I don't normally read the Washington Post, but this old article [1] has one memorable quote from Ben Rhodes (whom I also don't like overly much, but that doesn't matter in this case), and I can fully believe what he is saying:
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
This is my experience as well. If you've ever worked in a field that's reported on consistently, or a field you're an expert in, you'll see it is about 30% is accurate and 70% is completely made up. Many times it was like "I didn't say that" or "that didn't happen at all" while I was standing next to the person who wrote the story. The media in the US is in sorry shape. They definitely earned, and deserve, their place at the bottom of those 'most respected profession' surveys.
Now, extrapolate that to reporting on fields you aren't an expert in and form your thoughts accordingly.
Can also corroborate this. While working in the field for a news agency and sending in the news as an intern. Whenever any of the stories made the news, I was most times left with the same feeling. "This is not what I reported".
The newspaper's editors butchered the news. The facts were not accurate or had been watered down.
Not sure why're you're being downvoted. The common name for this is Gell-Mann Amnesia[1], and is casually observable.
Pick any field where you would be considered by the layperson to be a subject-matter expert. Then, go and consume popular media -- news, movies, fiction -- related to that field. How accurate would you say they are?
FYI: you've been downvoted because you talk about downvotes, which is frowned upon here. Have you referenced the Gell-Mann effect only it would be ok. Also, don't worry about things "being downvoted": there are often large swings in up- and downvotes in the first few hours after posting. In most cases they even out and there's no need to go out of your way to support seemingly downvoted comment (unless you have something to add to the discussion, outside of discussing the voting).
Same thing with reporters they're not on the scene getting a story they're sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring so that the police department can tell them what happened. "We're waiting on reports" "we're waiting for the investigation report" ect.
And a lot of that revolves around the news departments not paying those expenses to actually go to a location and be on the ground. However, you can see and support independent journalists that still do that. There was a debate recently on HN on the value of Twitter (probably recurring), but one great thing about Twitter is that I've found direct connections to those journalists and you can see live reporting on issues in a way that mass media just doesn't do, or do well anymore.
E.g. I often read the live tweet coverage of LA City Council meetings and public Q&A.
WaPo is a great example - the youth and inexperience of most of their "foreign" bureaus is shocking, given how supposedly esteemed their journalism is supposed to be, and how much foreign governments also rely on their reporting to inform themselves. Bad situation all around, people still think it's 1965 instead of the clickbait new millennium.
And anchors are glorified game show hosts. Access media journalists rarely press for answers and don’t often ask follow up questions. Journalists need to make less money and there needs to be more of them locally. The more journalists are just rich celebrities they get class solidarity with the people they should be trying to hold accountable. Their kids go to the same schools as the elite. They’re too cozy with the people who hold power.
It's not exactly a lucrative line of work as it stands. At the NYT, GlassDoor tells me they get paid $110k. It's a fine salary (although not quite so fine by New York standards), but that's at one of the most profitable papers in the country. The Orlando Sentinel apparently pays only around $50k.
Is $50k then not an acceptable salary in smaller cities if that comes with benefits? That would be quite a normal engineer's salary in many Western European countries.
Ah, it's well above the median wage -- almost twice as high, in fact. It's not enough to live a life of extreme luxury, but to say it isn't livable is going a bit far.
This reminds me of that bit from the BBC's "Yes Minister", where Sir Humphrey tries to dissuade Minister Hacker from actually leaving his office and talking to other people in the building himself - rather than allowing all information to be mediated by his permanent and personal secretaries:
A little bit. But to be honest, it was more that the BBC simply pays very badly, and Al Jazeera found it extremely easy to recruit whomever they wanted at the BBC by giving people nearer retirement a decent paycheck and a bumper pension.
I'm speculating based on experience where I live: When contract negotiations in the public sector comes up, the finance ministry makes a point of having its loyal economic affairs journalists and pundits point out how the top paying position at, say, some port authority is almost as high as the prime minister's. But they neglect to mention that 99.975% of employees make a lot less then that; and it was a one-time situation where the guy worked extra overtime; and that they also counted employer taxes rather than what the employee gets etc. etc.
At least in Europe the bar to became a journalist is very high. Apprentices for Top tier jobs even for TV stations known for low standards need to go through tests where they get asked for instance who is the boss of the IAEA. People generally underestimate how knowledgeable most journalists are. (I read news daily for an hour but I wouldn't pass such a test)
Reporters back in the day were like responsible hunters. They would peddle their bullshit while occasionally adding what little truth they knew, maintaining the semblance of neutral information providers.
Modern journalism has this breed of reporters outcompeted by a new one that has discovered that that semblance of neutrality was unnecessary.
Judith Miller wasn't a 20 year old when she fabricated tales. I have seen articles in Bloomberg News I know are fabricated (I had access to the raw data misreported) and the reporters aren't children.
Of course the oldies are sad. Their personal breed of lies have now been outcompeted by those of superior liars.
They write articles decrying this particular breed of overfishing the ocean. But they are just obsolete.
If you're a penny-pinching American news channel, a panel of pundits is a lot cheaper than having somebody in the field, whether that's a field correspondent or just a freelancer. Every time something happens in some far-flung corner of the globe you need new people and equipment on the spot, but your in-house pundits are always ready to show up to the studio and bloviate.
Talking about other people's reporting is cheaper than doing your own reporting. The question is, can American news conglomerates not afford to do proper reporting, or have they just found that it's more profitable to leave that to others?
To put it another way, if we found ways to bring more money back into journalism (e.g. By making companies like Google and facebook to pay for news content), how much of that money is likely to be spent on actual reporting?
I have a sinking feeling that the pundits are here to stay.
That's an interesting observation and in hindsight obvious. Back in the day we had news in the morning...news at noon and then some nightly news. The major networks (ABC, NBC) would play other random TV shows the rest of the time and make money. Now with 24/x7 news...they literally need to fill the time with some form of "news" and as you pointed out...pundits was their solution.
Let's not forget the FaceBook effect. Once news companies started getting instant feedback on their views via countable clicks/shares, it really showed them where the money is. A website starts up that just shows police brutality, gets millions of shares. Guess what's making the news? Now comes SEO style key-word packing. Lots of shares on police brutality? And racism? And lgbtq? Well, here's my cross-sectional news story that contains racist police brutality against lgbtq and even though the police officer was a minority this really just demonstrates internalized white supremacy.
I agree that the fraud that is the mainstream news media in the US today is not going anywhere, and it'll probably keep sinking lower. They made their decision a long time ago and will hold to it, they're not going to turn back now.
That said, I think there's an enormous demand for straight-forward news reporting with no opinionized, psycho partisan bullshit forced into it. CNN used to represent that in its early days for example, and they've gradually rotted away over decades.
I don't see why somebody doesn't build this, it's right there begging to be done.
Sign a deal with Reuters and a few other straight forward news gathering services, as the originating sources. Set up a Substack and a YouTube channel, and start reporting just the facts, with a couple of people on YouTube reporting the news from behind an anchor desk. Avoid the old media and their networks, publish as direct as possible. And if YouTube gets so bad with their creeping censorship that they start trying to ban reality, shift to self-hosting after you get initial momentum.
Anyone that can do that has my attention. It would be trivial to get started.
Reuters and others (BBC, Bellingcat etc) receive payoffs and instructions from the British government to craft and manufacture propaganda, narratives and storytelling:
To me it feels like every outlet is also more about persuasion than news. Its subtly (or not so much at times) bringing its viewers into increasingly dividing modes of thought. And at times i bet purposely avoiding stories that inconveniently contrast to their leanings. A subset of the population picks up on this, and loses trust in whats being reported. There is also some bit of resentment to the media, because sometimes they act in a way that says “we know whats best for you, so we wont give you all the information to all angles of this story”
It makes me wonder if there's a business opportunity here.
A beautiful app / website, that functions perfectly, and is basically a netflix for real journalism... The company itseld would be the one doing the journalism, and providing the app. Similary to how netflix has "netflix originals".
What you're describing is just an online newspaper. There's a reason most newspapers can't survive this way: people aren't willing to pay a monthly subscription.
Newspapers aren't making it easier for people. I'm considering subscribing to The Economist for several years now and I can afford it. But the horror stories about being unable to unsubscribe or a need to call someone by phone to do it (yeah, half across the globe, with several dollars per minute roaming rate) is always putting me off it.
Economist subscription is very easy to unsubscribe .You signup for a year and you don't have to extend beyond one year. Economist does not automatically charge you for the next year. I did not renew my subscription due to my financial constraints and I did not have to speak to anyone to not renew.
> But the horror stories about being unable to unsubscribe or a need to call someone by phone to do it (yeah, half across the globe, with several dollars per minute roaming rate) is always putting me off it.
The answer to that is government regulation - it must be mandated that terminating a service must be at least as accessible and fast as the most accessible/fast way of signing up.
Not just for newspapers, but also for other services - a particularly common target of complaints are fitness studios.
This kind of exists in the US as Unicorn Riot. There are some other alt/indie news sites that operate the same way. They're far from unbiased sources in what they choose to cover, but I think that's a given when you're working with so little capital to begin with. Well-funded sites that can afford to send reporters out to cover "everything" will probably end up being biased in a different way, given the sorts of people who have enough money to fund a global outfit.
What do you mean about Apple News? I have an iPhone and have looked at the news app (I think that is what you mean by Apple News). It seems to just be a conglomeration of various articles (some news, others not news). Most are "free" to view, some have a News+ icon that indicates that that article is only available if you have a subscription, however I've found that if I want to read one of those articles I can just go to Safari and search for it and read it for free over there. So... I really don't understand how Apple News could ever be profitable. Why would anyone ever pay for a subscription?
I believe that some attempts have been tried, at least in the general area of what you are proposing. Far as I can tell they have all been labeled conspiracy theorists, alt-right white supremacist fake news nazis, left wing radical SJW eco-fascists, or some other combination of epithets and denigration. And all it takes is for one of those labels to be plausible for a single article or contributor before some aspect. of the internet hive mind (incapable of forgiveness, nuance, or contextual interpretation) latches on and never lets go.
On the surface, 5 USD per month sounds cheap, but that is 60 USD per year. Way more expensive that most /average/ monthly news magazines. One of the ways that traditional magazines kept their subscription costs incredibly cheap was huge advertising revenue. Thus, I would like to see Substack introduce /limited/ and /focused/ advertising options for readers and writers alike. Example: Imagine if you enable some ads, then get a discount on the subscription. It could be a worthy experiment.
Example: Vogue magazine (US) is incredibly expensive to produce (photograph, report, layout, print, deliver), but the annual subscription price is only 40 USD. How is that possible? (The September issue is legendary each year and weighs just shy of a metric tonne!) Every major fashion brand has huge multiple page inserts in each issue. (I guess half of each issue is just fashion ads -- but artfully done!)
Yes, but a lot of people think it is news / journalism, and it is being heralded as that. In fact there is a good argument to be made it hurts news because it is purely editorial and summaries. It currently doesn't have many examples of empowering people to do real journalism / investigations.
I'm not sure exactly where the line between "news" and "editorial" is being drawn. If you have journalists from WaPo in DC writing articles on something happening in Israel, what is the difference between them and a respected journalist writing on Substack? If it's someone with a good reputation, I'd probably attribute a bit more weight to the Substack author's analysis on the situation.
Obviously there's space for investigative journalism like what, e.g. ProPublica is doing, but if it's just "news", I'd rather get it from an individual backed by a strong reputation than an institution backed by a strong reputation, unless the journalist has a useful on-the-ground insight.
To be fair, I was responding in the context of "traditional" American news outlets failing to actually provide what you're defining as "News/Journalism".
I agree with your definitions. But if I'm choosing between Editorial "news" from WaPo/NYT vs. someone independently covering the same events on their Substack, I'd be more interested in the individual on Substack if I trust them from previous experience as an intelligent, informed, good-faith writer.
WaPo/NYT I don't know the individual writers very well, and I don't really have much faith in the intentions of the editorial board...
Agreed, but I think a lot of that is around money, and their inability to be able to fund as much news/journalism. Plus, hard to turn down stupid money like Fox News who is making bank with near 100% propaganda 24/7.
Ya, but you have to remember Substack has no fact checkers, no standards, no peer review... NYT/WAPO are not perfect, but they have those in place. And, such as in the case of the podcast earlier this year they eventually get to the right place and fire the team that blatantly lied.
Reuters is probably a good source if you are looking for pure news, or apnews.
Look at the Economist- it covers many aspects worldwide, however ask yourself if an average Joe on the street would read it instead of the usual suspects.
I just Googled annual subscription cost for The Economist: ~200 USD. That is the same for the New Yorker. I agree with your point: Their readership is a drop in the ocean compared to other English language news sources. That said: It is worth considering the effect of "high/difficult paywall" on readership. Both have almost zero free content, high subscription costs, but excellent reporting.
Soledad O'Brien is a former cable news insider who also makes this point of pundits serving as a cheaper alternative, in an interview she did with Trevor Noah [1].
The real kicker is that the most respected publications are also guilty of this. The New York Times is currently being sued for defamation by Project Veritas. The NYT argued, on the public record, that they should be able to state opinions as fact outside of the Op-Ed section[0]. I read this as the NYT arguing that they have a license to lie with impunity on the front page.
If we live in a post-truth era, it's not because of the internet or the shitty click-bait 'news' sources that proliferate. It's because these institutions, like the NYT and WaPo, in which we used to be able to expect an objective accounting of the facts, have devolved into the personal Pravdas of a few well-educated idiots who thought that they could steer the country in a better direction, but only managed to drive us into a ditch.
That's not a great example because if there's any profession that was always post truth throughout all of history, it's lawyers.
If you hire a lawyer, the lawyer generally decides what argument to make in court. The things the lawyer says do not necessarily reflect what you believe, or even reality as you see it. The lawyer is expected to say whatever is calculated to make it more likely you will win in court. While there are some rules governing what a lawyer can and cannot say, they are limited to certain egregious behavior.
The client generally only decides whether to plead guilty, not guilty, or whether to settle in a civil case, or whether to fire the lawyer.
While a client could try to pressure a lawyer to make certain arguments, the lawyer is not ethically required to listen as long as they think it's better for the client if they don't listen to the client.
This is a misrepresentation of how lawyers manipulate facts. Lawyers take a serious professional risk of sanction from the court and/or disbarment if they make material misstatements of fact. Unlike journalists, the facts are also carefully examined by the opposing side (if they are doing their job) and there is a more open exchange of documents/evidence than in any other context.
If an attorney lies in a court filing, they can be sanctioned, they could be held liable for malpractice / other civil liabilities, be criminally liable, fined, lose their job, or even lose their career.
If a journalist misstates a fact that harms someone else or ruins their reputation, they add a little thingy in italics a few months later saying "oops lol guess we wuz wrong." Occasionally serial fabulists lose their reputations and careers, but generally do not suffer criminal or civil liability for their mistakes. The two professions are not terribly comparable in that respect.
