> It’s also not Zuckerberg’s responsibility to solve a broken business model in journalism. (One could argue he has a moral imperative to do so, given his position of power, but that’s not the same thing.)
That line is pretty much all you need to know about the article, despite what the title is claiming.
In my opinion. If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction. [0]
If some guy with a catchy domain name can produce content that goes viral, it doesn't matter how many Pulitzer the NYTimes has.
If anything, as someone who actually cares about facts, the latest changes in my Facebook newsfeed has gotten me to read a lot more publications because my friends are sharing stories from journals I don't normally read.
> In my opinion. If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.
Why is this a problem that needs to be solved though? A big part of being free is being able to choose what you get to care about, being able to choose what you get to read, and being able to have your own opinions.
Remove that, and you're no longer free. Would it be better to not be a free people? I can see the benefits of both sides, but I think freedom is a better long term solution for a multitude of historical reasons.
You get to choose what you care about, but you don't get to chose whether it is right to to care about it. You are free to have whatever opinion you want, but you don't get to choose whether those opinions are correct. This matters practically because the "tribunal of facts" stabilizes collective action: when responsive to it, people can count on certain strategies to solve problems. If you cease to care about what is fact, your strategies will inevitably get out of step with everyone else's. This is only sustainable until the facts force themselves on you.
Constraining your freedom doesn't mean you cease to be free, but it allows others to flourish just as you do. A free society ("a free people", as you say) should allow everyone to flourish as much as they care to (but no less). Collective freedom is not just the sum of individual freedoms. It is the result of cooperation.
> You are free to have whatever opinion you want, but you don't get to choose whether those opinions are correct.
What kind of nonsense is that? My OPINION is that Snowden is a hero, and NOT a traitor, and I absolutely choose to consider that opinion is correct. What are the FACTS about that? He broke the law. But he broke an immoral law? What about the actions he divulged? Were they not unconstitutional? Of course, there are "laws" on the books that make what the CIA/NSA did "legal." So where does all this leave us?
Forums like this keep discussion fake news in the light of "fact," as though fact were enough. It's not. You can go back and forth and back and forth with arguments about Snowden, and get nowhere. It all depends on your bias about how the Constitution should regard your personal liberty and privacy versus the concern for national safety. Lots of people fall on both sides. I use this example because it's a good, clear one, but the same thing is going on in most other stories. There's at least 2 ways of looking at everything. A person's bias and moral compass determines which way is the one they choose to care about. And who are you to tell them that their opinion -- based on the same set of data -- is "wrong?" That's just called having a difference of opinion.
Now that the country is well and truly removed from the halcyon post-war era, we have to figure out how to live with each other, and differences of opinion. That's the real issue here. The same way that social norms had to react and catch up with the emergence of Facebook itself, we have to settle into new norms about living with people who don't think like we do, and that goes for both sides.
It's not going to stop me from thinking that someone is "wrong" when they call Snowden a traitor, but it doesn't mean I need to get in their face about it, or put signs in their yard, or tear down their signs, or picket their business. You see what I'm saying.
Sure, but at the end of it, your opinion that Snowden is a hero or not is either grounded in fact or not. As you point out, "hero" as a concept is sensitive to perspectival factors, but it is possible to make those explicit, no? (likewise, If I feel cold, then that is a fact, despite it being inescapably subjective). The issue is, then, why are we inclined to assert that he is (or not) a hero "simpliciter", when the truth is more complicated than that? We might not be entitled to claim as much as we want.
> A person's bias and moral compass determines which way is the one they choose to care about. And who are you to tell them that their opinion -- based on the same set of data -- is "wrong?" That's just called having a difference of opinion.
Somebody's moral compass is not just an irreducibly subjective element, but it is also normatively sensitive to facts. Our weighting of the data might have biases, but those biases are surely appropriate or not as well? (I don't mean to imply that we can resolve in principle the issue of whether our biases are correct or not, which we might not; see the problem of Deep Disagreement [1])
So yes, I agree with you when you say that the problem is how to live with each other given our limitations to resolve disagreements. However, I think underplaying the role of facts in this needlessly perpetuates them. The sort of disagreements we face is not just of the kind you just gave an example of: people disagree in ways in which they don't even agree on the same set of data. See the case of climate change denial, for example. Those are not simply having a "difference of opinion".
You seem to be conflating facts and opinions. You correctly point out that people disagree on facts, but you don't seem to accept that even when people do agree on facts they can still disagree on opinion. I find this position dangerous, as it rapidly leads to the idea that, if everyone were equally in agreement of the facts, clearly they would all come to the same conclusions based on those facts. You have to draw a line between opinion and facts somewhere: choose a place, draw the line, and then assert your opponent is calling a fact an opinion; but as soon as you start redefining words like "opinion" to be something people don't get to choose the correctness of... well, it isn't just my "opinion" that you are now becoming part of the problem, I would argue it is a "fact" (insofar as words have definitions, which I would often argue against in the small, but definitely can't challenge in the large).
No, that is not what I'm claiming. I'm arguing for a normative claim: when people agree on the facts, they should not disagree on opinion. It is obvious that as a matter of fact, they can disagree / but this 'can' is that of a matter of fact possibility, not one of 'absolute allowance'. People can come to believe their opinions are correct, but that doesn't make them so. We can, as a matter of fact, live with the fact that our opinions are not absolutely allowed, but I don't think that makes our holding those opinions right in a strict sense.
> No, that is not what I'm claiming. I'm arguing for a normative claim: when people agree on the facts, they should not disagree on opinion.
I'm confused, isn't that exactly what the parent's argument is though? You said that's not what you're saying, and then repeat the exact same thing, contradicting yourself.
Personally I disagree with you, if I'm understanding correctly. To me, a huge chunk of the population, you included it would seem, believes that some things are no longer a matter of opinion, that 10 and 20 years ago everyone would have happily agreed are matters of opinion rather than matters of fact.
If I understood him correctly, he's saying that I was claiming that if we agreed on facts (if facts were settled, as it were), we would agree in opinions, which is clearly false as a matter of fact. My claim is that we should agree in opinions, if facts were settled. I think difference between would/should is significant here. I am saying: if facts were settled, and we had a disagreement, at least one of the parties in the disagreement should not hold their opinions (would be wrong). I am not saying: if facts were settled, we could not be in disagreement.
If it was possible in principle to settle the facts, our apparent entitlement to hold certain opinions would be, in a sense, illusory. We can act on the assumption that it is not, for sure, but that doesn't make our entitlement right.
I am not even claiming that facts are settled (that is, that we know what is true as a matter of fact). Since they are not settled, we should be more cautious in our taking of opinions, and of course that goes both ways.
It's a largely philosophical question so not surprising that it's difficult to go about.
At least for me, I am coming from the angle that some things are a matter of fact, and some are a matter of opinion. For example, everyone can be fully informed on economics, but on the matter of "how much should a waiter be paid in New York City", there is no "right" answer.
That might very well be not what the disagreement was about from your perspective though. :/
Yes, I understand that. The issue is that not all disagreements are about what you call "matters of opinion" (and thus faultless [1]). (And even when they are, one can give an approximate answer that filters out a bunch of alternative opinions on the matter: for example, it seems like a waiter in NYC should not be paid less than a certain a amount, let's say, the average it takes for someone in NYC in the person's social strata to pay rent and be able to eat and go to work each day). The issue really comes up when one takes all disagreements to take this form, which is, I think, what this thread was initially about (then the GGP asked why we should care about the facts at all).
Ah, I wasn't aware there was some formal theories on this idea!
Along the same lines (maybe), I've always thought an improved way to approach disagreement (breaking down "matters of opinion) is to break things down into components to better discover discrete points of contention. When you have a unsolvable dispute, you've either reached a matter of opinion, or, the disputed topic has to be broken down further. I wonder if that's the approach the book takes?
I think this approach could be quite successful, assuming two reasonable people involved (a tall order nowadays perhaps).
There are "facts" which support diametrical points of view, and you brought up the perfect example. You can make data support any theory you want, and you'll get published! And stories will be written about your research! And you'll get a raise! No matter WHAT you say about it.
People look to their ideological pedagogues to TELL them what to think about the NEWS COVERAGE of the ARTICLES about the PAPERS about the DATA, regardless of what it says, and it's happening on BOTH sides, with both the Rush Limbaugh's and the Jon Stewart's of the world. Facts may matter to you and me, but they certainly don't to most of the population. By the time it reaches the average person, an 18-month study, with all it's glorious data, assumptions, conditions, and results, is washed out in a single sound byte, because no one has the patience to understa...
Oh, look! A funny cat video! That's hilarious. Let me just send that on to 1,000 of my followers...
You can look at any situation and pick and choose what facts you want to care about, and that process can be extremely biased and misguiding, even though all the facts will be correct. It's not so cut and dry as facts vs. fiction. If things were that simple the problem would be easily solved.
This happens because it's not as simple as facts vs. fiction. Yes, he does get some facts wrong. But the media does pick what facts to report on to always paint him in a bad light. This is why I said it's not so simple.
Questioning our assumptions and commonly held beliefs (even facts!) should be encouraged as an integral part of intellectual discourse.
I'm saddened by the current state of affairs where increasingly polarized factions feel that taking nuanced (rather than absolutist) positions threatens their positions and gives up ground to the opposition.
Questioning established beliefs and fact should absolutely be encouraged. But that questioning must be grounded in a good-faith, logical, reasonable belief that contrary evidence exists. When mountains of evidence are provided that support existing facts, and you are unable to come up with any persuasive evidence or avenues of research to contradict those facts, you are an idiot and have no place influencing or making public policy.
And what about the cases where there isn't a mountain of evidence supporting one side or the other?
At least from my observation, the general stance of most people is 100% complete belief in any partisan theory, and complete rejection of any opposing ideas, regardless of the amount of evidence supporting each.
Look, we're talking about the difference between opinion and fact here. By its very nature, "fact" implies that you have enough evidence already that questioning that fact requires evidence of its own. If I hold some weaker opinion, then sure, it's entirely reasonable to hold an opinion contrary to that without the burden of proof immediately being on you.
I would like to agree with you, but if you get a large enough group that believes that fiction is truth, that can do a lot of harm to the people who actually do believe in facts.
That's where I (personally) draw the line on everything: do literally whatever the hell you want, as long as you aren't harming anyone else in the process. Obviously there are nuances, and sometimes causing some harm in the pursuit of the greater good is acceptable, but I think this principle is a sound starting point.
And that's the thing. You can be a climate-change denier all you want, but once that starts affecting public policy, that's a problem, because, for example, eviscerating the EPA will have far-reaching, long-term, negative effects on life on our planet.
> You can be a climate-change denier all you want, but once that starts affecting public policy, that's a problem, because, for example, eviscerating the EPA will have far-reaching, long-term, negative effects on life on our planet.
This goes both ways though. I'm far from an expert on the subject, but I've read very compelling arguments from people whose livelihood are significantly affected by EPA regulations that have missed the mark, or are enforced unfairly.
A perfectly legitimate case can be made to modify some EPA regulations, but when that reasonable position is characterized as "eviscerating the EPA", well then we have another problem, because then both sides are not in a compromising mood, and that is what we need to accomplish anything.
