above comment cable-news-brained, but it's entirely possible to push a misleading or outright false narrative while only presenting factually true statements. Remember, nearly everyone who's ever died has had a history of exposure to dihydrogen monoxide.
- maratc 9mo agoNot only that: it's impossible to report on everything that happened, so any outlet only reports on the important stuff. What is and what isn't considered important is a matter of bias, too.
- AnimalMuppet 9mo agoAll true. But you can choose what and how you report in order to give one side a boost, or you can choose what and how to report in order to give the best, most accurate picture you can of what's actually going on. The difference matters. Yeah, nobody ever does it perfectly. But trying to do it right rather than trying to do it wrong surely means that you'll come closer to doing it right.
- laughing_man 9mo agoI would love a paper like that. Don't tell me what to think -- just tell me what happened yesterday.