The moral expectations a lawyer is under are also not the same as those of a normal person in the American system. In the American system, even if you are defending a pedophile cannibal, part of your role is to ensure the integrity of the system by providing said reprehensible person the best possible defense without lying about the facts. This ensures the good reputation of the court and, in criminal cases, builds public faith in the integrity of the prosecution. That is the ideal, even if the reality does not always live up to it.
Clients make tons of decisions in either civil or criminal cases while being advised by counsel. A lawyer cannot ethically take an action without the express approval of their client. True, clients are not generally in the driver's seat, but attorneys are limited to advising the client and only acting with the express consent of said client at every step in any kind of process.
Should journalists be held to similarly high ethical standards? That was what the professional journalistic organizations once aspired to, but they have slipped a great deal over the decades.
I don't agree with what you wrote about attorneys. An attorney can make up whatever b.s. they want as long as it isn't a provable lie.
Was their client caught on camera committing a crime? Just spin some b.s. about that person on screen being someone else.
Did their client rape someone? Just make up some b.s. about the woman being a slut who concented. The attorney wasn't there, you can't prove they are lying when they spin b.s. so they are being "ethical".
The idea that highly paid elite attorneys are doing a public service while going to heroic efforts to try to mislead a judge and jury as to whether their super wealthy clients are guilty is the sort of b.s. these elite attorneys invent that can't be shown to be a lie.
(Of course prosecutors can behave badly as well).
In theory you are correct an attorney can be disciplined, in practice they are not expected to serve the truth.
They can even be disbarred for violating the confidentiality of what the client says to them. That's right, their job in some cases is to literally help insure nobody ever knows the truth of the client's bad deeds.
Beyond that I've read about attorneys being allowed to act against their client's wishes "for their own good", so unless you can show a case of an attorney being disciplined for not letting the client set litigation strategy I have to assume you are confused.
> Was their client caught on camera committing a crime? Just spin some b.s. about that person on screen being someone else.
That only works if it could plausibly be someone else. The defence's job is to introduce reasonable doubt, not prove that their client didn't do what they are accused of. It's the court's job to establish whether there is any merit to those claims.
Lying about a clearly provable fact is not generally how attorneys misrepresent reality. When you have an inconvenient fact and you are not obligated to disclose it, you can paint an alternative picture with the facts that you have disclosed. There are many specific rules that also limit what an attorney can say once you have actual knowledge that your client has committed a crime. You have more flexibility in civil matters but not to the point to which you can lie and escape liability for it.
There are many contexts in which you may be obligated to disclose exculpatory evidence in either civil or criminal cases. This really limits how much you can actually lie because of the discipline and transparency that are imposed by the open exchange of evidence.
So, right, you bring up the painting the rape victim as a slut defense. The way that you do that effectively is not by libeling the victim or inventing things out of whole cloth. You do it by creating the possibility for reasonable doubt in the jury by describing objective facts about the behavior of the alleged victim e.g. "On the night of the alleged incident, she posted "I'm gonna get laid tonight, hell yeah!" on Facebook. She texted the defendant "I'm really horny... u down?" not long afterwards.
Do either of those facts mean that the rape did not occur? No, it could have still occurred. The defendant could still be guilty. But your job is to establish reasonable doubt in the jury, and if there are good facts for your side, you go with that. If the prosecution brings up better evidence like security footage, the defense is screwed, but you could still use the 'good facts' on your side to try to bargain down the charges.
So, attorneys misrepresent the truth not by lying but by constructing narratives that favor their side using the best evidence that supports that narrative. Attorneys don't lie if they can avoid it, but they can deceive with the truth!
Confidentiality, yes, that's how the system works.
Here's a compilation of successful disbarments over client abuses compiled by a plaintiff firm that specializes in getting other attorneys disbarred: https://attorneygrievances.com/recent-court-cases/disbarment... Almost all of these issues are related to dishonoring the wishes of clients or just acting irresponsibly.
There are other compilations from any state bar. It's also frequently a topic of news articles in attorney periodicals about attorney sanctions and disbarment, especially because the stories are often funny and colorful such as attorneys being sanctioned for encouraging a witness to be rude or attorneys sanctioned for sassing judges.
I clicked three of those links and none of them involved the attorney disobeying a client's order "for their own good" and setting their own alternative litigation strategy. They appear to involve things like not showing up to court and stealing money. You did not actually link to a case like I invited at any rate.
Perhaps you simply typed "malpractice cases" in a search , and thought any case would do. If you want to link to an actual case in that site you feel is relevant feel free to do so.
If you are an American attorney, (complaining about attorney would likely invite replies from attorneys) you've almost certainly read cases in law school about attorneys not obeying clients for their own good and being deemed to meet ethical standards.
To be clear, I am referring to the attorney deciding what to write in court documents and what to argue before the judge, not things like failure to appear in court. There's no point in arguing with me if you know I am correct. If you genuinely feel I am wrong I invited you to link to a particular article showing otherwise.
Your other statements are just using fancy prose to call a lie something other than a lie. The attorney isn't slut shaming, they are "creating reasonable doubt". The attorney is not misleading the jury, they are "creating an alternative picture"."
Essentially you have a dictionary of professional euphamisms for propoganda constructed to decieve the jury about what occured during the crime.
I do appreciate the idea that the high powered defense attorney serving the ultra wealthy are not liars or grifter decieving jurys as to the guily of their clients but "creators of reasonable doubt".
That's a very nice play on language and the legal standards developed over the last few hundred years.
No, it's actually a fact that Veritas is deceptive. They have been caught in the act of attempting to deceive multiple times. At some point you lose the benefit of the doubt with regards to your credibility.
> Regardless, argument 1 must not be bullet proof, because their motion to dismiss was rejected
This shows a misunderstanding of what the motion to dismiss adjudicates. Argument 1 cannot win on a motion to dismiss, because it's an argument over the facts.
Argument 1 is absolutely irrelevant in a motion to dismiss. Argument 2 is the only argument you can raise in a motion to dismiss.
At the motion to dismiss stage you are only arguing questions of the law. You assume the facts as alleged by the plaintiff in the complaint, and then state that given those facts there is still no legal issue that can be remedied.
Argument 2 states that the times can’t be liable as a matter of law, regardless of the facts. Argument 1 requires a more detailed inquiry into the facts.
If argument 2 works for purposes of a quick motion to dismiss, and argument 1 requires discovery and possibly a trial, you’ll make argument 2 first, and if that fails, mount the much more expensive side defense based on argument 1.
Corporations are not actually people so it's not clear why the statements of the lawyer should reflect on the reputation of a paper the lawyer didn't produce. If I told you Apple had dirty bathrooms, would you conclude the Iphone engineers are bad at making phones?
> The New York Times also attempted a Hail Mary claim that Project Veritas was “libel proof.” We have previously discussed such claims as very hard to establish. The court correctly and quickly dispensed with that claim by the New York Times.
How does "Project Veritas bad" erase the fact that the NYT argued in front of a judge that what is on its front page should be understood to be opinion and not fact, even when it appears in the form of facts? That claim has nothing at all to do with Project Veritas; the NYT just happened to say it in a related context.
Claiming first amendment rights is the easiest and lowest risk route to winning the case. What would be the point of fighting the case on the basis that you do not have rights that you actually do?
Fox News also did the exact same thing on a similar lawsuit. It was used as a "gotcha" moment, but it still wasn't very meaningful.
Because there's a point where you end up going full ouruboros, which undermines the integrity of the institution all tpgether. The major established players want to be able to say other attempts at news outlets are deceptive, then turn around and do the same stuff, and yet still not be subject to the same loss of credibility.
I think public opinion is pretty clear at this point that no one cares about the specifics of the legal arguments made in any court cases other than lawyers and activists trying to gin up arguments for their side, and perhaps a very small number of people who care about the rule of law for its own sake. Everyone else just cares about the outcome of the case. No credibility is at stake, because 95% of the population has no interest in the contents of legal briefs.
I care that legal arguments aren't complete bullshit, actually. We need a justice system based in reason and in shared truths or we're just asking for society to collapse. No one wants to play Calvinball for very long.
A defamation case is inherently a question deeply rooted in first amendment rights. You can't really comment about project veritas suing the NYT without it having something to do with first amendment rights.
Literally the entire point of my comment was that the NYT's claims have nothing to do with Project Veritas. Thus the comment itself has nothing to do with Project Veritas.
Your comment was about the defamation case. You said:
> the NYT argued in front of a judge that what is on its front page should be understood to be opinion and not fact, even when it appears in the form of facts
That's a comment about the defamation case. The NYT was arguing the bounds of its 1A rights before the judge. When the person responded talking about the NYT arguing it's 1A rights, that's what they were talking about.
Then you asked what your comment had anything do to with 1A rights, and I pointed out that a comment about the defamation case is inherently about 1A rights.
So...it doesn't really matter that your commend had nothing to do with Project Veritas because the rest of the comment chain in response also has nothing to do with it.
My comment had nothing to do with the trial either. The trial is completely irrelevant. 1A is completely irrelevant because it only applies to the gov't. Free speech is completely irrelevant because I'm not suggesting or talking about something NYT is or is not allowed to do or say. None of this shit is relevant. You are just gishgalloping.
I quoted your comment above. It was literally a comment about the argument the NYT made before a judge in the defamation case.
You can say your comment wasn't about that topic if you want, but it's just doesn't seem accurate to me. I'm not "gishgalloping", I'm just explaining to you why people are reacting as if you commented on the defamation case.
Anyway, I think we're way out in the weeds and this discussion probably isn't productive so I'll drop it. I'm sorry if I didn't understand what you were trying to say.
I see no such thing in the article you linked to. All that ruling says is that a defendant is not liable for defamation against a public official strictly the basis that what was published was false and caused injury to a person.
However, the ruling explicitly states that if the publication knew that the information was false or disregarded whether it was true, then a defendant would be liable for damages.
That seems completely reasonable and in no way suggests that anyone has a license to lie.
You're right regarding the court's decision, my apologies. Yet the NYT did choose to go to court instead of publishing a retraction of what they then knew to be false:
Sullivan sent such a [retraction] request. The Times did not publish a retraction in response to the demand.
I am not an expert in this, but from the source you provided the NYT did publish a retraction of the advertisement.
Your post makes it seem like the NYT knowingly published false information about someone and refused to retract it, as if the NYT believed that they had the right to publish lies about someone.
Your source, however, paints a very different and much more nuanced picture. The NYT published an advertisement paid for by an independent organization, the ad contained false information, the NYT did retract the ad, the police commissioner, Sullivan, who is unnamed in the ad but potentially implicated by it sued the NYT for defamation, a court case was fought over whether the ad actually implicated him or not, the Alabama courts decided that the ad did implicate Sullivan and awarded Sullivan damages, the NYT appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court and they overturned the Alabama's Supreme Court decision on the basis that Sullivan being implicated by the ad is not sufficient to award damages for defamation.
At no point did the NYT try to justify lying or claim that they have a license to lie. What the NYT's argued was that Sullivan had no grounds to sue because he was not implicated by the ad.
This ruling is a good thing. It lets me say thing like "politician ____ is stealing from the public" without having to worry about whether or not I'll be sued for everything I've got because technically earmarking funds or receiving kickbacks isn't stealing. Hell, I'm even allowed to be wrong about it.
Complaining about the quality of mainstream media while quoting project vertias as your source shows your bias in the extreme - they are not someone you'd present as a trusted source, and in fact present extreme versions of the biases you are purporting others hold.
Polarization knows many victims. Important drivers are outrage, othering and dismissal.
I've followed Project Veritas and yes they go undercover for right-wing causes, but I haven't seen evidence of them being deliberately untruthful in their reporting.
The real case here is that imho we should all start to (1) withdraw from outrage, (2) expand our bubble to cover all sides.
I've done the latter, it helped with the former, although I'm not there yet.
Just to use their most recent scandal, what about their claim that Richard Hopkins, a postal worker in Pennsylvania, was told to backdate a ballot postmark? After which the post office inspector general investigated and reported that Hopkins had denied that claim?
I'm guessing you'll claim that Project Veritas was truthfully reporting what Hopkins told them, and it's not their fault that he changed his story once he talked to law enforcement. Even though he also told the investigators that his initial affadavit was written by Project Veritas.
Wasn't the sting OP to protect an alleged pedophile (or almost) organized by project Veritas? I saw this on a rightwing media in France, so unless there is no honor among thieves, this must be close to the truth, no?
Why isn't Veritas a trusted news source? What does "trusted" mean in this instance? My biases: I tend to think the corporate press has less rigor in terms of sourcing/reporting claims than your average high school homework paper, which makes most of it not trustworthy 'news' to me.
I don't read wikipedia if the page is locked, because locked pages are a clear indicator of editorialization from wikipedia. It's basically their icon for wikipedia's opinion section.
Why won't you read one or more of the 30 links that Wikipedia cites in the above article? Since you don't read locked articles, would you like me to link them here? I'd be happy to.
The trouble with trump is that there literally was too much going on. So it’s easy to divert or redirect whenever he’s caught doing something that would have brought down any other president on its own.
You conveniently leave out the fact that trump made not one but two separate calls (that we know of) to pressure Georgia officials regarding the certification of the election results.
One call to SOS raffensberger was made on January 2 and a hour long recording of it is not in dispute. This is the call where trump conveniently asks the official in charge of certifying the election in that state to “find” the exact number of votes required to flip the state from blue to red. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump–Raffensperger_phone_ca.... Note that page is not “locked” so perhaps it will meet your criteria to consider reading it and the linked primary sources?
Trump also made another call to Frances Watson, an official in raffensbergers office, earlier in December. This is the call you are referring to, where the post quoted text that turned out not to be accurate once the recording was released. The original quote said that Trump asked her to “find the fraud” and if she did she would become a “national hero”. Once the recording was released it was revealed he actually - a sitting US president - told her that “the country is counting on” her finding fraudulent votes in Fulton county.
Trump used the confusion immediately to crow about how the reporting on the “Georgia call” is a hoax, knowing full well that most people will merge the two calls in their mind, casting doubt not only on the December call, but also on the much more damning January call as well.
Short- I don’t care who you trust, but a recording of any sitting us president personally pressuring a state official to “find” just enough votes to flip the result to benefit him is a red line for democracy.
Here's the first "incident" referred to in the above link:
> O'Keefe and colleagues were arrested in the Hale Boggs Federal Complex in New Orleans in January 2010 and charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony, at the office of United States Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat. His three fellow activists, who were dressed as telephone repairmen when apprehended, included Robert Flanagan, the son of William Flanagan, acting U.S. Attorney of the Eastern District of Louisiana.[195][196] The four men were charged with malicious intent to damage the phone system.[197] O'Keefe stated that he had entered Landrieu's office to investigate complaints that she was ignoring phone calls from constituents during the debate over President Barack Obama's health care bill.[198]
Which of these sentences, specifically, are false, biased, or misleading?