> A perfectly legitimate case can be made to modify some EPA regulations, but when that reasonable position is characterized as "eviscerating the EPA", well then we have another problem
Walter Kirn made a similar argument[1] which you may enjoy reading in Harper's, but it is a subtle argument. He writes:
> So here’s to the freedom to be led astray, which it would be folly to restrict, lest it foster complacency and tempt the devil. Because that’s what attracts him: foolproof safeguards. Like the one the Clinton campaign erected when, per WikiLeaks, it encouraged the nomination of a laughable, beatable “Pied Piper candidate” named Donald Trump. Or CNN’s belief in its ability to not only report the news but tell us which sources to ignore.
> Assume you’re an imbecile, but, more important, consider that the imbecile across from you may be a genius in disguise. As we go forward, so many of us still secure in our contempt for the vulgar pretender and his sorry partisans, it’s a lesson worth remembering. It might prove helpful, even protective. Plus, it’s true.
It's good that people are free to choose what to read and what to believe, and yet the current state of affairs is cause for concern nonetheless. A coin is "free to choose" whether to come up heads or tails, but if it comes up heads ninety times of a hundred tosses, it's reasonable to assume that the coin has a problem.
Of course, you could always make the argument that nothing is a problem and that this is just the way the world is -- a growing number of people don't care about facts -- and this is what we are now. But all judgements of good vs. bad are ultimately based on a choice of values. Freedom is a value, as is respect for the truth. Believing that while everyone is free, stability requires that only a small portion would choose fiction over fact is a reasonable position.
Because it's uncomfortable to accept. On the one hand, democracy is touted as the perfect system in terms of fairness. But then the intellectuals are not content with letting people choose how the people, their local communities and inspirational leaders have convinced them into voting.
I.e. It becomes about controlling mind-share. Calling something out as "unfair", "biased", "propaganda", or "fake news" is one way of controlling the amount of mind-share it has with people that identify with it. So you can't just "let someone" have their "wrong" opinion, you have to "correct them". That is precisely what political correctness is, it's to "put down" unacceptable opinions with public witch hunts and legal pressure. I have no idea when it went from "leave people alone" with their probably "wrong" opinions, into "omg, you're not allowed to think/say that, you must be sexist/racist/homophobic and we'll make life a living hell for you, and we'll get you fired".
> On the one hand, democracy is touted as the perfect system in terms of fairness.
I don't disagree with your broader point, but I've never ever seen anyone tout democracy as "the perfect system in terms of fairness". Even back when it was the new hotness, writers on it (de Tocqueville et al) were very well aware of its flaws and failure modes.
> If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.
If you take a closer look, the established media is not so innocent about that. Most of them find it perfectly ok to lie for money every few minutes (TV ads)...
"Most of them find it perfectly ok to lie for money every few minutes (TV ads)..."
Agreed, but if advertising first purpose was to tell verifiable facts it would have been called information.
The problem here is people believing everything is thrown at them, especially if done by some popular figure.
>it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.
Sometimes is not that simple. A lot of this is related to personal biases and just the way the brain works. Ofcourse people can try to train theirselves into being more skeptic but in a world in which every day you are bombarded with information is pretty hard to find the time and motivation to do so.
Personal bias and brain tricks contributions are really blown out of proportions here. Most of the stuff that happens in the fact vs fiction is unfortunately of this aspect:
I feel like what you're saying is: humans have inherent flaws.
Even if it were the case that Mark Zuckerburg was exploiting those flaws for personal benefit, I find it hard to blame him - we live in and support a society that encourages that behavior. If exploiting human flaws for profit is an undesired outcome for human organizations, we should work to stop encouraging that behavior.
I will however provide a counter point to my own argument, which is that we should name and shame those who abuse human nature at society's expense for their own benefit. Otherwise we end up with a society full of people who are actively harming society.
Honestly I don't know what to think. I just wanted to provide both of these views. I'm curious what the response to either views is.
There are media codes of conduct. There are anti-discrimination laws. There are departments set up for supervising ethics. There are even people appointed specifically to monitor and stop prejudice.
You would assume this would stop lying, manipulating, bullying and prejudice by the media but it does not. As an example, Hillary Clinton's exit speech was particularly sexist and _nobody_ in the media took her to task,
"And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable, and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams."
https://www.google.com.au/amp/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.3843541
It's just one of many examples of prejudice and injustice that are pushed aggressively by almost every media outlet. When did we ever exclude kids based on their gender so blatantly and with such pride? How far we've regressed.
A school near me is doing the same thing (Mount Carmel College). A co-ed school that shows almost only girls in their pictures/website/billboards, yet, there is not a single complaint from anyone. There is so much discrimination from so many sources that you'd have to be blind not to notice it. It's despicable to declare a gender war on little boys, yet, I see no one protesting, especially ideologies that talk the most about prejudice.
Any time people point out these prejudices in public, you hear some glib comments about 50 years ago. You pull out the newspapers from 50 years ago to illustrate revisionist history and it is suddenly 100 years ago. This problem is systemic.
The truth is that humanity seems to need a bogey man. Today, that's likely the "all Muslims are terrorists" and "any white male is privileged (irrespective of age)", leading to some extreme bullying.
The only way for extremism to stop is to meet it head on, yet, not one "reputable" media outlet is willing to do so. Some say Breitbart is good, but, I found it sexist to the same degree that Ars Technica, The Verge, New York Times, etc are, just targeting the opposite gender. However, Breitbart is in the overwhelming minority (ie. sexist favouring males is the ~1% of media today).
What we need is decent people willing to tackle the prejudice. For some reason, the protests of decent people remain almost unheard. Whether it's domestic violence by women, overwhelming predominance of male suicide, predominance of male cancer, overwhelming predominance of male homelessness, overwhelming predominance of male incarceration, extreme prejudice against boys in school education or any other male oriented topic, the media manipulates, lies, misrepresents and bullies. To give a small example, how many times have you heard prostate cancer is a joke and almost nobody dies from it? Compare the stats yourself: MORE incidents than breast cancer and MORE deaths, despite the constant snipes by many media outlets to the contrary.
https://prostate-cancer.canceraustralia.gov.au/statisticshttps://canceraustralia.gov.au/affected-cancer/cancer-types/...
Society desperately needs people to protest vigorously. Hold Ars Technica, The Verge, Vox, Vulture, Daily Beast, New York Times, BBC, News Corp, etc accountable. Throw the book at the lot of them! Huge fines will fund more cases against other media outlets.
What is destroying journalism is also relying too much on news sources like AP, Reuters, etc. Let's call it copy&paste news articles. They should do their homework and investigate on their own, that's their job description after all. We don't need these cheap media that just reprint propaganda-style sponsored stories.
I mean sometimes reporters do a fantastic job and sometimes in the rush to get the story while it's hot there are legitimately bad stories run as God's given truth.
I do think the buzzwords need to die. Everyone calls everything they don't agree with fake news these days.
Well, yes and no. Does the media sometimes present propaganda and fake news as fact? Sure. Not always, but sure, it happens. Calling out specific media outlets when they do this is absolutely necessary. Of course, labeling media as fake news simply because the facts they report disagree with your ideology is dishonest and reprehensible.
Also syndication is probably not as important online when you could just link to the article source.
Also negative "news" sells better. Humans just respond to fear and hatred. It is just so much easier to fear and to hate. I'll admit to it. I feel suspicious when I see something positive in the news: is this a sponsored post?
> it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.
I know Facebook is a US-based product and everything, but I'm really getting sick and tired of products that are used all over the world getting adjusted just because they are a problem now in the US.
First we had "fake news" (which used to be called just propaganda), which we have dealt with long before Internet was even a big thing in our region[0]. Now this.
Media survives just fine here. Most people still don't use adblockers and most people are ready to donate for good quality journalism (in fact, there's a Serbian-based investigative reporting center that's currently making an excellent progress in moving away from grants to one-time donations by their readers, and there are other digital-only media sources across Europe which are even breaking records living off of subscriptions by being transparent and talkative to their audience[1]). But nope, instead of doing their own thing, they're going to have to adjust because Facebook wants to promote more "local" things to encourage "civil engagement" because a "research suggests it" (keep in mind there's not a single mention of what that research might actually be, neither in the article itself, nor in the manifesto).
You have separate sections in every newspaper what so ever, and unlike in Facebook's very specific, and very tailored to every individual bubbles, at least you skim through the headlines from other sections while you're trying to locate something you will actually read. That alone makes you more informed about what is going on more than Facebook's bubbles ever will.
Well you know sometimes many little guys can join together and get the/some power cause they can be sufficiently damaging/deathly to the big guy. Democracy, multipolar world...
My understanding is that "fake news" refers to stories fabricated, often by small-time entrepreneurs, to make money off of Internet ads and typically spread through social media. Propaganda, on the other hand, is biased or fabricated stories promulgated to forward a political agenda, especially by a government or other entity in a position of power. However, the term "fake news" has rapidly been politicized, and a lot of people, especially on the right, have used it to refer simply to biased news and false reports (typically with the implication of insufficient checking). So three really different motives here:
1. Fake news makers are exclusively after money.
2. Propagandists are exclusively after a political end.
3. Journalists are mostly after the truth, even if they are very biased and far from immune from the corrupting influence of money and political ends.
>"and a lot of people, especially on the right, have used it to refer simply to biased news and false reports (typically with the implication of insufficient checking)."
I read a lot of what most would consider "alt-right" news. They've repossessed that term and now use it to refer to really biased reporting on the part of the "mainstream media". The accusation is usually very biased reporting, blatantly favoring left-leaning ideas and politicians, as well as not reporting on issues that contradict the mainstream narrative.
Sometimes they go too-far with conspiracy-theory-level stuff, I'll give them that. But for the most part, they're spot on when it comes to reporting on the mainstream media's blatant left-leaning bias and selective reporting. When I read them, it sounds like a "normal" person, one that doesn't jump through hoops to justify their points. The points are just there.
I don't think this is it. The very concept of fake news is, fundamentally, propaganda.
The mainstream media's privileged position of controlling the narrative is under threat, both from within the media (e.g. Breitbart) and without (random guys on the internet creating narratives).
The idea of "fake news" is propaganda, created in order to push Facebook/Twitter/etc into shutting down the media and random guys that are threatening the mainstream media. It'll probably work too.
Incidentally, insofar as "fake news" is real, it is highly unlikely to have any major effect. ...for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single
fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads.https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
Yes, news outlets that use terms like 'fake news' to shut down competitors should be treated with suspicion. The term went mainstream over a period of a few weeks due to it being pushed relentlessly by the media. It has the hallmarks of propaganda.
What do you call information that is produced to resemble reputable news sources but contains very little true information?
Is there any support for the claim that it was reported, and a term was coined for it, in order to limit competition?
Why should we think it's that vs genuine reporting on a trend where people profit from producing this material AND a complimentary trend for Americans (trending toward conservative views) to believe anything that fits their preferred narrative without question?
I think this is absolutely different from propaganda because it's done first and foremost from a profit motive. It did not generally (as far as we actually know) come from powerful groups who want to control a political narrative. [0] I'm sure that has already started to change- Russia and other countries will certainly use this attack vector. The material they produce would be fake news used as propaganda.
> What do you call information that is produced to resemble reputable news sources but contains very little true information?
The status quo.
That's why I can't watch any of the national news stations. Foreign broadcasters are less likely to pump things up, and some local news stations are passable, but the big boys have been transparently biased and driven by clickbait, since before clickbait was a thing.
> Incidentally, insofar as "fake news" is real, it is highly unlikely to have any major effect
I think this study is too limited. The problem is not that a single article changes minds. It's a well-poisoning problem. Stories about the Clintons assassinating their opponents have been floating around right-wing media for decades.
When I was growing up, I heard an adult talk about the time their friend went to see the Clintons land at an airport. When the friend asked Hillary to end abortion because it was killing babies, Hillary supposedly replied "We will kill your babies."
Nonsense circulated for decades has a toxic effect on political discussion. "Fake news" is just the latest nonsense fad to join Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and their kind.
I guess you never argued with Trumpers on the Internet at election time. The Fake news were widely distributed and very frustrating to argue against! The template is practically a hack of human laziness and selective bias. Example:
This archive of a disreputable website has an article that claims Clinton bribed prominent Republicans (which were at that time Trumps opponents in the primary). It even links Wikileaks and gives an id for the email. Only ... the ID simply doesn't exist. It even made it into an Interview of Hannity with Assange:
> Hannity: Let me ask you about Wikileaks. I think this could shake up the political world. Is it true that an email sent in July of this year that you have, that describes how funds could be diverted from the Clinton campaign to the super PACs of Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and John Kasick. Specifically document number 1078645.
Assange: I don't have that in front of me. We have published nearly 100,000 documents so. I mean I have seen references to things like that. I don't recall seeing an 'eyes only' phrase.
Assange didn't recall it because there is no email. The whole story was made up as clickbait for conservatives. But even Assange guards his statement, because it is normal that one doesn't recall everything, right?
Another example was a story about Supreme Court justice Ginsberg. Another clickbait website made up a quote of her and linked as proof an interview of Ginsburg in the NYTimes. And the NYT is reputable, right? Only the quote is fictional it never was in the NYT article. In a time were many people just read the headline and skim the rest (if at all) and sharing via social media is one click away, this is disappointingly effective.
All the Trump supporters I know seem far more knowledgeable than the Trump opponents, and the opponents have all sorts of silly beliefs of their own.
(This is almost certainly due to selection bias - Trump hatred is a socially required belief in my circles, while Trump support is a very unusual position adopted only after careful thought and kept carefully hidden.)
There are many silly beliefs that Trump opponents have picked up from the mainstream media. For instance, compare beliefs about Trump-inspired crime to reality - most are hoaxes perpetrated by Trump opponents, and the most serious incidents (e.g. the kidnapping/torture of a mental retard) were committed by Trump opponents.
Or beliefs that Bannon and Trump are somehow antisemitic Nazis. Never mind that Trump was mentored by (((Roy Cohn))) and that the key people in his organization are (((Allen Weisenberg))), (((Michael Cohen))) and (((Jason Greenblatt))). Somehow (((Jared Kushner))) and (((Ivanka Trump))) are also involved. Not to mention that Bannon's rise to power came from working with (((Andrew Breitbart))), and he's secretly communicating with (((Curtis Yarvin))). [1]
Strangely, these crazy beliefs are never cited when discussing fake news. They just aren't part of the narrative. That's why I characterize this "fake news" push as propaganda - it's only about keeping non-mainstream sources out of the narrative.
[1] I'm only using the alt-right ((())) to emphasize what actual anti-semitic people would think of Trump.
> the opponents have all sorts of silly beliefs of their own.
Chiefly that owners have the cattle's best interests in mind and will tell them the truth.
(Actually, they mostly do. The advertisers are mainly very selective about the facts they publish. And the way they wrap them up for delivery. "Never give a sucker an even break" as one famous advertiser candidly put it.)
No, fake news is a real and distinct phenomena from propaganda.
Propaganda: The NYT, at the behest of the government, publishing reports of Iraq possessing WMD's in order to lay the groundwork for an illegal invasion and occupation.
Fake News: A fabricated story about a made up individual finding boxes of ballots marked for Clinton, complete with a photo pulled from Google. The story then is pushed on social media sites by sockpuppets.
In other words there's a difference between Judith Miller and Stephen Glass.
Of all the significant distinctions, the most important one is that fake news is driven by the current state of the internet: ad revenue based click grabbing, pushing of content on social media (sometimes through sockpuppets), an elevated level of anonymity, etc.
The original use applied largely to VNR and AVR (video and audio news releases) created by government or corporate entities, largely as what we'd consider to be propaganda or public relations efforts.
With the rise of weaponised viral clickbait and advertising-driven Internet competition over attention, we've seen an increase in algorithmic content created solely for the purpose of driving up advertising revenues.
Even that isn't an entirely new phenomenon. The rise of "penny presses" -- daily common-circulation newspapers based on advertising, and selling for a penny, as opposed to the "professional" six-cent press, gave rise to the New York Sun's Great Moon Hoax of 1835, with the goal of driving up circulation numbers:
I think you had to be pretty dialed-in to daily news to get the "fake news" origin story, and then how it turned to be something else.
In the beginning there were articles and there was fact-checking. Specific articles that failed checks (failed QA) were fake. A rush of those in 2016 were found to be for-clicks and for-profit.
One might have really hoped that more checking (better QA) would come out of that, but perversely the opposite happened. "Fake news" became a blanket condemnation not just for unchecked stories, but often unread ones. "The headline says that? Fake news!"
This is kind of a critical juncture, but I worry that it is becoming a wrong turn.
It doesn't matter how many Pulitzers the NYT has if they print Judith Miller garbage. The NYT are the paragons of wishful news. I unsubscribed from them early during this last election because they were selling bullshit. And boy! Was that a good decision or what!
How many of the people who hold up the NYT as some ideal actually subscribe? I'll be surprised if it's anything but a tiny number. Journalism is dying because journalists think they should write about what they want to be true. And the NYT is leading that charge.
I'll tell you something, though. They had a couple of very good articles that really stood out. And those also had exceptional prose.
>it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.
I believe it's less to do with not caring to not understanding the system. Coming from a world where newspapers ensured to report only correct info and corrected incase of error. People expect that the internet is also the same. Many are surprised to know that Wikipedia articles are peer submitted and reviewed. Many assumed its from a company like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Just an online version, instead of the heavy books.
Whenever I tune in to CNN to catch the latest news, all I see are "analysis" shows where various people sit around and argue or otherwise editorialize.
> In my opinion. If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.
Too bad we don't know which half and which news is fiction.
> If some guy with a catchy domain name can produce content that goes viral, it doesn't matter how many Pulitzer the NYTimes has.
The NYTimes can have all the awards in the world if they publish articles that you can demonstrate beyond doubt to be bullshit or dishonesty.
> If anything, as someone who actually cares about facts, the latest changes in my Facebook newsfeed has gotten me to read a lot more publications because my friends are sharing stories from journals I don't normally read.
You should always look at what the other side has to offer, I talk to people who have polar opposite beliefs to mine on a regular basis, keeps me informed and makes me re-evaluate my own position.
> The NYTimes can have all the awards in the world if they publish articles that you can demonstrate beyond doubt to be bullshit or dishonesty.
What articles did you have in mind? The NYT's reporting on WMDs in Iraq is often raised as an example of 'fake news,' but I think the failure of the fact-checking process and subsequent investigation and apology [1] is to the NYT's credit. Investigative journalists have to make judgment calls about their sources and sometimes they get it wrong, but I've never seen an NYT article 'that you can demonstrate beyond doubt to be dishonesty.' Factual errors and misleading language do slip in regularly, resulting in frank corrections or the publication of dissenting views. That's more than you can say for most 'alternative' news sources.
"it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction."
I posit that this number is close to 95% worldwide.
People are all the same - impulsive and vulnerable. I've spoken to some perfectly normal immigrants from various parts of the world and have heard some properly batshit insane stuff - any other time we would have assigned them a round-the-clock nurse.
And guess what - it makes zero difference to their life what they believe.
Beliefs need to collide with reality (through decisions, actions etc).
> If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.
If you simply consider your world to be the other half of the country (that does care about correct news), then there is not much of a problem. If, however, you need to please shareholders, then, yes, you have a problem.
> If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.
(You sure stirred it up with this one.)
But it's not really true, is it? The better way to describe the situation would be to say that the ~35% at BOTH ends of the political spectrum only wants to hear and read "news" that confirms their biases. And "journalism," as a business, has given them that.
What I'm saying is that we don't have a "facts" OR a "news" problem. We have an ideological division/superiority problem, and I don't know if anything can fix that.
Well, short of splitting the country into 3 parts: the 2 coasts, and flyover country, and letting them all go hard towards their biases, and checking back in on the results in about 50 years, and see which experiment worked better.
A frustrating part of political discourse is that most people don't bother to put in the time and energy to understand the things they talk about, largely because it does matter enough to them to actually be right.
As someone "on the right", I think you hit the nail on the head. At least for me, I have no problem at all admitting there are tons of faults among people on my side of the spectrum, seeing someone point out the same for the left is extremely rare.
Out of curiosity, which "side" are you on predominantly?
Agree with your post but you only highlighted half the problem.
More of the population is turning to alternative news sources because their trust of source like the NYTimes, WAPO and CNN has been violated. I'm pretty sure you weren't holding the Times up as some bastion of truth but to deny their blatant bias in reporting is folly. Withholding facts, failing to pursue facts or making the decision only to pursue facts you agree with politically is as bad as just making shit up.
The blueprint that's destroying journalism is the chase of profits over the chase of ALL truth.
Now, I do agree that large segments of the electorate are becoming less able to parse information effectively but I think there's still enough folks left that would gladly pay straight up subscription fees if they thought they could trust the information they were paying for.
I always get a chuckle when people mention the number of Pulitzers the NY Times has, Pulitzer himself was a master provocateur and spreader of yellow journalism, aka Fake News
The author doesn't realize that whatever Mark Zuckerberg does next, it's likely to fail. But Facebook will learn far more for trying than the news community will learn from sticking to the same old same old.
News will get reinvented, and the optimist in me hopes it will be a much better product than it is today. But that process will be hard to predict and the winners will be among the folks who take risks and try new approaches.
Even a list of facts can include bias, by which facts it includes and which it omits. There exists no unbiased source of news. Better to have information, along with documentation of any potential sources of bias, evaluate that for yourself with the caveats included, and give it appropriately discounted weight.
I hear you. I want more facts, less opinion, and a good list of verifiable sources out of my news. Suffice it to say, there's precious little of that to be found anywhere.