Did O'Keefe not actually break into a federal building?
Did he not state that he entered her office?
Was he not actually arrested and charged with a felony?
One more, in the Trump Georgia call, did Donald Trump say "I just want to find 11,780 votes"?
WSJ has declined to a significant level imo. Can't pass by some articles without hearing the phrase "radical left media" or "liberal media" or whatever.
Financial news and if US business news coverage isn't super important to be granular for you, then go for the gold standard which is the Financial Times. The Economist approach doesn't appeal much to me, since most of the time they are like a free-market hammer to which everything looks like a nail. Tech news, Stratechery.
The video in this article, even though I appreciate the criticism of Cuomo.
Also right now, in the front page of WSJ, there is an article criticizing the "woke orthodoxy". I'm no fan of wokeness, but I would have preferred some balanced criticism of the right too from a professional publication. Or just stick to professional reporting like FT.
Telling people the truth does not, in fact, satisfy them. They reason low quality, biased punditry as "news" exists is because people actually like it when it agrees with them.
Feels like major news corporations need to balance between maintaining credibility (at least ones that care about it) and publishing something that might (for lack of better term) trigger reaction like "wtf my favorite Blah-news is becoming more and more leftist-marxist/racist-fascist. Fk them, I switching to unicorn-patriot-news-or-something".
Marked-driven confirmation bias.
I wish I had a good idea how to fix it but I don't.
All of news is opinion. That's how you get news! People decide what's noteworthy, or notable about it. You would literally not have news if people did this. You'd just be reading every single blade of grass or bug or bird or sneeze or sleepless night.
Paid content is awful. Even worse when the notice for paid content is very small. The whole thing feels dirty. Sometime in the last two years, The Financial Times wrote and featured (front page!) paid content for Saudi Arabia's Aramco as a company that is helping with the climate crisis. Truly, it felt like FT's reputation was for sale to the highest bidder.
I also read some Singaporean print media. Various ministries in the single party gov't regularly pays local media to write "paid content". Without fail, the notice about paid content is not obvious or hard to find. What a shame.
But claiming some opinions are verboten or others must be accepted as fact rapidly destroys any historical reputation for a media organization.
It’s gotten so bad that a the NYT apologized for letting a sitting US Senator (Tom Cotton)[1] publish an op-ed that diverged with the views of its subscribers.
I might think that Senator Warren is an idiot, but I have no issue with her expressing her stupidity.
> It’s gotten so bad that a the NYT apologized for letting a sitting US Senator (Tom Cotton)[1] publish an op-ed that diverged with the views of its subscribers.
I think The Times knows that their revenue comes from people "picking a side", not from people looking for unbiased news. That's because it's easier to cultivate a fanbase than it is to hope that there is interesting news. Most days are boring -- you only get a blockbuster exclusive story once a decade.
Banning opinions for “things that are illegal” would ban everything from discussion about drug legalization to same sex marriage. The current legal status of a topic has no bearing on whether someone can make a cogent argument for or against it. Things that are illegal likely deserve more public forum for thought and discussion.
This is a glaringly bad faith interpretation of my post. You know what I meant - an op-ed featuring say a pro-pedophilia stance should not be published in a national media. This is not "discussion" or "public forum".
Respectfully, and with kindness not provocation: This "you know what I meant" sensibility, when many people don't know what you mean or simply have very different bedrock views that must first be engaged with and laboured on (if not you, then by someone) -- I feel this is part of the chilling effect of the view you're espousing here, and which others are downvoting you for <3
To clarify, i am not talking about pedophilia here, but other "obvious" things
Well I can't really agree here, I would think that Occam's Razor for me getting downvoted for saying that "Media companies should not be hosting op-ed articles like 'pedophilia is good'" is pretty clear at least to me. If that's a "chilling view" then, well, ABOLISH ICE. :)
>> Banning opinions for “things that are illegal” would ban everything from discussion about drug legalization to same sex marriage.
> This is a glaringly bad faith interpretation of my post. You know what I meant - an op-ed featuring say a pro-pedophilia stance should not be published in a national media.
I'm really curious how you're distinguishing pro-pedophilia op-eds from pro-same-sex-marriage op-eds. Is it just that one is bad and one is good? How do you know which is which?
Curious, why should a private company be forced to post op-eds from viewpoints that their editorial board has decided are against their editorial guidelines?
What other things should the government force a private company or that matter a citizen to say or not say?
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're battling for or against, because it's not what this site is for. Moreover it destroys what it is for, so we have little choice if we want HN to survive for its intended purpose.
I want fewer opinions in any publication I'm paying for news reports. I also pay for entertainment, and even to read someone's opinion, but these are separate products for separate purposes. The revenue model is really beside the point.
Opinion-infested reports where the writer is casting aspersions, making judgements, serving vanguard for some cause or presenting the writer's own opinion as part of the narrative are worthless to me. It's fine to have opinions as long as 1. that is what you are intending to sell and 2. you acknowledge this and are upfront about it.
Opinions backed by facts would be fine.
If someone explains why he has the opinion he has then I can agree/disagree/provide a better reasoning for another opinion etc.
But most of the opinions voiced are either not backed by anything or backed by one of the most common logical fallacy.
It's not just that, opinions are intertwined with (often) cherry picked facts in such a way that it blurs the line between them.
When writing in a style that I'd closely associate with how I'd like journalism written, I often find myself taking the beginning few sentences/paragraph to explain the facts of the situation as I understand it and the rest on what I think about it or why I think it occurred, etc.
I write this way because I am very open to corrections on the facts and my opinions may change wildly if those facts are corrected or updated so stated the basis for my thoughts up front helps provide context. My opinions and explanations are a lot less malleable if the facts don't change. I'm open to expanding and discussing my opinions but they usually evolve rather than fully change.
It's hard for me to really speculate on the driving force or the motive behind what we see in journalism today (or whether it's new) but it's very clear to me that the intent of the articles written don't seem to be clarity between fact and opinion.
The classic is "backed by statistics" so both sides pick the statistics that confirms their opinion.
Last seen just these days in US media about guns/gun crime/shootings etc. etc. There are so many statistics which all define mass shootings however they want and its super easy to find the "facts" you need for whatever point you wanna bring across.
I think opinion devalues the brand of news. People will share opinion columns from a newspaper on social media, people will begin to associate that source with propaganda (especially if they disagree with the opinion), and then when that source publishes hard news they disagree with, they'll brand it fake news. While newspapers go on and on about how they separate the editorial desk from the news desk, it doesn't matter when they both have the same company's name up at the top.
To some extent, this devalues the brand of all news. I'm sure that the Trump supporters who think The New York Times is fake news also don't read The Wall Street Journal. Even though the Journal has pretty conservative slate opinion columnists (and editorial board), people won't even consider it because they think all mainstream media is fake. (It never tells them what they want to hear; the real world without spin is VERY BORING.)
Agree. Even for The Financial Times, I have seen the same pattern over the last five years. Each year, it seems they push more and more commentary. Honestly, I have no idea if this strictly marketing (organisation of "front page") or actual budget changes.
If anyone works in the news making business, can you comment about the cost of opinion vs non-opinion (fact-based) reporting? I assume opinion (pundits) are cheaper than non-opinion reporters. Why? Much less travel & location costs.
Deeper: Can you imagine the cost of placing a highly educated reporter into a developing country with their family and children? I first thought about this after reading that Peter Hessler and and Leslie Chang were moving to Cairo to work for The New Yorker (TNY). Surely, their children will attend private international schools, where tuition would be paid for by TNY. And what about apartment / security / car-and-driver / yada-yada? I am not against any of it, but the total family package cost must be incredible! (Again: If anyone has first hand knowledge of overseas reporter living packages, please comment below!)
> One of the few useful reports today is from Al-arabiya.[1] They probably have people on site.
I'm guessing you meant to say the Al Jazeera article? In that Al Arabiya one I see clues they have no direct reporting:
* Only a stock photo of the ship, not anything from the current event
* Quotes and sources only by way of other media organizations ("Egypt’s Extra News", "Egyptian state TV", "Reuters").
* And facts I could get myself via vesselfinder.com or wikipedia ("321 ship stuck", "About 15 percent of world shipping traffic transits the Suez Canal.")
I could have written this article from my home in the US despite having no meaningful knowledge of the Middle East or shipping.
The Al Jazeera one has a photo of the ship actually in the canal and at least one direct quote. (Interestingly, they also have info from Rabie by way of Al Arabiya, which is not in the Al Arabiya article you linked. Looks like the Al Jazeera article was written later though given the count of waiting ships is higher.)
You could watch it at 10x speed 10 years from now if someone was recording it (I'm pretty sure satellites are recording it but I'm not sure how much the footage cost)
I'm not sure what your point is. Sure, it'll be interesting to watch, but the bar for a new organization to a crew to gather live footage is far higher than "some people would find it vaguely interesting".
I'm pretty sure some random Egyptian could monetize their live footage on YouTube... and also, I would like to see it.
I don't understand why it needs to be a news organization streaming it... Is it how that country works? (IE: Do they block anyone else from publishing data about this event, a bit like what China would do?)
> I don't understand why it needs to be a news organization streaming it... Is it how that country works? (IE: Do they block anyone else from publishing data about this event, a bit like what China would do?)
You can't really get live video of the ship from a satellite. But commercial imaging satellites pass overhead every few hours so you can stitch those together in a time lapse, although the resolution will be too low to see details of the salvage operation.
The reality is they can sale sensationalism at dime store prices. There is no need to be a real news outlet when they can mimic “The Sun.”
There is no cost and all profit to just printing garbage. In the short term.
This is trading your credentials for cash. Eventually, people will wisen and realize this is not journalism. It will cost them dearly then, but that is the future.
AP is famous for underpayment of outsourced journalists and even then cheating them out of their earnings on some BS clause, apart from overcharging newspapers to use their content. They are also famous for trying to block an open press in the Meltwater vs AP case. My ex who was a freelance video producer for a while gave me numbers that showed AP paid for 10-20x less consistently than a regional outlet (like Al Arabiya or CBC).
True. Newspapers, radio and TV used to be on the receiving end of most of the ad money. That has gone away almost completely over the last 25 years. And now they have to fight for clicks.
>A new tugboat has joined the ranks of those struggling to free the giant cargo ship blocking the crucial Suez Canal maritime route. Syria, citing the blockage, rations fuel, and Lebanon warns of a similar problem.
I think it's the same news, but more hours. So the rest is opinion.
The news used to be something that came on at 11 PM and was over by 11:30. Then there was another half-hour of local news. That was it. And of those 30 minutes apiece, at most 12 would actually be news (aside from fluff, commercials, sports [which aren't really news], etc).
Now news is a 24 hour thing, but there isn't 23 more hours of stuff going on. At least, not stuff that people would tune in to hear about. And since it's all the most engaging stuff, you basically get the same 12 minutes of news per day and the rest is yammering.
Your go-to news source is Al Arabiya, a state-owned propaganda channel that is owned by an autocratic regime (Saudi Arabia), and is not even trusted by Arabs themselves?
If it is more news, it will be like "A former US president said covid wasn't real".
The news reports accurately what happens. But we would still hate it.
But tbh I actually prefer reporting the news, not opinion.
If Donald Trump (a former president) causes lives with his lies, we should handle him through a legal mean, not through blackmailing a news channel to ban what he says.
People shouldn't trust the media. It's filled with people who go into it because they want to change the world. There's nothing wrong with that but if you consume it thinking that shouldn't be or isn't the case you're going to come away feeling betrayed.
The thing that annoys me is people who go into careers that are explicitly premised on describing the world only because they think they can use the trust that comes from that to change the world. Those people aren't in media though.
You wont get access to interviews or access to information if you don't agree upfront to support a certain agenda.
A journalist who tries to report against the agenda gets blacklisted immediately.
Mika Brzezinski was threatened by the Hillary campaign who tried to have her fired from MSNBC for making remarks against Hillary on her show Morning Joe.
It does sound very worthwhile! But in order for it to be useful people need to be able to trust you, and in order to build and keep credibility, you need to be able to stick to reporting "honestly and without bias" even in the face of countless temptations to be a bit dishonest or one-sided in your reporting, burning some credibility for short-term gain.
Of the people who want to change the world, how many can be convinced of the usefulness of such principled behavior, and actually stick to it? How many organizations? Empirically it doesn't look like very many.
If we have learned anything from the past two decades it is that anti-bias measures lead to less competent reporting.
The reasonable complaints about bias - those can be much better addressed by a focus on competency.
Failing to expose malfeasance within a liked administration is primarily an act of ineptitude. Correcting that seems a much surer path to less biased journalism.
There's differnt types of journalism though. Newscasters should absolutely be impartial and just a delivery mechanism of news. Investigative journalists are supposed to dig deep and get to the answers. You can't really be impartial. You're either going to prove or disprove something. Once that is done, the newscasters can do an impartial coverage of the facts that were discovered.
>The thing that annoys me is people who go into careers
because they want to be famous. These people we see on "news" programs don't give a rat's ass about the news, and only want to be the one people are watching.
The reasons you offer may be good arguments against unliked news but do not seem to follow a path to effectively false news.
I would restate the assertion to read: People shouldn't trust any news source implicitly - until trust is carefully nurtured thru the reader's regular and independent vetting of stories.
Short answer: after the revocation of the fairness doctrine, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes/Fox News found a profitable strategy in focusing on a specific demographic and telling them what they want to hear. Fox led the way, and the polarized template took off with Crossfire (on CNN) and further self-sorting by audiences.
(This was content in the embedded video—gestured at in the text.)
The nostalgic pining for the fairness doctrine that you so often see at Reddit and sometimes even here slightly reminds me of European monarchist movements that idolize the golden times of royal rule.
Both seem to ignore the fact that whatever worked in year X will not work in year X+50, because the society, technology and politics moved on.
One of the defining movements of the last hundred years was the fact that the cost of disseminating opinions and news was slowly becoming affordable for more and more corporations, small teams or even individuals. Thanks to technological progress, the voices out there multiplied, as did their audience. And people unhappy with a certain journalistic narrative found it cheaper and easier to broadcast their competing perspective.
Such a chaotic world cannot be subject to effective content guidelines such as the defunct fairness doctrine, just like the modern world of highly educated professionals cannot be ruled by hereditary nobility.
Such a chaotic world cannot be subject to effective content guidelines such as the defunct fairness doctrine
okay, I'll bite. What is the solution then? We got rid of Fairness Doctrine without putting any other check in place and Fox News successfully argued that no-one in their right mind should take Tucker Carlsen seriously, even though he has the biggest talk show on American TV today. I am guessing they are gonna argue the same in their voter machine cases too.
There should be some way to regulate the news media, no?
> There should be some way to regulate the news media, no?
To what end? The Fairness Doctrine was little more than a method by which powerful people within the government could service their own vendettas against conservative radio hosts, executed through FCC licensure agreements.