We are working on this problem at Newslines. We collect news into timelines, comprised of just-the-fact summaries. We are looking for more contributors to bring us up to date with our Donald Trump newsline http://newslines.org/donald-trump/
It is important to make a distinction between what has been reported, and what is true. Nothing is added to our site unless it is sourced from a credible source and all news from even credible sources that has anonymous sources is tagged as "Rumor/Unsourced". So let's say a credible source reports, using unnamed sources, that the national guard is going to be deployed to round up illegal immigrants. So we would write that as "According to the AP, the national guard is going to be deployed to round up illegal immigrants" and tag that as "Rumor/unsourced". Then when the next report comes out we say "The White house denies the report". And if another report came out about that issue we could tag them, and link them together as being the same issue. You would then be able to follow the timeline of events as they were reported. Contrast this to a newspaper which will massage the information you read each day, and to Wikipedia, which will remove the earlier reports to give you the truth. Problem is the general reader won't know what is kept in and what has been left out.
As for pushing a narrative, that is a form of bias that can be eliminated in the main by extracting the facts from articles. Consider two articles, one in the New York Times ("Trump's Florida rally shows he is unfit to lead" and in Breitbart ("Trump's Florida rally show's he is the best person to lead our country"). While both of these are highly partisan, the fact remains the same: Trump has a rally in Florida.
That said, our tools aren't perfect, but we can build on them.
I applaud the effort but reckoning "credible" seems like a tough proposition. How and by whom is the list of "credible" sources curated.
I wonder if there's some way to come up with content quality metrics for news based on pure reporting of as many of the facts available. Maybe something similar to the stack exchange type system.
You are right. It is very tricky to determine which sources are credible. The National Enquirer broke the John Edwards love child story, despite not being a credible source. And on the other hand we see credible news sources distort the truth to fit the narrative every day. However, the first stage is create systems that let us add news events and reporting in an objective form in which it can be assessed (we have done this already), and then to work on systems that allow us to assess their validity (work in progress). I think something like stack exchange can work, and it will be interesting to experiment to see what works.
I think this is preferable. If everyone was more upfront with their bias, then it becomes incumbent on the reader to get a complete view. Sure, plenty of people would just read what they want, but that's ALREADY happening. At least there would be less denial about it.
The death throes of this loathesome industry are glorious to behold. The idea that this is fact vs viction, real vs fake news, etc. shows how much these people have lost the plot.
Haven't you noticed how the word "facebook" replaced "the internet/online" in many contexts ? It was a part of marketing facebook to the masses.
Then again the decline of journalism is not a matter of internet as much than a matter of selling out to advertisers and being bought by rich individuals or corporations. With internet access becoming popular it provided an alternative to the traditional media to get news and information.
> a matter of selling out to advertisers and being bought by rich individuals or corporations.
Can you expand on that? I see the decline in circulation and eroding of their ad and classified income as the principal culprit. I haven't seen any prominent examples of newspapers where the rich individuals or corporations have caused a decline. The Washington Post was thriving during the 40 years that Buffett had an ownership stake.
I think Craigslist is a US problem. Internationally I think the traditional news approach has had many different challenges. Classified advertising also has had different challenges around the world, such as dedicated publications.
News organisations are finding that if your product has too little value that you have to support it with advertising instead of selling it directly then your business will fail as soon as someone figures out a better way of delivering adverts.
In the future I suspect Facebook and Google will have the exact same problem.
I think the real threat to journalism is the fact that news outlets have decided to "cater" to a certain section of the population. I don't think Facebook started or is to blame for the demise of journalism, but outlets like Fox show deep systemic problems in the world of journalism.
Crowd-sourcing news quality does not work. There's no ground truth.
Google News is suffering from this. I noted on Wikipedia today, in a discussion of reliable sources, that I had searched for info about a Wikipedia topic with Google news search, with terrible results. The top three results were Algemeiner (Jewish), Breitbart News (alt-right), and Mondoweiss ("progressive and anti-Zionist"). This is pathetic.
Those three are probably more reliably accurate than Atlantic, NYTimes, WaPo and the other old properties that have distinguished themselves only with lies and credulity in this century.
Breitbart is now the third most read news source in America, so things are looking up.
I assume they were ranked by views or CTR, which is perfectly normal given the current circumstances.
How else can Google News rank them? Follow some news media objectivity ranking on imgur? Hire tons of unbiased people to verify the integrity of all news before adding them into the index?
I'm not playing devil's advocate here but given an uninformed electorate, some form of authoritative truth by either a independent watchdog or government agency is probably a better idea than letting private companies run the media.
There was an effort at Google last year to measure site objectivity. I met the woman running it when she gave a talk in EE380 at Stanford. They have a a database of hard facts, and they're trying to check sites to see if they contradict them. This reduces the site's credibility metric. This was aimed more at medical promotion than politics. The technology was still R&D back then, not production.
>Crowd-sourcing news quality does not work. There's no ground truth.
This is not exactly true. At my site, newslines, we crowdsource news by collecting and summarizing only the factual parts of each story. While Google News aggregates articles, we select the factual information from them. In effect we put the factual data from long-form news articles into a database. Even if you have highly partisan sources you can still extract factual information. A good example of this is our newsline for Emma Sulkowicz, the so-called "Mattress girl" [1]. In her case, the news sources are extremely partisan, but even so we can still extract factual information to create an unbiased view of the news. We belive our solution is far better than Wikipedia for both handling of news events, and the elimination of bias.
We are currently looking for contributors for other lines, particularity Donald Trump.
Google is scary bad at providing accurate information and I think it's a big problem, skewing people's view of the world. Just search anything related to nutrition, supplements, medicine, etc. and you'll see that most of the top results are from crank blogs, "alternative medicine" websites, or otherwise sources with no basis in fact. And if you don't know much about how culture happens on the Internet, you might be satisfied just to click on the first few and accept that information as truth. Scary stuff.
Most people in this country are idiots, and celebrate idiocy. People in Asia/Europe still read newspapers and news is still news, not sensationalist media garbage like here with barely any mention of the rest of the world.
Distributing information in its written form used to be the domain of the Church. Printing press has democratized that, for a while. Eventually the diversity of information was roped in to serve the agenda of the new, capitalist elites. While individual journalists often thrive to deliver the best work, the editors inevitably arrange things to serve the interests of particular business groups, and those who don't toe the line fall into obscurity for lack of funds.
Now, the Internet has produced a new information diversity, which is bubbling and foaming as we speak. That too will get roped in. The viral effect will become the domain of well-funded teams, not of lone geniuses. As the art is perfected it will become more capital-intensive, we will see consolidation in the business. Eventually the bulk of it will be divided between few large players, well-aligned with other businesses, and the whole thing will become orderly and predictable once again. Maybe.
The difference between the printing press and the internet is that you and me could make a whole new Internet happen with just two $70 handheld computing devices.
The printing press needed a newsroom with typists and ad salesmen and a team of people wrestling with an ink belching mechanical beast. The minimum corporate interest required to feed such a beast is substantially more than the Internet business, the physical plant of which costs pennies a day in overhead to maintain (i.e. your cell phone and a few gigs of bandwidth.)
Money still buys you a lot of upgrades to your $70 internet. Ad campaigns, talented copy writers, data scientist, psychologists, computing resources for data analysis, large training datasets, cross-channel promotion (e.g. internet + billboards), astroturfers, community management, marketing, focus groups.
The amateur hour will come to an end. Especially now that the presidential election campaign has shown us how it's done.
It means that all the viral news and memes stuff so far have been the work of amateurs. Now that the effectiveness of this approach was proven, well-funded professional teams will move in and drive out the amateurs. Same as it happened with newspapers.
It seems you are afraid, but you shouldn't be. The professionals are funded by big businesses, they aren't looking to take your life, they want you buy their products, and they want you to be happy while doing it.
It's really the same picture we've had for the last few decades, only the technology is a bit different. If you weren't upset back then, there is no reason to be upset now.
Big business needs both a healthy consumer class and a poverty/continuously violated class to act as a "this is what happens if you are a bad consumer/employee" example to scare people into various kinds of compliance, and maximize profit/minimize wages.
It's comforting if you believe you can keep yourself and your friends out of that second category.
I keep making new friends in low places so that's not the case for me.
This is an odd editorial. The author stretches to explain how Zuck's Manifesto released this week could destroy journalism. But then she provides evidence that journalism is for all intents and purposes already dead. She cites a (possibly inflated) prime time news audience size of ~3 million people, and 1.5 million digital subscribers for the NYT...So less than 1% of America are using these previously major sources of news. How did that happen guys?
I'm the last person you will find defending Zuck or Facebook (which I do not use and have deleted other apps as facebook buys them). But this Atlantic article felt like a desperate plea for charity of some sort, and preferably cash since the Chan-Zuckerberg Empire has so much. This is yet another editorial complaining about themselves but the author does not offer an alternative idea for journalism to avoid its own demise. Why and how would she? Journalists don't seem to understand business at all and are scared to try.
In just 3 months since the election, journalists and many people in this country seem to have forgotten how biased, incompetent, clueless, fake and corrupt even the "real" news organizations are today. There was no mea culpa in the article for these issues, just a misguided complaint. The pre-internet old days were not so perfect either if anyone reads history...can anyone explain why newspapers, these supposed bastions of objectivity for communities, even endorse political candidates? Is that a newspapers job?
This whole situation reminds me of another time there was a Harvard guy's looong manifesto that no one had the patience to read in full and it was on a very similar topic...the news industry was running around like a chicken with its head cut off back then too [1].
I agree: journalism has let it's industry fall in to disrepute . It's no surprise that people are so easily convinced to move to new models of information delivery when you look at the current state of news organisations.
I'm surprised the left has become so sympathetic to the corporate media all of a sudden. These people colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump. This was only a year ago.
What is your evidence that they colluded? I agree that the media in general (at all levels, not just the corporate media) disastrously failed us during the election. But I don't think anyone has proven that they "colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity," right?
I'm not sure if I can link to wikileaks here but some of the emails showed collusion with the DNC in general and with the Clinton campaign in particular during the primaries. For an example, see the emails about the debate question leaked to the Clinton campaign for the primary debate in Flint, MI (although this was by someone, I think, hired by CNN who was later hired to head the DNC).
Those very narrow allegations about one incident within the DNC are not the same as the entire corporate media colluding in Clinton's favor. I'm not happy about what the DNC did but it's not clear that swayed the outcome from an inevitable Bernie victory or that the DNC was part of a conspiracy with the media.
The emails also showed that both the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC reached out to highly-placed journalists (Ezra Klein, some others) to prop up Trump, Carson and Cruz as GOP candidates because there was a consensus that they would be "pushovers." Donald Trump received an exorbitant amount of media coverage for free throughout the campaign cycle.
I would love to see a source. I can't seem to find anything that reflects this. Campaigns reach out to journalists constantly, every day, to try and influence their thinking. That's called discourse, and I'd hate to imagine what campaigns would be like if reporters couldn't talk to campaign staff. All I can find doing a quick search about Klein is that he was seen as someone interested in holding other journalists accountable, which means... nothing? Of course people in campaigns are going to be working on identifying who to speak with about various subjects based on who they think might agree with them. Klein is the extremely well respected founder of vox.com and certainly did not "prop up Trump, Carson and Cruz" to my knowledge. If anything, vox.com was substantially less Trump-obsessed and criticized the broader media coverage of Trump. If there were a credible source about a media conspiracy to elect Hillary Clinton I'd be very grateful to see it. But I haven't seen it yet.
If you've performed investigatory work before, you'd know that having a specific incident memorialized in text is often only the visible iceberg of non-compliance.
Most agents that are skirting the rules have some notion that they shouldn't be overtly recording their misdeeds. In other words, where there's smoke, there's often fire.
The 'one incident' wasn't just smoke, though. It was a full blown conflict-of-interest fire in and of itself.
Sure—and I'm not excusing Brazile or the DNC. But that wasn't the parent's point. Longtime establishment Democrat operatives acting on behalf of a longtime establishment Democrat against a non-Democrat who was constantly talking about his own disconnection from the Democratic establishment is something that I think is bad for the party and unethical. I don't really like the Democratic establishment very much. Having parties full of politicians operate things like debates from a supposedly neutral vantage is silly and shouldn't happen.
What does that have to do with a corporate media conspiracy to elect Hillary Clinton over the obvious victor Bernie Sanders?
I believe your points were already well addressed, but lets take another stab at this.
A number of studies have indicated that media displayed substantial bias during the primaries. That bias was directly in line with Clinton's campaign strategy, as stated in another child to the parent comment.
I'm not sure what else you're looking for. More on the causation front? Studies on the effects of media coverage on candidates in political races have thoroughly discussed here and elsewhere since the election.
More on the media bias side? I'm sure you can review the DNC leak as well as other post-election frequency reviews.
There's a reason why people were outraged at the media post-election and subsequently why the 'fake news' scapegoat was trotted out as a narrative to salvage the worth of mainstream media's reputation.
What? From the summary of your link: "Why was Clinton’s coverage substantially more negative than Sanders’, and why did Sanders get so much less coverage than she did?"
Did I ever claim the media wasn't biased? Of course the media had an effect on the election, and that effect wasn't neutral. The fact that the media has systemic biases does not imply that major media organizations conspired in favor of a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was actually considered by most to have been negatively impacted in the general election, and according to the link you posted, was covered more negatively than Bernie Sanders.
This is a giant mess conflating DNC problems with fundamental realities of news media with an unproven conspiracy theory. I have always been responding to this: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump." I promise you, that is not the position of the Shorenstein Center or any other academic research organization focused on journalism.
The primary criticism of media from the Sanders camp was a lack of coverage. Please revisit the Shorenstein Center study on this point.
The numbers bear this out, and you're welcome to do further homework on the issue, as well as the importance of variables at play in media coverage. Sentiment analysis is not the only element of reporting coverage that matters. Here's some more analysis which shows the putative internal mechanism for the frequency of media's reporting, which is consistent with the internal stakeholder incentives. The analysis shows that there is a dramatic decoupling in reporting frequency as between Clinton and Sanders. http://decisiondata.org/news/political-media-blackouts-presi...
The finding regarding his airtime in comparison to Cruz in the Shorenstein report is damning. So is the search interest correlation decoupling between him and Hillary.
Those are hard numbers. Numbers which bear our a narrative which was raised and repeated during the primaries, and then vindicated by numerical analysis afterwards by a number of reputable sources. Additionally, when the DNC leaks did occur, they revealed that Clinton's preferred media outcome did occur, and that the DNC systemically favoured her over Sanders.
Put simply, we have the act laid bare by statistical analysis, the relationships between the actors in question mapped out by the leaks, and the incentive for the parties to act all mapped out, yet your position is that there is no evidence whatsoever that something happened.
Not at all. You're describing a real problem, but it is in no way a conspiracy, in no way is it new, and in now way is it uniquely related to Hillary Clinton. The media has a problem with "horserace" coverage, which is the subject of your Shorenstein Center study. The problem, which is structural rather than conspiratorial, is that the media is obsessed with covering which candidates are winning and by how much, with projecting who they think will actually win, and then focusing on those candidates. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and creates an enormous barrier to entry for outsider candidates. As the Shorenstein Center study concludes:
"The problems associated with press coverage of the 2016 nominating campaign are rooted in the mismatch of journalism values and the structure of the nominating process. There is little question that the nature of the 2016 campaign—Trump’s presence, particularly—brought the mismatch into sharp relief. But the broad tendencies in press coverage of the 2016 coverage are ones that exhibit themselves every four years."
The truth is that Sanders was considered by everyone to be a long shot candidate, so he got less coverage. The coverage he did get was much more positive than the coverage of Clinton. They both got radically less coverage than Trump. So, no act laid bare by statistical analysis, just a long-standing bias in favor of covering the most famous candidates with the most celebrity status.
The relationships between candidates and reporters is totally public and was in no way revealed by any leaks. It's an obvious part of doing the job of political reporter that only people who had never closely followed a campaign were surprised by, and that was willfully misrepresented by the likes of Breitbart and Fox News as somehow nefarious. Remember, there was no corresponding RNC leak, which would of course show that reporters were talking to politicians there constantly too. There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert with the DNC to influence the outcome of the election in Hillary's favor, only that the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals (to get new information and to win the election, respectively). So, no relationships between actors mapped out.
Anyway, if there were a scheme to use frequent mentions to favor a candidate, it's clearly Trump, not Clinton. It's well documented that Trump stories drove the most clicks, which is why news outlets focused so much on him. Was there a massive conspiracy between all the Republicans, including Trump himself, who spoke to reporters every day, clearly tilted the general election in favor of Trump, and had a direct incentive to get a scandal-prone celebrity into office?
Most people who follow politics closely know that Clinton has a famously bad relationship with the media and has earned incredibly negative coverage as a result. She's very famous and so she gets covered but there is definitely no giant multi-company conspiracy to support her.
Your hypothesis has been debunked in the provided sources, as well as elsewhere.
Even when viewer intent is controlled for in models, Sanders was consistently substantially underrepresented in coverage, while Hillary was substantially over-represented. Additionally, pole results correlated poorly with coverage volume.
If you read the leaks, you will note that contrary to your statement that "There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert", there is substantial evidence that key, impactful information was provided to the Clinton campaign and that Clinton's campaign desires aligned with reporting in fact.
Clinton wanted Trump to be a frontrunner because she thought she could eviscerate him. This is contained in the leak.
That she did not, in fact, do so, doesn't indicate that there was no conformity between her campaign strategy and the media coverage in fact. Most media narratives leading up to the election indicated that Hillary was substantially ahead.
Your argument that 'the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals' doesn't indicate that there wasn't an improper collusion. If you and I own companies, and we agree in service of our own goals to raise prices and reduce competition, in most jurisdictions we would be thrown in jail. Which is why the conversations in which these agreements happen (and they do) are not. written. down.
I think you're railing too much on the "obvious victor" point, which the OP didn't even say. In fact, given your statement "Longtime establishment Democrat operatives acting on behalf of a longtime establishment Democrat against a non-Democrat", you've established the collusion yourself. The press part is their long-standing and equally unsavory relationship with the [DR]NCs to begin with.
Indeed, the burden is on you to show how they ever lifted the tiniest finger to NOT do what we all knew they were up to from the start: coronate Clinton as heir apparent.
Again, I'm responding to this statement: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump."
The fact that career democrats feel strongly about the outcome of a democratic primary is not a corporate media conspiracy. Should there be reforms to the Democrats' primary process? Yes. Is that at all relevant to the subject of this part of the thread? No.
But you don't challenge the central point. Just because major media collusion with [DR]NC is normal doesn't make it any less galling. In fact the only reason there is any complaint this time around is precisely because Bernie's candidacy was so unexpectedly strong. When Howard Dean was demolished (DNC-orchestrated with the full participation of the press) there wasn't nearly the backlash as he was just getting started.
With that point standing, the statement is opinionated but hardly tinfoil-hat. Hillary and the DNC are definitely due for a great deal of blame for our current disaster -- if they had lifted a finger to accomodate the Bernie side -- make him VP maybe, or pick someone less nasty than freaking KAINE -- they might have been able to pick up on his momentum a little. Would Bernie have beat Trump, or even won without the DNC collusion? I don't know -- but you don't either.
There certainly is a kind of mutually entrenching equilibrium between the major political parties and media conglomerates. There are certainly structural factors in terms of how our political and media systems work that arguably disfavored Bernie Sanders. The media believes that establishment candidates are most likely to be elected, and they therefor cover them more than candidates they deem to be less likely, such as Sanders. I think this is a perverse approach that distorts elections, but I have no sense that this is done in bad faith by the thousands of people who make editorial decisions like this every day. I can disagree with the conventions of political coverage in the United States without impugning the motives of an entire industry.
Further, the incredibly contingency of all of this means that we can't actually prove such vague cause and effect relationships. We can't know that the media unilaterally crushed Bernie's candidacy. Maybe if the media had covered Bernie more, it would have led to more scrutiny or some kind of gaffe that destroyed his campaign. Maybe if he had gotten one more news story he would have been reading it on his phone, slipped on a banana peel, and broken his neck. I have no idea if more coverage would have made Bernie more popular, or if the "the media is ignoring me!" narrative was actually a key engine of his campaign's growth.
Collusion means "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others" according to Google. DNC collusion is fair—there are arguments that this is less than nefarious, but I disagree with them. Multi-corporation media conspiracy with the purpose of anointing Hillary over Bernie? Still waiting to see any evidence of that.
I suppose the collusion is more guilt-by-association -- the DNC's tight relationship with major media means unfair activity on their part will be amplified in the press, and given the extremity of the bad-faith activities in this case, anger at the press is justified. But I concede that direct collusion is unlikely, and probably not even what folks are angry about if they choose their words carefully. Bernie's campaign tread over many sacred cows -- Palestinian rights on national TV?? Single-payer health care?? Labor?? (The press HATES labor!!) -- so add their institutional hostility to a left-wing candidate, and collusion isn't necessary.
This going way over the line for politics on HN but I can't let it go. Everyone repeating the story you are pushing is robbing the Hillary supporters of their agency. I've voted for Democrats for years and years. I didn't view Bernie as a once in a lifetime opportunity. I saw him as way too far left for me.
I was clearly wrong on the relative electability of Hillary & Bernie, but I'm voted in the primary for the candidate that better represented my views. I didn't vote for Hillary because the DNC made me do it or the media lied to me. I watched their speeches, I read their websites, I watched the debates, and I decided I'd rather have Hillary than Bernie. That's it.
It's not a giant conspiracy, there's just a lot of rank and file Democratic voters that aren't all in on Bernie's worldview. If you want to make an argument for why I should be more in on the Bernie plan than Hillary's plan I'd hear it (I guess not on HN), but stop pretending like the majority of Democratic primary voters were duped.
I'm inclined to agree with you, albeit from the "Bernie's not left enough" side -- I was amongst those who were critical of his decision to go Democrat in the first place, announcing right from the start that he'd endorse Hillary if he lost, which he did, and WTF does that mean for his policies/politics???
However, I'm surprised that you aren't offended by the DNC's corruption and dishonesty. Say what you want about Bernie -- you can't deny he attracted much new blood to the party; he was the last hope of reclaiming the lost passion of the 2008 Obama campaign. The DNC's open hostility to his candidacy was shameful. If you're trying to imply that somehow it had no effect on the primary outcome, you should share whatever you're smoking with the group.