Everything is IP-networked now, and there's no FCC licensure for publishing on the internet so a bloody-minded focus on returning to the glory days of the Fairness Doctrine is really just fighting the last war. Oh and it's effectively government-compelled speech, AKA a blatant and egregious violation of the First Amendment without even the paper thin justification of public-owned airwaves.
It can certainly be compatible with the First Amendment; just make "fairness" a requirement for Section 230 immunity. Then no speech would be compelled, but if someone chooses to invoke their free speech right to control the message on a site they own, they would be held responsible for that message.
And that's not about "fighting the last war"; it's about correcting for the network effects of the Internet that create natural monopolies with too much influence on public discussion.
Merely being content-based doesn't imply unconstitutional. The CAN-SPAM Act, for example, is content based. This would be similar to that: allowing immunity for moderation of commercial speech, obscenity, etc while holding companies accountable for moderation of most speech.
And that is protecting the free speech rights of users, in an age when the public space is controlled by private corporations, so there's a compelling government interest involved.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that's the best possible solution, but it has the advantage of historical precedent for a similar problem: a few companies have too much influence on public discussion.
And it addresses the flaw in Section 230: companies that act like publishers but claim the protections of platforms.
So is that the best reply you can come up with, or do you have any other reasonable objections besides those I've already addressed?
Your proposal is for Congress to essentially blackmail server owners, note: not just corporations, but server owners with anything that can be called an “interactive computer service” such as a comments section, with an extant statutory liability shield, because the news media, note: not social media, not search engines, we were actually discussing the news media, are not viewpoint neutral. There is no such thing as viewpoint neutrality by the way so enjoy your selective enforcement.
Your proposal as to how it could work amounts to while the First Amendment does say “Congress shall make no law etc.”, it doesn’t say anything at all about Congress not weasel around it, engage in political blackmail, and make bad law anyway”, just so you can get away with calling it “not technically compelled speech”.
Your motivation appears to be to increase the number of forums in the broadest sense of the term in which people can talk freely as like if they were on government property instead of private property, at the expense of private property rights, that other thing that is integral to a free society and liberty. The mechanism by which you propose to do so would however provide a strong incentive for existing server owners to get out of the forum business thus actually reducing the total number of servers and services connected to the internet on which you can post.
There isn’t anything I can say to your position that you haven’t said yourself if this is seriously your position. I mean it’s immoral, antithetical to both free speech as a cultural phenomenon as well as our laws, antithetical to private property rights, and probably also unconstitutional, and at the very least a massive abuse of legislative authority. I guess if you can convince Congress to pass your proposal, the New York Times and Fox News should also be quaking in their boots at the prospect of turning off their comments sections (do they even still have comments sections?).
My recommendation instead is to make peace with the idea that there’s a website, podcast, subreddit, Facebook group, IRC, Slack and/or Discord channel for every opinion, every gradation of an opinion, and every type of audience. The web is a big place. Not quite as big as the Universe but from our puny positions with our lack of perspective it might as well be as big.
Almost every regulation on business could be considered "at the expense of private property rights". That doesn't matter to anyone except libertarians.
Likewise, any law could be called "blackmail", because they all threaten negative consequences if someone doesn't do what the government says, but that doesn't matter to anyone at all.
Those aren't serious objections to any regulation.
And it's ironic to call this "antithetical to free speech as a cultural phenomenon" when this would be a defense of free speech for 99% of the population.
The rights of a few billionaires who own web companies shouldn't trump the rights of the public.
Finally, where do you get the idea that companies simply couldn't exist if they didn't remove user content that doesn't violate a few regulations the law would allow (like spam, threats, obscenity, and copyright, which would all be clearly Constitutional content-based exceptions)? That reddit, for example, would have to shut down if they hadn't banned The_Donald or ChapoTrapHouse? That would be a fair objection, if you can support it.
> Finally, where do you get the idea that companies simply couldn't exist if they didn't remove user content that doesn't violate a few regulations the law would allow (like spam, threats, obscenity, and copyright, which would all be clearly Constitutional content-based exceptions)?
So if I want to run a website with comments I need a lawyer to review each comment? Like how am I, a layman, supposed to determine whether a comment violates copyright or is actually fair use? Or whether it's a "true threat" as opposed to bluster ("Next person who comments about X is getting slapped")? What happens if I wrongly remove a comment?
How that's different from any other business? Businesses have to remove disruptive customers, fire employees, etc; there are rules about that; and somehow they manage.
Probably there would be exceptions for personal non-commercial sites and even small businesses. There's plenty of room for compromise between the status quo and draconian rules that shut down every website.
> Almost every regulation on business could be considered "at the expense of private property rights". That doesn't matter to anyone except libertarians.
This is something that matters to anyone that owns or aspires to own property and assets: houses, vehicles, servers and other fixed assets, as well as the money in your bank and brokerage accounts. Our economy doesn’t exist without private property rights.
> Likewise, any law could be called "blackmail", because they all threaten negative consequences if someone doesn't do what the government says, but that doesn't matter to anyone at all.
The reason and intent behind a law matters in a democratic society if you prefer laws to be just rather than tyrannical in nature. Section 230 despite the political football it has become was actually a fairly reasonable piece of law. The courts may have come around to similar law through procedure, but by passing it as a statute from the legislature, it quickly resolved what the risks were to running a server other people could use as long as you made a good faith effort to moderate publicly accessible data which enabled the sort of risk-taking that made an interactive web possible. You would take this otherwise fine piece of legislature and smack private entities upside the head with it, and if you can’t see the problem with it, I can’t help you see it.
> And it's ironic to call this "antithetical to free speech as a cultural phenomenon" when this would be a defense of free speech for 99% of the population.
99% is actually a reduction. What part of “Congress shall make no law etc.” is unclear? Generally when two parties have conflicting free speech interests, the property owner wins. That means the owner of the server prevails. You, as a private individual, can purchase your own server, and if you let me post to it, you can kick me off of it and I would have zero remedy.
> The rights of a few billionaires who own web companies shouldn't trump the rights of the public.
As I’ve just outlined, this is not zero sum. There are countless channels in which you can exercise your first amendment rights, but you are not entitled to do so on someone else’s property more than they allow.
> Finally, where do you get the idea that companies simply couldn't exist
> Fox News successfully argued that no-one in their right mind should take Tucker Carlsen seriously
This sounds like another repetition of the same bad legal take on the "rhetorical hyperbole" standard based, probably, on the McDougal case or one similar [1]. That argument is made with respect to particular statements, not that nobody would ever believe anything they say. But don't take my word for it, read how the court in that very case talks about the standard:
"In particular, accusations of “extortion,” “blackmail,” and related crimes, such as the statements Mr. Carlson made here, are often construed as merely rhetorical hyperbole when they are not accompanied by additional specifics of the actions purportedly constituting the crime."
You will note that it's limited to particular statements in a particular context, not everything the person ever said for any reason, nor to anything ever said on the show. This same standard was used in, e.g. the case vs. Larry Flynt[2]. The media loves to misrepresent this argument as applying very broadly to everything a person says whenever it comes up in contexts with a political opponent, but the claims made are far narrower and rely largely on people not bothering to read legal rulings or knowing what on earth "rhetorical hyperbole" is to begin with. If you take this as some defense of Tucker, it's not, the other side does exactly the same thing whenever rhetorical hyperbole comes up.
So basically every time you see the meme "can you believe that X argued in court that nobody would ever believe them" you can be sure that you are seeing this tired misrepresentation of the rhetorical hyperbole standard.
Which seems apropos in an article about the media losing trust, as I know from actually reading a lot of court rulings just how uniformly terrible legal reporting is to the point where I actively mistrust all headlines by all outlets and refuse to consider anything but actual court papers off of Pacer.
Outlets love to put out headlines with unreasonable billion dollar defamation claims (even if actual awards are a tiny fraction thereof and they have no realistic hope of getting anything but a headline because their prayer for relief doesn't have a prayer), or to headline meaningless procedural motions as somehow dispositive (The Supreme Court denied a hail Mary petition for a writ of certiorari to decide whether suit could even be brought in the first place? Quelle surprise! The case must be almost over!), or to talk about "harsh questions" during oral arguments (the side that gets questioned more wins slightly more often, they may be trying to shore up the arguments for their ruling). There are far, far more tropes than this, but seriously, if you care at all about accuracy, take a course or two on legal procedure so that you understand the different courts and levels of appeal and actually read legal rulings.
Granted, that takes at least some small amount of legal education, but honestly, the public has neglected legal literacy for far too long.
Similarly, if I understand it, in the recent Sidney Powell filing and partial representations thereof. Out of a 60(?) page filing, presumably offering point after point after point after point, one point apparently offers [rhetorical hyperbole] for consideration. And I hear this on the progressive radio I follow as [the fact of] "Powell's admission that nothing she said is to be taken seriously."
Here's the motion to dismiss. Point after point after point but none of them, that I saw, attempted to say that what Powell said about Dominion was true.
> none of them, that I saw, attempted to say that what Powell said about Dominion was true.
She argued that her beliefs were based on disclosed facts (sworn depositions by others), which is a credible defense against defamation.
Inasmuch as you're claiming that she doesn't argue truth as a defense, that's appears to be true based on skimming this brief, but it's also quite common simply because that puts the burden of proof on you and it's much, much easier to argue most other defenses.
So even when a person truly believes that they're right, they often won't argue this point in court, especially not on a contentious political topic. So failing to argue that point isn't quite the indicator one might normally assume it should be, even if it does tend to appear in slam dunk cases.
N.B. I don't think her allegations here are actually true.
I find your comparison rather dubious and far-fetched.
That aside, it's not because there is a higher diversity of sources at more diverse scales tosay that the answer is not to look at what worked in the past. Or to simply throw one's hands in the air.
It is not because small ISPs, tech companies, etc. exist that the large conglomerates that impact our daily lives should be left untouched and unregulated. Same goes with news, or masquerades of news.
A good start for instance would to untie news media from the profit motive. NPR exists, the French Radio Publique exists, etc. and they output great content, independently more often than not. It shows that public investment into newsmaking is worthwhile and has often a better quality to it. News reporting should be seen as of public interest, and treated as such rather than as a commodity. Breaking news conglomerates should also be explored.
I can't talk about NPR or other public service news report, but for the French public radios, they're mostly saying what the government want the French to hear, with little independence (as their funding comes from taxes) from the government
It is still expensive to create widely disseminated high quality productions which will consistently and reliably attract eyeballs.
I can setup a website or twitter handle and get my ideas published out there, but they drown in a sea of similar opinions. I can't compete with the kind of ideological carpet bombing than Fox News, CNN or MSNBC can produce. Money and Capital can buy a much larger bullhorn, so that is what people listen to.
Eliminating the Fairness Doctrine left only Pay to Play. Broadcast content moderation simply shifted further towards advertisers.
Instead of censorship, Capital simply hoarded all the bandwidth, starving alternative voices of attention.
How now are us newly ennobled modern highly educated professionals supposed to hear voices which no longer exist?
The hysterical bit is social media swiped the control away from advertisers. We've replaced your dreaded hereditary nobility with the mythical meritocracy.
> Both seem to ignore the fact that whatever worked in year X will not work in year X+50, because the society, technology and politics moved on.
That's... literally not a "fact". It's a situational thing. I mean, just to be glib: almost everything that "worked" in the 1980's works now. Most things haven't changed!
As far as media balance: yes, clearly balance is a good thing. I think forcing Fox to hand over an hour of coverage every evening between Hannity and Tucker to someone like Chris Hayes can only be a net benefit. MSNBC can slot Ingraham in after Maddow. Both their audiences will win, because the networks will have to find a way to keep eyeballs without outrage.
Fox only works as "Fox" because of the echo chamber effect. And that can absolutely be regulated.
> Both seem to ignore the fact that whatever worked in year X will not work in year X+50, because the society, technology and politics moved on.
This is true, which means it's important to look at the context.
The fairness doctrine was from a time when there was limited airtime. Things were broadcast and anything so broadcast filled space that couldn't be used by something else. Filling the airwaves with a singular opinion literally prevented any others from being carried. The fairness doctrine was meant to counteract this.
Today that technical problem does not exist. Everything is on demand. The economic cost in terms of storage and bandwidth is so low that the likes of YouTube and Facebook can carry everything published by everyone. Problem solved, right? Just carry everything; completely fair.
Except that they reintroduced the scarcity artificially through market consolidation. There are effectively three major cable news networks and every one of them is aligned with a political party.
Because that's what happens when there are so few of them. If you have dozens then they each carve out a niche. One caters to socialists, another to libertarians, another to moderates etc. You get a greater diversity of viewpoints and, importantly, less tribal warfare because there is more overlap between any given pair of outlets.
And it thwarts the even more problematic attempts by partisans to capture the incumbents and enforce ideological conformity through them, because it's not as effective if you have a dozen other competitors who aren't just shills for the other team (and therefore have credibility) rightfully pointing out the lies told by competitors they otherwise agree with and keeping each other honest.
What we need is less media consolidation. More competition. Applies to the media as much as the tech companies.
The fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast TV, never cable. This is a myth that will never ever die and I see repeated constantly, even though it's been debunked numerous times by Snopes and others. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ronald-reagan-fairness-doc... The fairness doctrine was also abused by multiple administrations to go after broadcasters who were overly critical of them- FDR did it, so did Kennedy, Nixon, etc. The government is not and should never be the arbiter of what's 'true' or 'fair'. I'm always amazed that it never occurs to people that the gov't might use this power in bad faith, yes?
But no, the fairness doctrine has nothing to do with Fox News, it never applied to cable
It absolutely had to do with Fox News by way of Rush Limbaugh. The fairness doctrine applied to broadcast radio as well as television, and the next year after its abolition, the Rush Limbaugh Show began airing. His meteoric rise over the next couple years demonstrated a large market for conservative media, which motivated Murdoch's and Ailes's approach in founding Fox.
I’ve heard the argument on the right that the fairness doctrine was in name only, as in it gave the news media monopolistic power while they showed a skewed perspective of what the other side actually believed. Consequently, Rush Limbaugh grow so big so quickly because someone was finally representing this audience
You’re right - section 3 very purposefully doesn’t set guidelines for what’s “fair” so you get many liberal outlets presenting just right-of-center as the opposing viewpoint.
In many ways it accelerated Limbaugh et al because viewers could see they weren’t getting an accurate conservative viewpoint in the mainstream and thus trusted it less, leading to other outlets.
We are all eventually in service to the truth. Misinformation can cause real damage. A surge of misinformation calls for more aggressive appeals to free speech to keep society stable.
What would have protected free speech in the first place? Not allowing the dangerous fantasies supplant fact.
Dangerous fantasies like “thalidomide is perfectly safe” or “smoking is good for your health”? How about “fat makes you fat”?
There’s plenty of statements that the mainstream media supported that were either flat out wrong and harmful to the American public. We’re still feeling the repercussions of a government hellbent against saturated fats.
At least allowing people to indulge in “dangerous fantasies” lets some of the people be right some of the time, instead of the entire monoculture being dangerously wrong.