A number of comparative studies were performed during the primaries regarding the electibility of various candidates against their counterparts on the other side. Sanders performed very well against Trump on those metrics.
There are a number of people advancing the 'we have no evidence' banner in this thread, which is strange because studies of electibility were commonly discussed here during the primaries.
What it comes down to is that I don't think electability polls taken before the conventions can really tell us much about how people would feel about Sanders after he started getting hammered in a general election.
Certainly! That's a fair criticism. I just wanted to point out that the statement that there is 'little or no evidence' is not accurate. Many rounds of electability analysis were performed.
"32% [of Americans] say they have 'a great deal' or 'a fair amount' of trust" in the mass media; that number drops to
14% among Republicans, "down from 32% last year."
Mark does make a lot of sense. Fake News is destroying out community. Instead of only generating catchy headlines to increase viewership why not do somework and discover amazing content to publish.
While the traditional media has been asleep at the wheel for a long time now, I find myself incredibly worried at this juncture. Social media prevails over traditional media if - and only if - the system is not being abused. Unfortunately, it appears that social media is being manipulated in massive, shocking, unprecedented ways, which is why I believe Zuckerburg is going on his save the world campaign. The idiot opened Pandora's box[1], and now social media has become the instrument of data-driven electioneering and reactive targeted propaganda campaigns.
We have hit a paradox in news publication. If we let everyone disseminate the news, we end up with Lord of the Flies esque cults surrounding every rumor. If we only allowed figures of authority to disseminate the news, we'll never know if a story was intentionally buried or misrepresented. There's no easy answer here. This is human nature.
The media is not needed anymore to tell us what to think. We are able to research anything now with the internet, so it's much harder for the media to spread falsehoods now.
If there's one "fake news" story that tops the list, in my opinion, it's the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. When the ACTUAL facts came to light, via autopsy, it was clear he had not been an innocent victim of a racist cop with a grudge. He had just robbed a store, and then fought with the cop, and tried to take his gun. He was shot while CHARGING the officer, head down, hands at his sides. NONE of that was immediately available on the internet, yet millions and millions of people seized on that opportunity to fill in the blanks. The actual report took weeks to generate, as it should, and by the time it came out, there was an entire national movement ("hands up; don't shoot") that was based on a fantastical lie.
How do "we," as a society, function and thrive when there are people like those leading the BLM movement, who are willing to seize on fake news, and create entire polemical fictions, well aware of their specious basis, trying to extract what personal benefit they can from the situation until the truth comes to light?
"One analyst told The New York Times last year that 85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over."
I stopped reading here since the author obviously doesn't know what he/she is talking about and didn't bother looking it up.
> Advertisers adjusted spending accordingly. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst.
I don't know if it's accurate, but New York Times citing an analyst at a major financial services firm seems more credible than user "cerved" on Hacker News. Do you have better information?
Okay so look at the two quotes "85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google" and "85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising"
One proclaims that two companies take 85% of all online ad revenue, the other 85% of the growth in one quarter. So the first problem is the reference to the source is incorrect.
The other is the assumption that only news orgs and Google and Facebook are the ones taking a part of the pie. Disregarding the other hundreds of companies that are a part of the online advertising ecosystem as well as other types of publishers.
I would assert that the Atlantic misquoting a quote from the New York Times, which is a quote from a note a Morgan Stanley analyst wrote to clients the 7th of April 2016 is in and of itself not credible.
I don't know the real figures but one could calculate this by estimating global ad spend in 2016, take Google and Facebooks ad revenue minus the cost of revenue, ie money spend on buying ads from publishers (ie. news organisations etc), and compare that to other actors.
Bottom line, I refer to my previous point that the author doesn't know what he/she is talking about.
Used to be that advertisers didn't know which 50% of their budget they were wasting. That money paid for interesting writing, some of it even investigative reporting.
Now advertisers can track the last red cent. Thank you, W3C. Well done, even if that wasn't the intention.
Turns out it's slightly more complicated with that: it's possible to track direct interactions with online content and advertising, but it's not entirely clear that that's all that useful, and it may well be harmful.
The Register had some recent bits on this ("what part of advertising is wasted? All of it" is my recollection of the headline), and I've been kicking around this topic for a while.
If you aren't discussing operation mockingbird and the consolidation and monopolization of the parent corps along with the editorial influence that comes with you are nowhere close to understanding the real problem.
Without understanding the real problem, any proposed solution will be lacking.
I think the problem with journalism is that it was never the actual business. What it was, were supporting and adding sophistication to the news industry, but it was never actually central to the business. But the value of news was that it didnt used to be widely available. That was actually what people paid for. The news and clssifieds, not the journalism. And so what we see are all these people in the news industry trying to improve their business by improving journalism.
The problem with "journalism" is that it got degraded to infotainment over the last decade and there is barely any real journalism left. If you have to make money, you have to cater to a large group of people and also for your advertisers. This essentially making sure most of your output is clickbait titles and nothing too crazy. There are few exceptions though like the intercept and similar news outlets.
Entertainment is the product. See Neil Postman's Amused to Death. If people really wanted quality journalism, they'd be lining up to pay for it. This is not a market failure.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadThat line is pretty much all you need to know about the article, despite what the title is claiming.
In my opinion. If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction. [0]
If some guy with a catchy domain name can produce content that goes viral, it doesn't matter how many Pulitzer the NYTimes has.
If anything, as someone who actually cares about facts, the latest changes in my Facebook newsfeed has gotten me to read a lot more publications because my friends are sharing stories from journals I don't normally read.
The author is misplacing the blame.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...
Why is this a problem that needs to be solved though? A big part of being free is being able to choose what you get to care about, being able to choose what you get to read, and being able to have your own opinions.
Remove that, and you're no longer free. Would it be better to not be a free people? I can see the benefits of both sides, but I think freedom is a better long term solution for a multitude of historical reasons.
Constraining your freedom doesn't mean you cease to be free, but it allows others to flourish just as you do. A free society ("a free people", as you say) should allow everyone to flourish as much as they care to (but no less). Collective freedom is not just the sum of individual freedoms. It is the result of cooperation.
What kind of nonsense is that? My OPINION is that Snowden is a hero, and NOT a traitor, and I absolutely choose to consider that opinion is correct. What are the FACTS about that? He broke the law. But he broke an immoral law? What about the actions he divulged? Were they not unconstitutional? Of course, there are "laws" on the books that make what the CIA/NSA did "legal." So where does all this leave us?
Forums like this keep discussion fake news in the light of "fact," as though fact were enough. It's not. You can go back and forth and back and forth with arguments about Snowden, and get nowhere. It all depends on your bias about how the Constitution should regard your personal liberty and privacy versus the concern for national safety. Lots of people fall on both sides. I use this example because it's a good, clear one, but the same thing is going on in most other stories. There's at least 2 ways of looking at everything. A person's bias and moral compass determines which way is the one they choose to care about. And who are you to tell them that their opinion -- based on the same set of data -- is "wrong?" That's just called having a difference of opinion.
Now that the country is well and truly removed from the halcyon post-war era, we have to figure out how to live with each other, and differences of opinion. That's the real issue here. The same way that social norms had to react and catch up with the emergence of Facebook itself, we have to settle into new norms about living with people who don't think like we do, and that goes for both sides.
It's not going to stop me from thinking that someone is "wrong" when they call Snowden a traitor, but it doesn't mean I need to get in their face about it, or put signs in their yard, or tear down their signs, or picket their business. You see what I'm saying.
> A person's bias and moral compass determines which way is the one they choose to care about. And who are you to tell them that their opinion -- based on the same set of data -- is "wrong?" That's just called having a difference of opinion.
Somebody's moral compass is not just an irreducibly subjective element, but it is also normatively sensitive to facts. Our weighting of the data might have biases, but those biases are surely appropriate or not as well? (I don't mean to imply that we can resolve in principle the issue of whether our biases are correct or not, which we might not; see the problem of Deep Disagreement [1])
So yes, I agree with you when you say that the problem is how to live with each other given our limitations to resolve disagreements. However, I think underplaying the role of facts in this needlessly perpetuates them. The sort of disagreements we face is not just of the kind you just gave an example of: people disagree in ways in which they don't even agree on the same set of data. See the case of climate change denial, for example. Those are not simply having a "difference of opinion".
[1]: https://www.academia.edu/2592706/What_is_the_Problem_of_Deep...
I'm confused, isn't that exactly what the parent's argument is though? You said that's not what you're saying, and then repeat the exact same thing, contradicting yourself.
Personally I disagree with you, if I'm understanding correctly. To me, a huge chunk of the population, you included it would seem, believes that some things are no longer a matter of opinion, that 10 and 20 years ago everyone would have happily agreed are matters of opinion rather than matters of fact.
If I understood him correctly, he's saying that I was claiming that if we agreed on facts (if facts were settled, as it were), we would agree in opinions, which is clearly false as a matter of fact. My claim is that we should agree in opinions, if facts were settled. I think difference between would/should is significant here. I am saying: if facts were settled, and we had a disagreement, at least one of the parties in the disagreement should not hold their opinions (would be wrong). I am not saying: if facts were settled, we could not be in disagreement.
If it was possible in principle to settle the facts, our apparent entitlement to hold certain opinions would be, in a sense, illusory. We can act on the assumption that it is not, for sure, but that doesn't make our entitlement right.
I am not even claiming that facts are settled (that is, that we know what is true as a matter of fact). Since they are not settled, we should be more cautious in our taking of opinions, and of course that goes both ways.
At least for me, I am coming from the angle that some things are a matter of fact, and some are a matter of opinion. For example, everyone can be fully informed on economics, but on the matter of "how much should a waiter be paid in New York City", there is no "right" answer.
That might very well be not what the disagreement was about from your perspective though. :/
[1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545405
Along the same lines (maybe), I've always thought an improved way to approach disagreement (breaking down "matters of opinion) is to break things down into components to better discover discrete points of contention. When you have a unsolvable dispute, you've either reached a matter of opinion, or, the disputed topic has to be broken down further. I wonder if that's the approach the book takes?
I think this approach could be quite successful, assuming two reasonable people involved (a tall order nowadays perhaps).
People look to their ideological pedagogues to TELL them what to think about the NEWS COVERAGE of the ARTICLES about the PAPERS about the DATA, regardless of what it says, and it's happening on BOTH sides, with both the Rush Limbaugh's and the Jon Stewart's of the world. Facts may matter to you and me, but they certainly don't to most of the population. By the time it reaches the average person, an 18-month study, with all it's glorious data, assumptions, conditions, and results, is washed out in a single sound byte, because no one has the patience to understa...
Oh, look! A funny cat video! That's hilarious. Let me just send that on to 1,000 of my followers...
Does that extend to facts?
Trump constantly spouted blatant fiction. He still does. This isn't one set of facts vs another.
Trump lies, then vilifies those who call out his lies, and somehow he's the hero.
This happens because it's not as simple as facts vs. fiction. Yes, he does get some facts wrong. But the media does pick what facts to report on to always paint him in a bad light. This is why I said it's not so simple.
No, it isn't. With complete sincerity I think you should make a serious effort to appreciate this possibility.
I'm saddened by the current state of affairs where increasingly polarized factions feel that taking nuanced (rather than absolutist) positions threatens their positions and gives up ground to the opposition.
At least from my observation, the general stance of most people is 100% complete belief in any partisan theory, and complete rejection of any opposing ideas, regardless of the amount of evidence supporting each.
Look, we're talking about the difference between opinion and fact here. By its very nature, "fact" implies that you have enough evidence already that questioning that fact requires evidence of its own. If I hold some weaker opinion, then sure, it's entirely reasonable to hold an opinion contrary to that without the burden of proof immediately being on you.
That's where I (personally) draw the line on everything: do literally whatever the hell you want, as long as you aren't harming anyone else in the process. Obviously there are nuances, and sometimes causing some harm in the pursuit of the greater good is acceptable, but I think this principle is a sound starting point.
And that's the thing. You can be a climate-change denier all you want, but once that starts affecting public policy, that's a problem, because, for example, eviscerating the EPA will have far-reaching, long-term, negative effects on life on our planet.
This goes both ways though. I'm far from an expert on the subject, but I've read very compelling arguments from people whose livelihood are significantly affected by EPA regulations that have missed the mark, or are enforced unfairly.
A perfectly legitimate case can be made to modify some EPA regulations, but when that reasonable position is characterized as "eviscerating the EPA", well then we have another problem, because then both sides are not in a compromising mood, and that is what we need to accomplish anything.
Terminating the EPA entirely (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/861) is not a "reasonable position".
> So here’s to the freedom to be led astray, which it would be folly to restrict, lest it foster complacency and tempt the devil. Because that’s what attracts him: foolproof safeguards. Like the one the Clinton campaign erected when, per WikiLeaks, it encouraged the nomination of a laughable, beatable “Pied Piper candidate” named Donald Trump. Or CNN’s belief in its ability to not only report the news but tell us which sources to ignore.
> Assume you’re an imbecile, but, more important, consider that the imbecile across from you may be a genius in disguise. As we go forward, so many of us still secure in our contempt for the vulgar pretender and his sorry partisans, it’s a lesson worth remembering. It might prove helpful, even protective. Plus, it’s true.
It's good that people are free to choose what to read and what to believe, and yet the current state of affairs is cause for concern nonetheless. A coin is "free to choose" whether to come up heads or tails, but if it comes up heads ninety times of a hundred tosses, it's reasonable to assume that the coin has a problem.
Of course, you could always make the argument that nothing is a problem and that this is just the way the world is -- a growing number of people don't care about facts -- and this is what we are now. But all judgements of good vs. bad are ultimately based on a choice of values. Freedom is a value, as is respect for the truth. Believing that while everyone is free, stability requires that only a small portion would choose fiction over fact is a reasonable position.
[1]: http://harpers.org/archive/2017/02/a-grim-fairy-tale/?single...
I.e. It becomes about controlling mind-share. Calling something out as "unfair", "biased", "propaganda", or "fake news" is one way of controlling the amount of mind-share it has with people that identify with it. So you can't just "let someone" have their "wrong" opinion, you have to "correct them". That is precisely what political correctness is, it's to "put down" unacceptable opinions with public witch hunts and legal pressure. I have no idea when it went from "leave people alone" with their probably "wrong" opinions, into "omg, you're not allowed to think/say that, you must be sexist/racist/homophobic and we'll make life a living hell for you, and we'll get you fired".
I don't disagree with your broader point, but I've never ever seen anyone tout democracy as "the perfect system in terms of fairness". Even back when it was the new hotness, writers on it (de Tocqueville et al) were very well aware of its flaws and failure modes.
What they cannot choose, however, is what is truth, and what is reality.
Reality has a way of imposing itself. And a disregard for reality on the part of some has a profound way of imposing itself on the many.
If you take a closer look, the established media is not so innocent about that. Most of them find it perfectly ok to lie for money every few minutes (TV ads)...
Agreed, but if advertising first purpose was to tell verifiable facts it would have been called information. The problem here is people believing everything is thrown at them, especially if done by some popular figure.
Sometimes is not that simple. A lot of this is related to personal biases and just the way the brain works. Ofcourse people can try to train theirselves into being more skeptic but in a world in which every day you are bombarded with information is pretty hard to find the time and motivation to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5d4yVP7sNA
Even if it were the case that Mark Zuckerburg was exploiting those flaws for personal benefit, I find it hard to blame him - we live in and support a society that encourages that behavior. If exploiting human flaws for profit is an undesired outcome for human organizations, we should work to stop encouraging that behavior.
I will however provide a counter point to my own argument, which is that we should name and shame those who abuse human nature at society's expense for their own benefit. Otherwise we end up with a society full of people who are actively harming society.
Honestly I don't know what to think. I just wanted to provide both of these views. I'm curious what the response to either views is.
You would assume this would stop lying, manipulating, bullying and prejudice by the media but it does not. As an example, Hillary Clinton's exit speech was particularly sexist and _nobody_ in the media took her to task, "And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable, and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams." https://www.google.com.au/amp/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.3843541
It's just one of many examples of prejudice and injustice that are pushed aggressively by almost every media outlet. When did we ever exclude kids based on their gender so blatantly and with such pride? How far we've regressed.
A school near me is doing the same thing (Mount Carmel College). A co-ed school that shows almost only girls in their pictures/website/billboards, yet, there is not a single complaint from anyone. There is so much discrimination from so many sources that you'd have to be blind not to notice it. It's despicable to declare a gender war on little boys, yet, I see no one protesting, especially ideologies that talk the most about prejudice.
Any time people point out these prejudices in public, you hear some glib comments about 50 years ago. You pull out the newspapers from 50 years ago to illustrate revisionist history and it is suddenly 100 years ago. This problem is systemic.
The truth is that humanity seems to need a bogey man. Today, that's likely the "all Muslims are terrorists" and "any white male is privileged (irrespective of age)", leading to some extreme bullying.
The only way for extremism to stop is to meet it head on, yet, not one "reputable" media outlet is willing to do so. Some say Breitbart is good, but, I found it sexist to the same degree that Ars Technica, The Verge, New York Times, etc are, just targeting the opposite gender. However, Breitbart is in the overwhelming minority (ie. sexist favouring males is the ~1% of media today).
What we need is decent people willing to tackle the prejudice. For some reason, the protests of decent people remain almost unheard. Whether it's domestic violence by women, overwhelming predominance of male suicide, predominance of male cancer, overwhelming predominance of male homelessness, overwhelming predominance of male incarceration, extreme prejudice against boys in school education or any other male oriented topic, the media manipulates, lies, misrepresents and bullies. To give a small example, how many times have you heard prostate cancer is a joke and almost nobody dies from it? Compare the stats yourself: MORE incidents than breast cancer and MORE deaths, despite the constant snipes by many media outlets to the contrary. https://prostate-cancer.canceraustralia.gov.au/statistics https://canceraustralia.gov.au/affected-cancer/cancer-types/...
Society desperately needs people to protest vigorously. Hold Ars Technica, The Verge, Vox, Vulture, Daily Beast, New York Times, BBC, News Corp, etc accountable. Throw the book at the lot of them! Huge fines will fund more cases against other media outlets.
What's destroying journalism is people like you calling out media as propaganda, fake news, etc...
I do think the buzzwords need to die. Everyone calls everything they don't agree with fake news these days.
Also negative "news" sells better. Humans just respond to fear and hatred. It is just so much easier to fear and to hate. I'll admit to it. I feel suspicious when I see something positive in the news: is this a sponsored post?
Making occasional errors isn't a sign of bias. Correcting those errors is a key part (and running the correction prominantly) of not being biased.
It's been observed that the principle bias of many major commercial media is inherently pro-establishment.
I know Facebook is a US-based product and everything, but I'm really getting sick and tired of products that are used all over the world getting adjusted just because they are a problem now in the US.
First we had "fake news" (which used to be called just propaganda), which we have dealt with long before Internet was even a big thing in our region[0]. Now this.
Media survives just fine here. Most people still don't use adblockers and most people are ready to donate for good quality journalism (in fact, there's a Serbian-based investigative reporting center that's currently making an excellent progress in moving away from grants to one-time donations by their readers, and there are other digital-only media sources across Europe which are even breaking records living off of subscriptions by being transparent and talkative to their audience[1]). But nope, instead of doing their own thing, they're going to have to adjust because Facebook wants to promote more "local" things to encourage "civil engagement" because a "research suggests it" (keep in mind there's not a single mention of what that research might actually be, neither in the article itself, nor in the manifesto).
You have separate sections in every newspaper what so ever, and unlike in Facebook's very specific, and very tailored to every individual bubbles, at least you skim through the headlines from other sections while you're trying to locate something you will actually read. That alone makes you more informed about what is going on more than Facebook's bubbles ever will.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav...
[1] https://medium.com/de-correspondent
Have no fear, citizen, that bug will be solved soon.
1. Fake news makers are exclusively after money. 2. Propagandists are exclusively after a political end. 3. Journalists are mostly after the truth, even if they are very biased and far from immune from the corrupting influence of money and political ends.
I read a lot of what most would consider "alt-right" news. They've repossessed that term and now use it to refer to really biased reporting on the part of the "mainstream media". The accusation is usually very biased reporting, blatantly favoring left-leaning ideas and politicians, as well as not reporting on issues that contradict the mainstream narrative.
Sometimes they go too-far with conspiracy-theory-level stuff, I'll give them that. But for the most part, they're spot on when it comes to reporting on the mainstream media's blatant left-leaning bias and selective reporting. When I read them, it sounds like a "normal" person, one that doesn't jump through hoops to justify their points. The points are just there.
The mainstream media's privileged position of controlling the narrative is under threat, both from within the media (e.g. Breitbart) and without (random guys on the internet creating narratives).
The idea of "fake news" is propaganda, created in order to push Facebook/Twitter/etc into shutting down the media and random guys that are threatening the mainstream media. It'll probably work too.
Incidentally, insofar as "fake news" is real, it is highly unlikely to have any major effect. ...for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads. https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
What do you call information that is produced to resemble reputable news sources but contains very little true information?
Is there any support for the claim that it was reported, and a term was coined for it, in order to limit competition?
Why should we think it's that vs genuine reporting on a trend where people profit from producing this material AND a complimentary trend for Americans (trending toward conservative views) to believe anything that fits their preferred narrative without question?
I think this is absolutely different from propaganda because it's done first and foremost from a profit motive. It did not generally (as far as we actually know) come from powerful groups who want to control a political narrative. [0] I'm sure that has already started to change- Russia and other countries will certainly use this attack vector. The material they produce would be fake news used as propaganda.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...
The status quo.
That's why I can't watch any of the national news stations. Foreign broadcasters are less likely to pump things up, and some local news stations are passable, but the big boys have been transparently biased and driven by clickbait, since before clickbait was a thing.
I think this study is too limited. The problem is not that a single article changes minds. It's a well-poisoning problem. Stories about the Clintons assassinating their opponents have been floating around right-wing media for decades.
When I was growing up, I heard an adult talk about the time their friend went to see the Clintons land at an airport. When the friend asked Hillary to end abortion because it was killing babies, Hillary supposedly replied "We will kill your babies."