Not all misinformation is the same, there's a difference between science got it wrong and society eventually corrected it self and being wrong on purpose or misleading to pander to an audience.
Maybe I am lol, but thats not important. I think it's fairly easy to differentiate people trying their best from bullshit peddlers. Look at the recent controversial topics
vaccines, global warming, masks. Is it really unclear to see who is putting in a genuine effort?
Once upon a time, emancipation of slaves or universal suffrage were dangerous fantasies. In China as of today, democratic ideas are a dangerous fantasy.
It is not as if contemporary West is the only society in history that has everything figured out and can only get worse through entertainment of "dangerous fantasies". To the watchers of status quo, every potential change is at least suspect, if not outright dangerous.
A deeper problem is that many consider voting broken by definition, unless their team wins. Because the opposition has been "corrupted" and "fooled", their dissent is not legitimate. They see the ballot box strictly as a utilitarian tool, which when it does not give the God Given outcome, can rightly be followed up by the ammo box. Because the opposition is wrong and dangerous to this country.
In other words, people who wanted their bad faith arguments represented in a world of mostly good faith journalism got their way. "Mostly" because obviously there have always been journalists who were clearly disingenuous, but they took the hit to their reputation in kind. Reputation is barely a thing worth caring about anymore. Everyone takes a hit to their rep no matter what they say, so now they just focus on raking in advertising dollars.
Fox didn’t create a biased media, which existed long before Fox News did, they responded to it.
Most surveys going back decades and decades show that 80 or 90%+ of journalists are registered Democrats. That doesn’t make them bad journalists, but they are a monoculture that doesn’t represent the diversity of political views in America.
It’s notable how it really bothers people that there is one right-leaning news network out of a dozen or so left-leaning networks. Apparently it’s not enough to control 90% of the media narrative - it has to be 100%.
It would be healthier if there were competing right-leaning networks. A lot of the problems with Fox stem from the fact that they have close to 100% of the conservative audience. The various left-leaning networks have other left-leaning networks to keep each other in check. There is no similar pushback for Fox.
MSNBC and CNN do not keep each other in check, it's a race to the bottom of pure garbage "journalism", which is most often either exaggerated clickbait or totally fabricated yellow journalism.
They also all participate in laundering of fake news. One of them throws up a totally false story and all of the others repeat it.
As a recent high-profile example, Washington Post falsely claimed that Trump told a Georgia election official to "find the votes", which a later leaked recording proved to be absolutely fabricated (they retracted it). CNN, MSNBC, BBC and other ethically bankrupt organisations printed the lie verbatim.
What in the world? The former guy said, on a real, not fake recording "I just want to find 11,780 votes". This has not been retracted. Where are you reading this?
Perfect example! The media took the GA official at his word, ran with the story, 2 months later the recording come up and most of it was made up.
If that doesn’t tell you what the media is about I don’t what is. They literally ran with a story about the president they couldn’t corroborate and it turned out to be lies.
"CORRECTION: [...] Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so."
That's a pretty whopping correction that changes the entire story. If he's asking her to investigate the votes to find wrongdoing, then there's absolutely no wrongdoing.
Network news in the 80's wasn't ever "biased" in the way that Fox was from the start. That's just nonsense, sorry. What makes Fox "Fox" is not merely the fact that their reporters "don't represent the diversity of political views in America" (they don't, of course) but the fact that they deliberately spin coverage in one direction or another. Identical situations (c.f. the current "crisis" at the border which echos the same stuff that was happening two years ago but somehow wasn't a problem with White House policy then!) are presented differently depending on the partisan identity of the actors, and that's something mainstream media has never done.
(And I think you're going to need to cite that "80-90%" number, which seems made up. Nothing is that uniform, even CPAC has a bunch of registered libertarians and independents walking around.)
From a European perspective there's one bonkers network that is nothing but a billionaire's propaganda outlet and many conservative to rightwing networks.
Actually, how crazy the situation is, is shown how "conservatives" abandoned Fox News because they did not reflect their reality distortion and moved to even more extreme outlets (I mean who can call newsmax or OAN even news). If someone moved from Fox News to OAN, they were never interested in news, they were after someone feeding their prejudice no matter how unreal they are.
The issue with the "fairness doctrine" is what is fair? Why is free speech curtailed?
I'm not saying anything was good vs bad, but it's clear why it was a perceived an issue. One political party was taking advantage to revoke the speech of another. Put simply, I could put two left leaning people on my show, but claim one was "conservative" and that was "fair". Honestly, it's no better than now, but at least we all know the truth.
Crossfire (1982) actually substantially predates FOX News (1996)... and I also don't think it materially changed in how it framed debates after the FD erosion in the mid-80s.
I do agree that the FD revocation leads directly to FOX News and AM talk radio, I just don't think CNN or Crossfire are examples of the phenomenon being discussed. I think people mention Crossfire largely in the context of Jon Stewart criticizing the Tucker Carlson era iteration, which fair cop was bad, and also coincided with an era where CNN phased out real news journalists like Aaron Brown in favour of more idiot talking heads. But I'm just not sure you can draw the causal graph from fairness doctrine to those events ~18-ish years later the same way you can to the rise of talk radio a few years after FD was sunset and FOX News 5 or 6 years after that.
This did happen after the revocation of the fairness doctrine, but another angle to consider is that the US nominally won the Cold War when the USSr disintegrated, and reactionaries like Limbaugh and Ailes then rose to popularity by identifying and villifying An Enemy Within.
The fairness doctrine was solution to a monopolist problem - there were only 6 TV stations (because broadcast frequency was limited and broadcasting expensive). It also didn't work that well - stations gave lip service to fairness by representing opposing views badly. Most people don't watch TV anymore and cable has hundreds of channels. It's hard to see how the fairness doctrine would be relevant on the internet, with tens of thousands of providers, and without similar monopoly-producing conditions.
Nowadays it is much clearer that media is pushing the goals of some interest groups. It is obvious in the case of Fox News, but similarly for more traditional newspapers and TVs. They're pushing the agenda of big business and wealthy individuals, with secondary views on popular topics that don't threaten big interests.
Another important issue that you'll figure out in mainstream media is that they're always pushing the idea of us against other countries. They're promoting the underlying notion that we should always be at war (or close to that) with countries that are not aligned with the current interests of the elites. There is always some "enemy" that is a threat to "civilization" and that we desperately need to contain or destroy. Not only this benefits the big interest groups, but this also creates a fictional narrative of reality that keeps viewers interested in learning about the latest developments of this "holy crusade for civilization".
Who does get to decide? I think the easy answer is, "the people" but when you dig deeper into that, a representative group collectively making and enforcing decisions is... a government.
So I don't think there really is a right answer here. "Not this" may be a start, but it's hardly a solution.
It has always been this way, there is nothing new under the sun. Even the Spanish War was fueled by newspapers.
The media business is a business, it has always been about what's profitable. It's not a public service, even hard hitting journalism must sell copies.
The closest thing to news media that serves public interest are worker owned media companies and socialist magazines.
Wouldn't you also expect journalists to scrutinize things? As in skeptically question basically everything that's reported to them, and leave the drawing of conclusions up to their viewers? I think the scrutiny steps seems to get skipped, and each news outlet just reports the conclusions they want their viewers/readers to be exposed to.
I agree. I remember when news organizations had correspondents who travelled around the world to report on stories. People like Marie Colvin, who would risk their lives to get a story. Now it's all talking heads sitting around a table, telling you what to think. The stories aren't even real in many cases now, but made up hysteria like the nascar noose.
>BTW, I regularly read both the WSJ and the NYT. Reading both gives one a good idea about how agenda driven the media is.
May I suggest reading RT and the SCMP while you are at it. Maybe round it out with with some Al Jazeera.
I find it deeply ironic that Russia can run a news network that acts as a propaganda weapon by just talking about all the scandalous topic that American media wont touch (US war in Yemen, CIA black sites, Hunter Biden emails, Saudi government involvement in 9/11, CIA dumping billions of $ of weapons into the hands of ISIS, etc).
Journalists inserting their personal opinions and passing it off as fact, while working to manipulate public opinion of hot button issues for the sake of clicks.
So I know what you mean but the issue is more complicated than that. The implication is that if only journalists would stop doing inserting their opinions that the problem would go away.
This is technically true but also misses the point by a mile. The dry work of journalists hasn’t at all changed. News is just as boring and impartial as it always has been but nobody consumes it. It’s been there the whole time and hasn’t gone away. But television radically disrupted what we call news and proved that what people wanted wasn’t actually news but storytellers who consume the news and present it as a cohesive narrative that has the benefit of context (historical, cultural, political). This is totally rational. It’s why reading news reports and case files about criminals is niche but true crime podcasts are hugely popular.
These aren’t and can’t be apolitical in nature but that isn’t the same thing as “injecting opinion into fact” which is something that doesn’t really happen all that often. It’s very rare that you know a journalist’s opinion on a topic (outside of their personal Twitter) but how they assemble a narrative is ultimately informed by their views as an individual.
Yeah, and everyone is guilty of it IMO. I would love to see an analysis of news articles over the last few decades where someone counts the adjectives.
This is a bit rich coming from the CBC. They're institutionally incapable of understanding the problem because they can't comprehend how their perception of themselves as an elite is illegitimate, imo.
Yeah, I came here basically to say the same thing. Don't want to get political, but CBC is so far from objective both in the spin they put on stories, but mostly in what they select to "report" on that I give no weight whatsoever to what they report. Canada badly needs objective, good journalism (CBC may still be at the top of the comical lineup of special interests we call news outlets). However, I think a big problem we have is that many people still do trust the CBC, I see it all the time in discussions where the nonsense they report on is accepted as gospel.
Funny enough, I’ve never considered the CBC an “elite” source of media and didn’t get that impression from the CBC itself. Maybe you could explain a little? I want up understand what you mean better.
You've asked a Canadian to air their complaints about the CBC.
Indeed, the CBC isn't an actual elite that could be defined by achievement, performance, accountability, history, or other merit, but they do groom the lower slopes of it. It's possible they have become more balanced as I tuned them out almost 10 years ago, and perhaps in the mean time they've investigated public service corruption, major party financing and election integrity, foreign influence operations, value for money in spending, threats to Canada's sovereignty and place in the world, challenged dominant narratives, and provided valuable and neutral insight into the culture conflicts of the day, but I'm willing to bet I haven't missed that much.
If you are in the U.S., CBC news is like if a Portland NPR affiliate had the budget of CNBC. Lots of very concerned and appropriately unattractive white people with cameras, descending from billion dollar office towers to hover around mystified minorities (who, quite reasonably, just shrug and go with it) demanding to know how they've been victimized by the Four Bads. (climate change, homophobia, racism, and sexism.) The CBC became the prosecutors in litigating for social justice, which I think many of them would be sincerely flattered to read, but to many Canadians, they are just activists posing as reporters.
This is in addition to that they are the state broadcaster whose mandate was to popularize Canada's increasingly homogenized federalism and (now post-) national identity. Their mandate isn't even reporting, it's narrative, and from a federalist perspective.
That view represents the consensus of a few neighbourhoods and schools, basically Queen's, McGill, and to a lesser extent, Carlton, and the international NGOs they all did their gap years at. It is widely regarded as an arm of the LPC. Their content is a formula of patronizing concern about what should be done about people who don't work for the government, or aren't paid in public money, and it manufactures sentimental conflict over different minority interest groups toward that end. While most media panders to outrage, the CBC's editorial tone exalts victimhood as a kind of new state religion.
I could just dismiss them as just another group of radicals with government jobs, but it's more complex than that in Canada. The CBC is something much weirder altogether.
I went to one of the Universities on your list, and the thought process of my fellow students was markedly different, depending on which faculty they attended. I don't think you know who the Canadian elites that you dislike so much are.
That said, I agree with parts of what you said. CBC's opinions are not at all related to the normal experiences that Canadians have.
The news podcast is fine, and is better than the quality of most Canadian news (a low bar). I appreciate that they will steadily question the government in interviews; however, but for topics around science and technology, they simply don't have the background to really ferret out BS in the same way.
For instance, they will readily tell you "all of the vaccines are equally good at keeping you out of the hospital" - which is true - but they will not ask the more challenging follow-ups. For example, "if all vaccines prevent death, why is it so important for certain vaccines to be allocated exclusively to the elderly?". The answer to the later question is actually far more interesting, since it unveils bioethics questions that a listener may not agree with; but the CBC is invested in protecting the aura of the experts it agrees with.
The Japanese NHK is, without a question, far better than the CBC, despite its politicization and its recent change to be seen as "agreeing with the government". Other than the Ideas podcast and the News show, there is very little value that the CBC provides me (despite being a linguistic, racial and religious minority in a mixed-race marriage with another linguistic, racial and religious minority.)
I might vote for a political party that had a clearly defined plan to end CBC's divorce from the concerns of the average Canadian.
Wow, I just want to say that this was good. You have managed to very accurately and eloquently describe the CBC. And you're right, you have missed nothing since you tuned out.
Wow. This is a remarkably good take on the CBC. I could never quite put my finger on why their coverage seems so “off”, but this sums up my observations as well.
At least in the US you have a few different news sources all with their own bias. But the CBC is looked up somewhat as an institution and god damn Peter Mansbridge is a handsome man.
I’ve seen stories covered in the US media and on CBC and it’s apparent the CBC provides an even narrower viewpoint.
And don’t get me started on how most coverage of the US tends to have the conclusion “aren’t you glad we aren’t as bad as the US? may be you should stop complaining about our governments little missteps?”
There are a lot of good comments here on what's wrong with the media and why. A couple posts talk about solutions like AllSides or Ground News. Pardon the self-promotion but I'd like to add my company's solution: TheFactual.com. Hopefully a solution to help people complain less and consume better news :-)
We use technology to rate how informative an article likely is: links & quotes analysis, lack of opinion in writing tone, author's topical expertise based on historical writing and site historical reputation. The result is you can find good articles in hundreds of sources without having to brand an entire source (Fox, NYT, CNN etc) as good or bad. And by curating a few highly rated stories across the political spectrum on each topic you see different framings of a story quickly so you get closer to the unbiased story.
This looks like an interesting site. I've checked out All Sides and Ground News and a lot of what used to be considered center is now labelled as "left." I think that's because of the particularly skewed Overton window in the U.S.
It would be nice to have a spectrum that could be set based on your country.
I've been surfing around on your site. The article selection is very good. I'm unlikely to use it because I refuse to sign up for almost anything these days, and it's a requirement on the site, but it looks well done.
Thanks so much! Interesting idea to set the political leaning info based on country. I have heard many say that the US center is right of what most people consider center.
The press's extra constitutional protections imply a duty to act as an adversary to the powerful and to inform the public of what they learn.
In as much as news orgs fail to challenge those in power, they are abdicating their primary responsibilities - they are earning a loss of trust. Publishing press releases by Gov/LEO/Biz verbatim, without vetting the info or adding historical context, is a polar opposite of what 1A protections imply.
As far as informing the public: One news org publishing 7 headlines is informing us. Dozens of others who publish those same stories, w/o meaningfully different content, is not. Bounded, local markets have been gone for a generation. It seems delusional to disseminate news as if it were still 30-300 years ago.
I think there should be a government agency that counters mis-information in the media just like we have agencies that inspect food to be poison-free. Such an agency should be independent in the way that Federal reserve or Bank of England are independent of the current government.
I think this is sort of like asking why the Catholic Church lost the trust of Northern Christians. Yeah, there were some specific actions taken by the Church that led to the seeds of the Reformation...but ultimately the printing press and a long-growing trend of secular power is what actually caused and maintained the larger historical process.
In other words, in a world where the Internet exists, it was inevitable that established media powers would eventually erode away and lose their position as sole arbiters of information.
Except there is no Pope of Media. There is no single party controlling it all. A real problem however is monopolies. That is why we need laws that stop companies from becoming monopolies. That is why we need regulation.
Personally I think the lawsuit against Fox about mis-information they spread about voting machine manufacturers is a great remedy and will help restore public's faith in the system. It is not that all media are equally bad in spreading mis-information. Some are clearly worse than others. How do we know that? Lawsuit(s) will prove that, beyond reasonable doubt.
If Fox News is ordered to pay billion(s) in damages that is big news which should reach even the "average person". Yet maybe not the average consumer of Fox news.
Such news would be highly relevant to the average Fox News customer because it would tell them that Fox has done something quite bad, caused damages worth billion(s) by spreading misinformation.
It is relevant to the "average person" because it clearly tells them something about the trustworthiness of the news they get from Fox every day. But whether that news will reach them is a different question. Therefore I think part of the remedy should be to order Fox News to tell their viewers about the outcome of the lawsuit more than once to make sure it reaches all their customers.
I’m not sure because most people don’t consider fake reviews or sponsored Reddit posts or YT people to be part of story, thus I feel they will underestimate the degree to which narrative is manipulated.
The real problem is us, humans. We really struggle when all our coefficients and denominators go to 0 (cost) or ∞ (availability)
The Internet is Pandora's box. It's been wide open for 20+ years, and we just don't know what do about it, or even if anything should be done about it. Infinite information is something humans have never had before, and its greatest strengths are its greatest weaknesses.
This thread craps all over media (and with good reason), but the same force that makes that media available is the one that gives us hyper-local, unmediated information in near-realtime through Twitter, Facebook, et. al. You can't have the one without the other.
1940's His Girl Friday is a great madcap comedy about the journalism business. Though I can't find the timestamp, there's a great scene in the first act where the reporters are sitting around their phones playing cards. Our heroine, Hildy (played excellently by Rosalind Russell), comes in and rouses the group with a hot story. The reporters then relay the story back to the newsrooms in increasingly dubious and truth-stretching headlines, all for the evening editions.
It's a bit over the top, but the headlines they spout out sound just like Twitter posts and FB memes to my ears.
Yellow Journalism has been around in the US for about a century now, so it's not 'news'. To see the path out of where we are now requires that we look back and see how it was done before
Side note: it's bizarre to me that Fox News gets a pass on being part of "the media". The article says that "73 percent of Republicans say news media don't understand people like them." But Fox News has been the most-watched news source in the United States for nearly two decades!
Fox News is trash too, it’s not as Republican loved as it is made out to be, not even close. It may even be more of a lightning rod for taking jabs at Republicans than it is actually trusted.
I’m not sure if it’s not “right enough” so much as it’s just mostly low quality content, many see it lumped together with CNN/NBC/ABC/etc as just another bunch of talking heads to manufacture consent on behalf of the American political oligarchy.
I can't disagree, but usually when you ask them what news source they trust they list places that do nothing but spew qanon talking points and other conspiracy theories.
> But Fox News has been the most-watched news source in the United States for nearly two decades!
Why does watching a news channel necessarily mean that you think that the news channel understands you? Maybe they're watching it and from that deciding it doesn't understand them. In fact... if they didn't watch it they wouldn't know that it doesn't understand them so they must be watching it...
Even if it's an awful news source, which it is, it's the only place to receive the other side of stories, or alternative viewpoints, as biased as they are. Fox News and CNN are the same in my book. You can disagree with that, which is fine, to each their own, but I see them both as insanely biased, politicized, monetized, having given up on actual journalism long ago. I watch them both just to see what the extremes of both sides are up to, with the truth being a combination of bits and pieces from both sides. I literally have to incorporate Fox News in, as horrible as it is, because it's the only way to be exposed to any other data.
So yes, I watch it, and yes, I don't think it's good or understands me, but there's no other choice; the alternative is to be awash in one ideology's propaganda 24/7, to only ever receive information from sources that are horribly biased one way.
why do you think it gets a pass? may be they just choose to watch it the same way they choose to vote, the least bad option. And also it is entertaining in a way, so might be just that(don't trust any media, but fox is at least fun, etc)
Keep in mind that this is an article of pre-suasion by the CBC which justifies Canada's current approach of funding government approved journalists and media companies.
The argument is that if someone (government) doesn't fund and help maintain the old model of establishment media (with some left/right division) then the new economic forces will lead to its collapse. The framing being advanced here is that the collapse results in further left/right polarization as we move from objective news reporting towards self-rationalizing and subjective news analysis because that's what drives attention and clicks. This is a false framing in my opinion and only serves as a justification to protect establishment narratives using government money.
Instead I would suggest that: is that the collapse of current media leaves us with a polarization between establishment/non-establishment media narratives also. It's also possible to argue (but that's not my goal here) that non/establishment polarization is greater or more threatening (to who) then the left/right polarization.
The manifestation of this change is much more holistically represented in US politics by putting the typical voting blocs on a political compass map and plotting the line separating Rep/Dem for 2014 vs November 2020. Note that the shift is axial. I think this a more useful (productive) example than the proposed capitol riots (Jan6th) example or Antifa suggested by others. The axial shift is correlated with a different dimension of disagreement in the common zeitgeist.
So some questions worth asking are:
- Is this ok? The days of yellow journalism DID have some of the highest literacy rates in the USA.
- Are you ok with a system where the government gives out financing at will to journalists/media and you may have to take them to court to get a press pass? ...like Canada?
- Were we ever really objective? Should we still strive to distinguish the objective from the subjective?
- Not everyone learns these words in school. Some learn (incorrectly, in my opinion) that there's a moral connotation to it. How can we do better at this?
- Is it worse to lose "objectivity" in reporting or to purport to to be when we really aren't?
Superficial analysis by the CBC. The only reason why the citizenry is heavily invested in the US media is because they are ANGRY. Americans have been laid off by the corporations, led to bankruptcy by a callous medical insurance system, told them they are dumb and untrainable by programs like H1b, and lied to repeatedly by politicians.
Americans are looking for a savior. The politicians and the mainstream media are pandering to this groundswell of voter anger.
For years now, the only remaining public institution that Americans "trust" is the military. If a junta of generals promise jobs and stability, I do not doubt that many Americans will acquiesce.
For those who like to draw parallels with the Romans, this is how Rome became a monarchy. The average Roman was being exploited or enslaved by the wealthy optimates led by Pompey and they looked for salvation in Caesar and his nephew Augustus.
The brothers Gracchi, grandsons of Scipio Africanus who defeated Hannibal, championed the poor and were eventually murdered by their political opponents. A famous line by Tiberius Gracchus who commented on the fate of those who fought for Rome in her legions:
"The savage beasts," said he, "in Italy, have their particular dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light and, having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to wander from place to place with their wives and children." [1]
One of the unsavory facts of the Roman republic was tax farming. The rich paid huge sums to the Senate for the right to "tax" that is extort as much money as possible from freedmen as possible. If you can't pay, then your family could be enslaved. This was one of the reasons that led to the Second Servile War.
Accordingly Marius sent to Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, requesting assistance. The king replied that the majority of the Bithynians had been seized by tax farmers and were now in slavery in the Roman provinces. The senate then issued a decree that no citizen of an allied state should be held in slavery in a Roman province, and that the praetors should provide for their liberation. [2]
The effect of Rome's many wars was that freedmen and small farmers became impoverished. After the Punic wars, the rich bought up all the land and employed their newly conquered slaves.
Livy and Polybius also tell of farms suffering physical destruction at the hands of rampaging armies, both Roman and foreign, especially during the Hannibalic War. Scores of veterans returned home only to behold the burnt remnants of their once-productive farms and were forced to sell or abandon their plots when they could afford neither the resources nor the time to restore them.[3]
There's a lot of focus on recent events, but surely I'm not the only one that remembers when the New York Times almost singlehandedly started the Iraq War based on false reporting, right?
The NYT's involvement in the Iraq War was not ineptitude, but the intentional passing on of administration claims not only without criticism, but while also excluding and attacking critical voices as borderline seditious.
It was also editorially consistent with the NYT's positions before and after the fact.
Painting Judith Miller and her coworkers as a hapless accident is defaulting to excusing an outlet you identify with. The NYT was not doing good, badly. The NYT was doing bad, knowingly.
This is a pretty solid example. Edward Snowden dragged the US press into reporting on US Gov's surveillance misdeeds. Before, revelations like those from Mark Klein got a huge yawn from the entirety of the US Press Corps.
The most likely reasons for news orgs refuse to publish damning evidence about US Gov malfeasance are collusion and/or ineptitude. I feel that showing unearned deference to US NatSec state implies the latter.
Most people read ineptitude to mean lack of capacity/skill rather than cynicism. If you knowingly do something that leads to a (generally) unwanted result, that's quite different from wanting to do something else but clumsily failing.
Because US media is legally allowed to lie on air.
Make lying, or knowingly propagating information you know to be wrong illegal - as it is in civilized countries - and the problem goes away. But you'd rather have guns and lies.
Banning lying means allowing the government to determine the truth. Many, if not all, dictatorships ban the truth under the guise of banning the truth.
I think that kind of depends on how it is enforced. If the government is defining an authoritative truth and enforcing it, I think that's definitely the authoritarian route that every American is taught is bad.
If a jury of peers is determining that someone lied, that seems pretty reasonable to me. It can be illegal to lie on purpose without the government determining the truth or enforcing "the truth". The court system would almost certainly require that not only did an entity deliberately lie, but direct harm was caused that exceeds the harm done to freedom of speech.
The US free speech system already divides speech into high value and low value speech. Political opinions in America are considered high value and are probably the most protected speech in the world. Do you think direct lies or manipulations should be considered high value speech? If you have a scale for "value of speech" that starts with illicit pornography on one end and political speech on the other, where would you put: "fire!" in a crowded theater, advertisements/commercial speech, opinions, direct lies, direct manipulation, medical lies (this sugar pill cures cancer), etc. What about labels on food. Should a company be able to list 0 calories on their ice cream? How much should this idea of "speech" be unbend-able, how narrowly or broadly should the word "speech" or "press" be defined?
If we have a class like "food" that requires true nutrition labels to protect the integrity of food, and we have have scheduled medicines that require "active ingredients," to protect the integrity of medicine, why is the idea of news regulation to protect the integrity of news so provoking?
There is no black and white when it comes to this issue. America's free speech almost lost us our democracy to an authoritarian who would have assuredly decreased our human rights and ended the idea of free speech. In philosophical terms, our free speech as it exists right now is very likely a "contradiction". If free speech exits to prevent authoritarian destruction of human rights, but it also allows for an authoritarian to seize power, is the basis of free speech in tact? How do you protect the integrity of the system?
When it comes to America, I think you've hit the nail on the head. Americans are so worried about losing their freedom that they'll sacrifice their freedom in order to keep it, all the while never realizing that they've been free all along.
Defamation only applies when the lie is causing harm to a specific person. It's just a special case of lying. As far as I'm aware, there's no existing law in the US that would penalize lies (from the media or otherwise) in general.
I don't see this as a particularly problematic idea. Assuming a high burden of proof, why shouldn't a deliberate hoax from a news organization be treated as a kind of fraud or "malpractice"?
An alternate implementation would be for the FCC to regulate this and unilaterally issue fines for broadcasting fake news, but that seems ripe for abuse and more against the spirit of 1A.
Instead, I like the idea that anyone (either the state or a private citizen) could sue any news outlet for publication of a hoax; not necessarily claiming any direct or personal harm caused, but just to defend the principle of truth. The process would be as fair as possible — requiring evidence of willful intent to the standards of a court of law, allowing appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, etc. — but in return the consequences would actually have teeth. Offhand, I'd say fines roughly comparable to securities fraud and a journalistic equivalent of disbarment for individuals responsible.
Yeah, and even when the lie is causing harm to a specific person, the U.S. media are mostly immune from libel lawsuits when that person is a public figure like a politician or business owner they're opposed to. Also when they turn that person into a public figure via their campaign of lying, I believe.
Strangely, the seminal 1988 work "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman and Chomsky is not mentioned.
It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to consent of the governed. . . .
Another big miss is not mentioning "The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority" by Martin Gurri first published in 2014 and republished by Stripe Press in 2018.
Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age government, political parties, the media.
The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world.
Has anyone actually got a good news source that reports useful detail? The ship in the Suez is a great example - how hard is it to say what the problem is? Its really hard to find anything. BBC can be good. NY times has a few articles but is increasingly one sided. Al Jazeera can be good for anything not in the middle East.
People in the US have not been exposed to much propaganda from the media before, so tended to trust the news. That's why fake news and biased reporting had such an adverse effect.
Now this is changing, as more people realize that New York Times or Fox News are not much different from Pravda, and that it's not a good idea to blindly trust talking heads on TV.
The problem with this is that there is no alternative. There's a theory that QAnon-types are too shrewd about the motivations of media, leading them to not trust anything that comes off as reasonable.
We interpret world events entirely through the lens of massive, politically-embedded corporations. To avoid that lens, we'd have to visit those places ourselves and investigate, which, to say the absolute least, is not scalable.
The oddest aspect of modern media is that when it comes to foreign coverage, the smaller the outlet, the more likely that they are actually on the ground where they are reporting from. Representatives of large outlets clump together in hotels attending press conferences from government representatives and interviewing designated sources whose names were passed to the journalists by intelligence services. Journalists with no money just travel to countries and go to where the action is happening.
But there are alternatives. Even in the Soviet Union where the government controlled all press and TV, it was possible to find other sources of information: short wave broadcasts, samizdat, word of mouth, etc.
The most important thing is the habit of not trusting any sources, official or not, and ability to recognize propaganda.
That is a false equivalency. NYT is biased but it is biased towards factual information. Fox is not. Pravda is clearly government controlled.
The issue is that if media outlets provide only news their viewership wants to hear then it can go very wrong. But there is a difference. Some people want to hear accurate information while other prefer information that only supports their worldview.
This is different from the issue of trust. If you trust a media outlet because it always gives you news you want to hear then the problem is with you not with media that provides accurate information.
Note also that it is in the interests of those who want to spread misinformation that the public indeed loses its trust in the media. When that happens then anybody's opinion is as good as anybody else's.
Note that it is also in the interests of those who want to spread misinformation that the public trusts the media that they publish, and ascribes its "failures" to incompetence rather than intentional manipulation of public opinion.
Why are these threads on HN always full of alt-right people crawling over themselves to spread cynicism and discord? Yes everything is opinion now... within the opinion shows or opinion articles... Yes Murdoch spent a lot of time sowing this antagonism while using it to justify their claim to be above it somehow... Yes the US media fell in lock-step to justify the Iraq War.
But what no one is talking about on this thread is how this headline is the message. The message that trust is gone. How can we get it back? You can't... or so they want you to believe. In reality there are many forces trying hard to keep you confused because your attention is the commodity that they trade in.
The truth is out there, and it isn't hard to find. People who had RSS readers through the 2000s already went through a kind of grieving process for the flow of information and learned how to cultivate their network. They made a lot of mistakes too, and found themselves in conspiratorial suspicion networks that spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and that's where the majority of people engaging with the news currently are, and the former majority, from the 2000s have moved on from this game.
The eternal September will continue, and all of the current people bewildered by crank memes and "I'm just saying" types will be the ones in the future trying to talk about how all of this has been going on forever when in 5 years the amount of news consumers online makes another broad leap in size and complexity.
We need a resurgence in the study of how we all come to know things, and we need to invest in why we decide to trust sources. This needs to be a public conversation and not just yet another kind of behavior where people can just argue and be like "well, if you believe the Associated Press" seriously screw that kind of thinking. Tell me why you don't believe that specific source and give me something more than just cynicism and doubt, show me something that has the same rigor from whatever you're trying to justify.
"Tell me why you don't believe that specific source"
I don't believe Dan Rather's claims or excuses afterward for "unsubstantiated critical allegations about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973." In the resulting controversy "[a] former vice president of CBS News, Jonathan Klein, dismissed the allegations of bloggers, suggesting that the 'checks and balances' of a professional news organization were superior to those of individuals sitting at their home computers 'in their pajamas'."
The document itself that they used was probably at best a recreation, the content of the document was not invalid and verified by several that such a document did exist at least at one point and time and said exactly what it said.
I think it is a good example of how people hyper-focus on one thing to discredit someone or some thing and throw out the underlying truth because of it.
Edit: what I specifically posted was that you just can't say I don't believe that source... but that's a great example of how "I don't believe that source" usurped the original point for sure.
> The document itself that they used was probably at best a re-creation
> the content of the document was not invalid and verified
> several [verified] that such a document did exist at least at one point and time and said exactly what it said
How did you come to believe these assertions to be true? I'd be inclined to believe them at the level that favoritism is often shown for the offspring of wealthy and politically connected folks. My assumption is that a claim of special privilege is likely true. I don't see any justification for any truth to the document. You claim that "several" verified such a document existed. Who are those people?
When I was very young, Dan Rather took over for Walter Cronkite. Their evening TV program I would watch under strict orders of silence in respect for the seriousness my grandfather gave it. Their credibility came from the prestige of an organization with wondrous information processing and distribution capabilities with a multi-generational reputation for seriousness and veracity.
Dan Rather and the CBS institutional response to the blatant and pointless forgery recklessly published before an election was an "emperor has no clothes" moment. In any possible interpretation their response to the revelation of the forgery destroyed their prestige derived authority. Were they incompetent, partisan, indifferent to facts? Whichever direction they demonstrated deep contempt for their audience and are at least part of the reason some are not likely to trust media organizations by default.
So it boils down to “fake but accurate” for you. Glad to establish your level of interest in evidence or lack thereof. I guess that’s a good posture to maintain one’s trust in media.
HOUSTON, Sept. 14 - The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed that they are fakes.
[...]
Mrs. Knox, who was the secretary for the squadron at Ellington Air Force Base from 1957 to 1979, said she recalled Mr. Bush's case and the criticism of him because his record was so unusual. Mr. Killian had her type memorandums recording the problems, she said, and he kept them in a private file under lock and key. She said she had never voted for Mr. Bush, because she disliked his record in office.
It is pretty easy to maintain trust in media if “fake but [maybe] accurate” is A-ok. Maybe it isn't even "fake but accurate" but "fake but fitting with my preconceptions and interest in self-delusion."
>Tell me why you don't believe that specific source and give me something more than just cynicism and doubt, show me something that has the same rigor from whatever you're trying to justify.
This is completely upside down. Necessary skepticism (not cynicism) should always be your default mindset, not blind trust. If a specific source makes a claim then the burden of proof is on that source to provide evidence for their assertion. It is in many ways analogous to science or mathematics. You should never simply believe an assertion that comes without the underlying data or proof that supports that assertion.
Unfortunately legacy media (most newspapers, all corporate owned networks) have devolved into a toxic soup made up of opinions and evidence-free assertions from unnamed sources (assertions which often turn out later to be false). Well-sourced, well-written, fact-based journalism is practically non-existent. The critical role of the 4th estate is to be a watchdog over the government and other loci of power. Instead the 4th estate has been subsumed by the powerful, and effectively acts as another propaganda arm of the political parties and various powerful corporate interests.
Edited: Re-reading what you posted here, I'm not saying blind trust, I'm saying if you're going to criticize something you just can't say I object, you have to provide as much rigor as the thing you're objecting to, which I think is actually in agreement with what you're saying.
It started with the 24 hour news introduced with cable. In order to fill 24 hours, they started adding more fluff and opinion. Then slowly opinion started getting treated like fact. Even broadcast news favors opinion over fact now[0].
What strikes me how frequently obvious propaganda from China and/or North Korea, clearly meant for internal consumption are reported as “news”. Of course bellicose vitriol is printed against the US for example, but it’s clearly not official or policy in any way. I don’t have references but this has become much more common in recent years, imo.
What are our solutions, though? We're attacking this problem from a million disjointed fronts. The blessing (and peril) of not following a rigid strategy.
Though I think we should have some red lines, some big picture initiatives that do need to be planned at a higher level. The US dropped the ball on this for a while, for example.
That may just be how it looks to people who are not involved in the decisionmaking, except as observers of what has been reported to them by actual decisionmakers.
The consensus reality agreed to between major media outlets may well be an epiphenomenon.
Many obvious and already discussed topics, but my concern is losing Local news, most of the world's news are irrelevant to me as I know titles are sensationalist. But this lack of journalism really can screw up communities. Example: Irvine asphalt plant, no real journalism when is needed for the schools and communities around.
The US media was never trustworthy, i.e. worthy of trust. Pulitzer named prizes after himself but he was a propagandist for the democratic party and pioneered yellow journalism.
It was just easier for them to get away with lies before mass adoption of the Internet allowed anyone to point out their lies.
News orgs should be able to register similar to 501c and reporters similar to any perennial certification system and get subsidization for dedicating some amount of coverage to the public interest, which you leave intentionally nebulous and allow for the public to challenge it through the courts if they feel there's a bad faith actor.
The freedom of the press is sanctified to ensure functioning democracy but there needs to exist reasonably accessible tools to exercise that freedom otherwise it's just flowery language.
It's not meant to cover all the costs but exist as an incentive so that the service is provided.
My comment will be way too late to be read, but I have to say it.
When 4/5 of the major networks use identical wording when reporting on any politically polarizing subject, one cannot help but think they are told what to say.
I know when the NYT lost me: it was the insane boosterism for invading Iraq. I keep track of who was and wasn't rabid for it. Tom Friedman and Ted Koppel stand out. The former still writes, and apparently is still actually read.
To have been so thoroughly wrong would make anyone with any shred of remaining self respect give up writing.
Most people at the time thought that voting to authorize W to invade Iraq was what cost Hillary the nomination, because Barrack voted against.
They did it to themselves. If the nyt was just giving us the straight truth then there wouldn’t have been any opening for Fox News to come in and do their thing. And now we are left with left news and right news and most people only listening to the side that confirms whatever biases they have while at the same time thinking the other side is crazy. Sad:(
If there's some event, you can often find a video of it. When you compare the video to whatever "the media" says, and you quickly notice that they don't match up. Either "the media" is lying or the event is not clear-cut and there are multiple valid interpretations.
This only has to happen once for you to stop trusting "the media".
I keep changing my mind on if we can replace the Media with Social Media. SM is great way for people who are actually there, involved or knowledgeable to report what is going on. On the other hand its an echo chamber amplifying the most batshit crazy conspiracy theories and even the knowledgable people turn out to be the people that just should the loudest or have the best clickbait hooks.
We just need a good filter to keep the good. Like Curated Social Media, like a newspaper/TV should be.
> Media consumption was at record highs in 2020, but trust plummeted.
1. News media viewership and trust in the content are two very distinct things.
2. Referring to news as a "consumption" good already kind of answers the question of why it is not to be trusted.
> But as people consumed more news, they also began to trust the media less
No. Their low trust decreased even more. It was low before the 2020 elections as well.
> A Pew survey suggests 95 per cent of MSNBC's audience are now Democrats while 93 per cent of the Fox News audience are Republicans.
Well, those two sources are highly partisan: MSNBC is known as "MS-DNC" (for the Democratic National Committee) and Fox was created by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, with GOP man Roger Ailes at the helm from early on, to serve the Republican Party and a right-wing/"conservative" agenda from the get-go.
These are not trustworthy bodies _structurally_, even before you examine their specific contents.
What could be said to distinguish the recent few years - other than Covid-19 - is the fact that the established Republican and Democratic party have a sort of a modus operandi with the various large corporate news outlets, so that neither side points out inconsistencies and misconduct of the other beyond a certain point. Trump and many of his followers, however, were not in on this cultural norm, and lashed out against news media (mostly the Democratic-party-supporting outlets). Some of the complaints were justified, many/most weren't, but the point is that people were now hearing a prominent voice suggesting that they question mainstream news.
This may not be the only factor - the prevalence of online news sources in recent years may have also had an effect, and probably some other factors - but this struck me as quite influential.
This is actually good news. It means people are still capable of distinguishing between propaganda and real journalism even when the former disguises as the latter. Which means the market forces will soon do their job. The rapid rise of Substack only confirms that.
RT - Russian Today has the best reporting on America. Some might think their stories have a bias. But their facts are surprisingly accurate. They don't make things up to make America look bad. As some claim. America does it on its own. They just report it.
I can't read that because its paywalled. But I assume its a story how 5G is safe. Maybe. But I'm not sure I would fully buy that either. I've seen 5G towers/antennas on local apartment buildings, directly above people's bedrooms.
‘Journalist’ should be a regulated profession like ‘Doctor’ or ‘Structural engineer’ or ‘Airline pilot’ or ‘Architect’. It seems very likely that poor journalism has incited violence that has caused death and injury. Other proffessions that hold people’s lives in thier hands are regulated. Journalism should be too. Of course anyone can still say whatever they want on the internet just like I can give out homeopathic advice if I want to but they wouldn’t have the badge assuring quality control.
Articles could be signed by the journalist and you could check the probity of the journalist in the same way you can check the safety record of a Pilot with the FAA. Complaints could be tried by a tribunal panel with findings of poor professional conduct published like they are for Doctors and Architects the ultimate sanction being struck off from the profession.
I’m going to off on a tangent here, but what I find amusing is the theater circus the American Congress has been putting on with CEOs of big tech and social media companies.
Suddenly these people care about misinformation? Really? I mean, to an outside observer Fox News and CNN are propaganda machines from two different sides of the spectrum. And they push these politicians political agenda.
But now we have social media where America’s elite can’t just kill a news story, and suddenly that’s so wrong?
I think back to 2003. I was in Asia and flipping between CNN and Fox News as Saddams statue was being toppled in Iraq. These media organizations peddled lies and were an important cog in the machine to reshape the Middle East, which only led to hundreds of thousands of deaths or people becoming refugees.
Social media has its own problems, but it’s quite insane that the same people who peddle lies each and every day have the audacity to act like they’re on some moral pedestal questioning tech CEOs. In fact they’re just mad they can’t control them. I saw this last week and couldn’t help but wonder that America can’t afford healthcare and had homelessness in most metropolitan cities... yet your leaders put on theater.
Congress and tech CEOs are dancing together. Congress agrees not to make any actionable accusations, and tech CEOs agree to make a concerned face and promise to do better if given the legal tools.
The All Sides blog has been an eye opener when it comes to examining biases that permeate virtually all news media (even the tenured giants like NYT), understanding how narratives are engineered, and how public perceptions are shaped. For example they had a recent write up on plug and play journalism (https://www.allsides.com/blog/rise-plug-and-play-journalism) and media bias regarding violence against Asian Americans (https://www.allsides.com/blog/unpacking-media-bias-and-narra...).
I use them too. I love their aggregation and display of news articles across the spectrum.
An interesting tool they built is their “Blindspotter”, which lets you see the bias of who a particular Twitter account follows (their news diet). Interestingly a lot of the left leaning popular media accounts like Trevor Noah’s operate in a complete echo chamber whereas many popular right leaning accounts like Megyn Kelly are actually very balanced. And as you might expect, extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are very biased in their news diet: https://ground.news/blindspotter
It's clear that everything from NPR to Fox News is a propaganda machine - plain and simple.
Anyone who spends any time investigating any story will quickly find the truth.
Take the Capital's mostly peaceful protest on January 6 (sarcasm), where the 7 people who died. Did you know the only two who died violently that day were protestors and many news agencies retracted the death of the police officer "hit with a fire extinguisher"?
Officer Brian Sicknick died the following day and there have been arrests, supposedly he died of a stroke, but to-date no medical report has been released:
Estimates vary, but based on reporting on the ground, it appears there were at least 500,000 people there, so it's not super surprising that there would be quite a few natural deaths.
Further, it has to be the only armed insurrection in history where the insurrectionists primarily left their weapons at home.
Not saying what was done was moral, correct, etc (it wasn't), but after watching my own city burn in the BLM "mostly peaceful protests" I can't help but recognize the unadulterated falsehoods being propagated.
Both are bad, both were riots, and all you have to do is look to see how bad it is. We don't need to make the death count worse or ignore other riots / crimes.
The general point, if the media would focus on reporting as opposed to pandering it would have trust. As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership. However, as soon as people realize they're being sold something, they forever lose that viewer.
I tend to trust journalists a bit more, such as Glenn Greenwald:
> As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership.
This is a red herring - the amount of revenue/profit produced by news media outlets is trivial. Not just nominally as compared to any other industry, but also as compared to the other sources of income that the owners of these outlets have.
The primary reason for the editorial lines that large news outlets take is to push ideas through the electorate, and to generate references that politicians and businesspeople can use to justify their support of certain issues/legislation that the owners of those outlets also support.
Sorry, but a link to a video of two dudes on a podcast saying "for sure hundreds of thousands" is not evidence. Not even a picture of these hundreds of thousands? Absurd.
>Those are two registered reporters who provided much of the coverage Jan 6.
>Edit: registered White House press core
Isn't this just appeal to authority? It's not even a good authority. If he was a crowd counting expert, and was doing a count from a helicopter, I'd be more inclined to believe him. As it stands it's still some guy making a casual estimate from his very limited viewpoint.
Holy crap, that's a bad photoshop job. Look how tiny people's heads are right next to a van, and trees, and lampposts. And they're all staring straight forward...at what? It's just ridiculous that people are peddling obviously faked pictures and then don't trust the "media". So bad.
Oh, this one might be 'shopped but it is not that inconsistent with photos from reputable news agencies (AFP, Getty, AP). The thing is it's still not half a million people. Whoever thinks it was is radically underestimating the volume of half a million people.
>All the hotels were booked for 45 min around and in DC. That is literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Source? Specifically, what's the hotel capacity "45 min around and in DC", and what's the the normal occupancy rate (ie. last year, or in the weeks leading up to the protest)?
The choice of language is also important. Lots of people are using terms like “coup” or “insurrection” causally. The experts meanwhile note why this is not appropriate, with careful comparisons to historical incidents: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/why-this-wasnt-a-coup-c...
Does this matter to anyone? No. After constant amplification of a hyperbolic take on the Capitol riot, the truth seemingly doesn’t matter anymore and instead its derivative stories are the new battleground (for example “should social media increase censorship of moderates and conservatives”). In short, the damage has already been done, seemingly permanently.
We saw bias in the other direction last year, with underreporting of criminal political activity. Like you, my city has experienced a constant stream of riots from BLM activists. In 2020 we literally had daily blockades of highways, autonomous zones resulting in deaths (CHAZ), widespread destruction of businesses, and more. Seemingly all of news media, social media, and even academic research studying BLM-associated rioting inaccurately portrays what actually happened.
It’s scary to see how widespread and unchallenged those prevailing narratives are. I think a lot of people forget that “propaganda” doesn’t have to come just from scary foreign state actors - in practice it is much more likely to come from domestic sources, such as masses of activists blindly repeating falsehoods in unison. The journalism industry is supposed to protect against that but it’s actually part of the same machine. The only way to counter the effect is to read and listen to many different sources with different biases.
I was thinking about Glenn’s piece on this topic as I read, I have more respect for that guy than ever especially after what happened with the Intercept and his Joe Biden article. I subscribed to his Substack immediately and intend to continue to support him directly.
There may be problems with the OP's argument, but your response is fallacious itself and does not address them. Linking to Breitbart isn't a great idea, but doesn't invalidate everything else that was said.
That the news lied about the January 6 event and also lied about the black lives matter protests?
In their own words 50,000 people were at the capital so they said it would be statistically likely for people to die. That is ridiculous otherwise large concerts would have deaths associated with it.
But they don't apply their logic to the BLM protests where estimates of 15 to 26 million people protested [1]. They don't think that of those millions it would be a very small group causing trouble.
Also. Breitbart is a "news" outlet which has a "black crime" section. They are objectively a racist publication and it's laughable to use that as a source when calling out bias in NPR and Fox news.
It's a transparent if they say "oh it was the first article I saw when I searched" they don't think that it's indicative of it being untrustworthy reporting but instead some truth the "MSM" don't want to tell.
Likewise the Nypost is very much a outlet that spins facts to suit their narrative. That isn't a secret.
So OP's argument is just that they prefer when people tell them what they want to hear.
These are reasons why it is extremely sad that the larger and more consumed outlets are collectively deciding to not report on stories, or on each other. If Breitbart is the only major outlet reporting on a factually correct story, that's a failure of the institution of journalism, not a success for Breitbart.
The two protestors that died on the day were reported as the two deaths. And the outlet who reported about the officer death posted a retraction about the police officer being killed by the fire extinguisher.
It's a straight up lie to say that only Breitbart was the only website that reported it.
A mistake was made, it was corrected afterwards.
But people that want to downplay Jan6 have jumped on it and use it as "evidence" of lies.
If you browse social media you will find that many of the users there still believe that Officer Sicknick was murdered by Trump supporters.
Shout the lie, whisper the retraction is SOP for the New York Times and it's a effective strategy. Once the US was committed to occupying Iraq admitting that their WMD justification was a lie doesn't really matter.
> If you browse social media you will find that many of the users there still believe that Officer Sicknick was murdered by Trump supporters.
The felonious mass attack on the Capitol, and acts taken by particular participants in the course of that mass felony, seems nearly certainly to be a but-for cause of his death, so everyone engaging in that mass felony likely murdered him under the felony murder rule; the people who directly assaulted him, whose acts are most direct contributors to his death, probably committed something between voluntary manalaughter and depraved-heart murder even disregarding the felony murder rule.
People have been convicted of murder when the person murdered ied of a heart attack nearly a month later in which the stress of the criminal act as well as preexisting conditions were factors; that the immediate cause of death appears to be a heart attack doesn’t make this not-murder.
Right. The officer just randomly died the next day. People tend to randomly drop dead.
So what about the officers that weren't killed?
Plenty of videos of them being beaten with pipes.
One officer crushed against a door.
What do you think of the officer that was hit.with a stun gun 6 times and lost the tip of their finger? [1]
The police union says that one officer got their eye injured so bad that they lost it [2]
At the end of the day I presume Trump supporters don't care.
What justification to say it was bad do you have for the video where Babbit was shot? The people there were trying to smash a door on which the other side were politicians.
When people were protesting police brutality they were quick to shout #BlueLivesMatter.
But when Trump decided that he could pretend that millions of votes were fake and try and steal an election, his supporters were the "good guys" breaking into the capitol.
All their challenges failed in the courts but curiously they were only challenging results in districts which were majority minority. Not white majority districts which used the same voting methodology.
You say that it's SOP to manufacture consent. But every speech about taking the capital from Trump to Cruz on that day did exactly that in the minds of these people.
They talked about storming the capital. And that's what they did.
The New York Times retracted their Sicknick story because it was false. All current indications are that Sicknick died of a heart attack, perhaps the stress and anxiety he felt that day aggravated his pre-existing issues but calling that murder is an impossible stretch.
> All current indications are that Sicknick died of a heart attack, perhaps the stress and anxiety he felt that day aggravated his pre-existing issues but calling that murder is an impossible stretch.
No, it is well within the established caselaw surrounding ‘homicide by heart attack’, where other factors (such as the felony murder rule) establish that if the death was homicide, it would be murder.
Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? Your good comments are great, but you unfortunately have a habit of crossing into badness regularly.
Going after another user like this is not cool on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. The damage it does outweighs the benefit it brings, even in the case when you have a good underlying point. No more of this please.
dang, as always I appreciate your curation of this place, but there has to be a channel to push back on people who just come here to lie. If we just let it slide that people are going to post here that we can't trust the media because they aren't reporting on the shocking story of all those dead voters in Milwaukee, then we are inevitably accepting the end of civil society.
"People who just come here to lie" is flamewar/battle language. So is "push back on people", in fact. What I've noticed is that when internet commenters use such phrases, they're coming across as far more aggressive than they think they are. Everyone feels like they're just playing defense while others are committing outrages.
That kind of thing just inflames the problem further and take us into deeper circles of hell. You can respectfully provide correct information without doing that. Your arguments will be more effective too.
Perfect example of false equivalency. Setting aside the issue of how the protestors were treated differently by capital police (many of whom supported Trump), one protest was against police brutality, and the other was an attempt to overthrow the result of a free and fair democratic election on the basis of a lie.
If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence?
If it makes you feel better, they are being treated much worse by the prosecutors. Denying bail to trespassing Grandmas. The double standard is amazing. Many BLM rioters have their charges dismissed outright. Some walked free after setting a court house on fire.
I'm not an American, so I can say this without repercussion. But I think its time for a regime change in America. Perhaps its better off being smaller countries.
How much would it change your belief that this is false equivalency if you thought that the protest against police brutality was also based on a lie? There's a good argument to be made that it was.
It was my understanding that the entire point of the protest was to publicly demonstrate their frustrations with the voting process. The hope was that such protest would give Trump the political power to do one of the following:
1. Pressure Congress to delay counting the elector's votes and perform a proper investigation (which they felt hadn't happened)
2. Pressure Congress to count the votes of the "alternate" electors sent by some of the disputed states by the losing party (who instead supported Trump). I'll stress that this was predicated on the idea that, since the election was "stolen", these were the "rightful" electors.
3. Some Q-Anon bullshit I don't care to remember too deeply, just that it was something to do with Trump doing some kind of secret investigation behind the scenes or something
All of the above (including a few I didn't list since I forget the details), were precipitated on the the idea that /someone else/ was going to be fixing this. Many left-wing people don't seem to understand this, but most modern conservatives are not activists at heart, they just roll over and let things happen. To be clear this isn't really a "right-wing" thing but a "conservative" one, they generally don't, at scale, rock the boat.
The truth is the even if there was 100% undeniable evidence that the election was blatantly stolen, conservatives would do absolutely nothing (unless you include complaining), and frankly that's kinda what happened. Looking at it another way: to many conservatives, the election really was stolen from them, and they aren't doing anything about it. A small subset of them loitering around in the capitol was the best they had.
> If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence?
You said it best yourself, why wouldn't you resort to violence? The answers is less exciting: because they are afraid and unmotivated.
>It was my understanding that the entire point of the protest was to publicly demonstrate their frustrations with the voting process.
No, it was explicitly to change the outcome of the election, by changing the way the election was certified. This is why Trump was demanding that Pence attempt to change the election outcome as he was presiding over the certification process. This is why the crowd was chanting "hang Mike pence" when he refused to do so.
This is why Trump told his supporters that they had to be strong, to give the Republicans the "courage" to do "what they had to do".
See, you bought the lie, so to you, stealing the election on the basis of a lie seems legitimate. Stopping counting mail in ballots on election night, once Trump had a lead in tallied ballots based on the on-person voting (a lead he had orchestrated by telling his supporters to vote in person), also probably seems reasonable to you.
The problem with "alternative facts" (such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump) is that when you believe them, all sorts of horrible behavior seems justified, and in fact you believe that your side "isn't going far enough!"
> No, it was explicitly to change the outcome of the election
Exactly what part of my comment refutes this? Ultimately the end result of all outcomes I listed (from the perspective of someone who believes the election was stolen, aka not me), would lead to a change in the outcome of the election.
> See, you bought the lie, so to you, stealing the election on the basis of a lie seems legitimate.
I'm uncertain if you are attacking a hypothetical here or me personally, but I feel it's the latter. Are you implying I "bought into" the lie of Trump's supporters or from Trump himself?
> The problem with "alternative facts" (such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump) is that when you believe them, all sorts of horrible behavior seems justified, and in fact you believe that your side "isn't going far enough!"
You say that but is that necessarily true? What exactly has the party that always claims to be armed and ready to overthrow the government done when faced with a scenario where they believe there was a stolen election? We can agree to disagree on this but I still have trouble wrapping my head around why people are so hysterical about random unarmed people loitering around the capitol building.
It's certainly a far cry from actual insurrections:
To make my position on this more clear, my concern here is not the election itself, its this growing anti free speech movement spurred by fear of these "Alternative Facts". I'll remind that this is in-fact a discussion on the public's trust in the media and I believe apologists such as yourself are "buying into" their lie that this was a bigger deal than it really was. In order to retain their position as guardians of the "truth", they spread fear to achieve their goals like they always do.
The web provides us direct access to the discussions of people from all kinds of backgrounds and political ideology. One can easily get a feel for the "other sides" perspective on nearly any issue. I'm not talking about the issues themselves but the people who believe in them and why. Yet far, far too often, people rely on talking heads with an agenda, to TELL them what and why people believe something, often exaggerating or misrepresenting their intentions to make them out to be some kind of ultimate evil.
I'm not saying the election was stolen and I'm not saying they were right. I'm saying you don't have as complete a picture of this as you are suggesting because you didn't get your "Facts" from a primary source.
Exhibit A:
> such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump
The impetus of all this, for many conservatives in the online discussions I was following (but not participating). Was explicitly that Republican poll watchers were complaining about their level of access to the ballot counters. Their access was restricted due to Covid, and they were disputing this restriction directly on social media.
This detail is far easier to overlook when you are fed all of your positions by journalists spinning a narrative that makes this out to be far less complicated than the reality of the circumstances. Personally I consider "spin" to be functionally the same as lying.
Because they're counting deaths that weren't directly related to anything. There are supposedly seven people who "died in the Jan 6 riot" and yet two were suicides days-to-weeks later, three were heart attacks / strokes from physical assertions (or gas/spray, we aren't sure) and one died from falling / being trampled and one was shot in front of police.
The "7 people died in an armed insurrection" is a lie.
The most accurate statement is:
"one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot",
"one officer died from suspected injuries sustained",
"two people died in march to capital after trump's speech",
"two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital"
"one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters"
^ These are all more accurate, but probably reduces viewership. The statement was "how did the US news media lose their viewers trust". I simply summarized one event which highlights it.
> "one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot"
i.e. one rioter died in the riot.
> "one officer died from suspected injuries sustained",
i.e. one officer died in the riot.
>"two people died in march to capital after trump's speech"
i.e. two people died in the riot
>"two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital"
i.e. two officers died in connection with the riot
> "one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters"
i.e. one rioter died in the riot
>"one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters"
i.e. one rioter died in the riot
I'm very confused as to where the media claimed that "7 people died" as the result of being gunned down in the street. Obviously if 7 people died by being gunned down in the street, the media headline would be "7 PEOPLE GUNNED DOWN BY INSURRECTIONISTS", not "7 PEOPLE DIED IN THE INSURRECTION".
I'm confused as to where the comment you replied to claimed that the media claimed that "7 people died" as a result of being gunned down in the street. Was there an edit?
> There are supposedly seven people who "died in the Jan 6 riot"
And then proceeds to dispute this, by showing that... each of those 7 people died as a result of injuries in the riot, with the sole exception of the suicides.
The question is what standard of "dying in the riots" would satisfy OP, if the literal interpretation (died from injuries sustained in the riot) does not satisfy him. Presumably if they were gunned down in the streets?
Nothing says "objective reporting" like a government-funded news publisher. That's why I always get my news from Russia Today, so I know it's objective.
(Word to the literalnet: I thought we were all adults here and we didn't need a /s. Apparently I was wrong.)
I read the CBC regularly and listen to the radio as well and agree it is not objective and is always pushing a social objective.
If you could remove the inflammatory tone from your posts and just state the facts there might be an interesting discussion to have.
If the CBC is someone’s only source of news it is a handicap to them as there is very little business reporting except from the point of view that some people having some success is bad because others didn’t have any.
At least the old newspapers had a business section that celebrated success and gave one a window in to that world. If all you consume is CBC you aren’t shown a path in to markets but are shown that they exclude you and there is nothing you can do about it. CBC creates victims.
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/obama-officia...