Nonsense circulated for decades has a toxic effect on political discussion. "Fake news" is just the latest nonsense fad to join Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and their kind.
http://archive.is/9CXYO
This archive of a disreputable website has an article that claims Clinton bribed prominent Republicans (which were at that time Trumps opponents in the primary). It even links Wikileaks and gives an id for the email. Only ... the ID simply doesn't exist. It even made it into an Interview of Hannity with Assange:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhereIsAssange/comments/5ion2c/full...
> Hannity: Let me ask you about Wikileaks. I think this could shake up the political world. Is it true that an email sent in July of this year that you have, that describes how funds could be diverted from the Clinton campaign to the super PACs of Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and John Kasick. Specifically document number 1078645. Assange: I don't have that in front of me. We have published nearly 100,000 documents so. I mean I have seen references to things like that. I don't recall seeing an 'eyes only' phrase.
Assange didn't recall it because there is no email. The whole story was made up as clickbait for conservatives. But even Assange guards his statement, because it is normal that one doesn't recall everything, right?
Another example was a story about Supreme Court justice Ginsberg. Another clickbait website made up a quote of her and linked as proof an interview of Ginsburg in the NYTimes. And the NYT is reputable, right? Only the quote is fictional it never was in the NYT article. In a time were many people just read the headline and skim the rest (if at all) and sharing via social media is one click away, this is disappointingly effective.
http://www.snopes.com/ruth-ginsburg-president-resign/
(This is almost certainly due to selection bias - Trump hatred is a socially required belief in my circles, while Trump support is a very unusual position adopted only after careful thought and kept carefully hidden.)
There are many silly beliefs that Trump opponents have picked up from the mainstream media. For instance, compare beliefs about Trump-inspired crime to reality - most are hoaxes perpetrated by Trump opponents, and the most serious incidents (e.g. the kidnapping/torture of a mental retard) were committed by Trump opponents.
Or beliefs that Bannon and Trump are somehow antisemitic Nazis. Never mind that Trump was mentored by (((Roy Cohn))) and that the key people in his organization are (((Allen Weisenberg))), (((Michael Cohen))) and (((Jason Greenblatt))). Somehow (((Jared Kushner))) and (((Ivanka Trump))) are also involved. Not to mention that Bannon's rise to power came from working with (((Andrew Breitbart))), and he's secretly communicating with (((Curtis Yarvin))). [1]
Strangely, these crazy beliefs are never cited when discussing fake news. They just aren't part of the narrative. That's why I characterize this "fake news" push as propaganda - it's only about keeping non-mainstream sources out of the narrative.
[1] I'm only using the alt-right ((())) to emphasize what actual anti-semitic people would think of Trump.
Chiefly that owners have the cattle's best interests in mind and will tell them the truth.
(Actually, they mostly do. The advertisers are mainly very selective about the facts they publish. And the way they wrap them up for delivery. "Never give a sucker an even break" as one famous advertiser candidly put it.)
Propaganda: The NYT, at the behest of the government, publishing reports of Iraq possessing WMD's in order to lay the groundwork for an illegal invasion and occupation.
Fake News: A fabricated story about a made up individual finding boxes of ballots marked for Clinton, complete with a photo pulled from Google. The story then is pushed on social media sites by sockpuppets.
In other words there's a difference between Judith Miller and Stephen Glass.
Of all the significant distinctions, the most important one is that fake news is driven by the current state of the internet: ad revenue based click grabbing, pushing of content on social media (sometimes through sockpuppets), an elevated level of anonymity, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_(testimony)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news
With the rise of weaponised viral clickbait and advertising-driven Internet competition over attention, we've seen an increase in algorithmic content created solely for the purpose of driving up advertising revenues.
Even that isn't an entirely new phenomenon. The rise of "penny presses" -- daily common-circulation newspapers based on advertising, and selling for a penny, as opposed to the "professional" six-cent press, gave rise to the New York Sun's Great Moon Hoax of 1835, with the goal of driving up circulation numbers:
http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_great_moon_hoax
In the beginning there were articles and there was fact-checking. Specific articles that failed checks (failed QA) were fake. A rush of those in 2016 were found to be for-clicks and for-profit.
One might have really hoped that more checking (better QA) would come out of that, but perversely the opposite happened. "Fake news" became a blanket condemnation not just for unchecked stories, but often unread ones. "The headline says that? Fake news!"
This is kind of a critical juncture, but I worry that it is becoming a wrong turn.
How many of the people who hold up the NYT as some ideal actually subscribe? I'll be surprised if it's anything but a tiny number. Journalism is dying because journalists think they should write about what they want to be true. And the NYT is leading that charge.
I'll tell you something, though. They had a couple of very good articles that really stood out. And those also had exceptional prose.
I think what's even more troubling is that this isn't just changing fashions, but that some are actively trying to shake people's faith in the truth.
I believe it's less to do with not caring to not understanding the system. Coming from a world where newspapers ensured to report only correct info and corrected incase of error. People expect that the internet is also the same. Many are surprised to know that Wikipedia articles are peer submitted and reviewed. Many assumed its from a company like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Just an online version, instead of the heavy books.
This world never existed, sorry.
Too bad we don't know which half and which news is fiction.
> If some guy with a catchy domain name can produce content that goes viral, it doesn't matter how many Pulitzer the NYTimes has.
The NYTimes can have all the awards in the world if they publish articles that you can demonstrate beyond doubt to be bullshit or dishonesty.
> If anything, as someone who actually cares about facts, the latest changes in my Facebook newsfeed has gotten me to read a lot more publications because my friends are sharing stories from journals I don't normally read.
You should always look at what the other side has to offer, I talk to people who have polar opposite beliefs to mine on a regular basis, keeps me informed and makes me re-evaluate my own position.
What articles did you have in mind? The NYT's reporting on WMDs in Iraq is often raised as an example of 'fake news,' but I think the failure of the fact-checking process and subsequent investigation and apology [1] is to the NYT's credit. Investigative journalists have to make judgment calls about their sources and sometimes they get it wrong, but I've never seen an NYT article 'that you can demonstrate beyond doubt to be dishonesty.' Factual errors and misleading language do slip in regularly, resulting in frank corrections or the publication of dissenting views. That's more than you can say for most 'alternative' news sources.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the...
I posit that this number is close to 95% worldwide.
People are all the same - impulsive and vulnerable. I've spoken to some perfectly normal immigrants from various parts of the world and have heard some properly batshit insane stuff - any other time we would have assigned them a round-the-clock nurse.
And guess what - it makes zero difference to their life what they believe.
Beliefs need to collide with reality (through decisions, actions etc).
If you simply consider your world to be the other half of the country (that does care about correct news), then there is not much of a problem. If, however, you need to please shareholders, then, yes, you have a problem.
(You sure stirred it up with this one.)
But it's not really true, is it? The better way to describe the situation would be to say that the ~35% at BOTH ends of the political spectrum only wants to hear and read "news" that confirms their biases. And "journalism," as a business, has given them that.
What I'm saying is that we don't have a "facts" OR a "news" problem. We have an ideological division/superiority problem, and I don't know if anything can fix that.
Well, short of splitting the country into 3 parts: the 2 coasts, and flyover country, and letting them all go hard towards their biases, and checking back in on the results in about 50 years, and see which experiment worked better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_multiculturalism
I look at the pros & cons of a place like Japan and wonder.
A frustrating part of political discourse is that most people don't bother to put in the time and energy to understand the things they talk about, largely because it does matter enough to them to actually be right.
Out of curiosity, which "side" are you on predominantly?
More of the population is turning to alternative news sources because their trust of source like the NYTimes, WAPO and CNN has been violated. I'm pretty sure you weren't holding the Times up as some bastion of truth but to deny their blatant bias in reporting is folly. Withholding facts, failing to pursue facts or making the decision only to pursue facts you agree with politically is as bad as just making shit up.
The blueprint that's destroying journalism is the chase of profits over the chase of ALL truth.
Now, I do agree that large segments of the electorate are becoming less able to parse information effectively but I think there's still enough folks left that would gladly pay straight up subscription fees if they thought they could trust the information they were paying for.
News will get reinvented, and the optimist in me hopes it will be a much better product than it is today. But that process will be hard to predict and the winners will be among the folks who take risks and try new approaches.
There needs to be a single store, or repository of it all. Until that happens, news is just a "peek" at something, which will inevitably include bias.
1.) Is what's reported actually true? 2.) Is what's reported only half the truth so as to advance a prescribed narrative?
As for pushing a narrative, that is a form of bias that can be eliminated in the main by extracting the facts from articles. Consider two articles, one in the New York Times ("Trump's Florida rally shows he is unfit to lead" and in Breitbart ("Trump's Florida rally show's he is the best person to lead our country"). While both of these are highly partisan, the fact remains the same: Trump has a rally in Florida.
That said, our tools aren't perfect, but we can build on them.
I wonder if there's some way to come up with content quality metrics for news based on pure reporting of as many of the facts available. Maybe something similar to the stack exchange type system.
Then again the decline of journalism is not a matter of internet as much than a matter of selling out to advertisers and being bought by rich individuals or corporations. With internet access becoming popular it provided an alternative to the traditional media to get news and information.
Can you expand on that? I see the decline in circulation and eroding of their ad and classified income as the principal culprit. I haven't seen any prominent examples of newspapers where the rich individuals or corporations have caused a decline. The Washington Post was thriving during the 40 years that Buffett had an ownership stake.
Actually it was Craigslist. Back before the internet, the single biggest pot of newspaper revenue was classified ads.
Any manifestation of the Internet makes that obsolete - but the specific method of obsoletion may be different by country.
Yes, Facebook is how many people use the Internet - but it's a mistake to therefore conclude Facebook is responsible for journalism's decline.
In the future I suspect Facebook and Google will have the exact same problem.
Google News is suffering from this. I noted on Wikipedia today, in a discussion of reliable sources, that I had searched for info about a Wikipedia topic with Google news search, with terrible results. The top three results were Algemeiner (Jewish), Breitbart News (alt-right), and Mondoweiss ("progressive and anti-Zionist"). This is pathetic.
Breitbart is now the third most read news source in America, so things are looking up.
How else can Google News rank them? Follow some news media objectivity ranking on imgur? Hire tons of unbiased people to verify the integrity of all news before adding them into the index?
I'm not playing devil's advocate here but given an uninformed electorate, some form of authoritative truth by either a independent watchdog or government agency is probably a better idea than letting private companies run the media.
This is not exactly true. At my site, newslines, we crowdsource news by collecting and summarizing only the factual parts of each story. While Google News aggregates articles, we select the factual information from them. In effect we put the factual data from long-form news articles into a database. Even if you have highly partisan sources you can still extract factual information. A good example of this is our newsline for Emma Sulkowicz, the so-called "Mattress girl" [1]. In her case, the news sources are extremely partisan, but even so we can still extract factual information to create an unbiased view of the news. We belive our solution is far better than Wikipedia for both handling of news events, and the elimination of bias.
We are currently looking for contributors for other lines, particularity Donald Trump.
[1] http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=DESC
You say that like it's a bad thing, but that's the nature of reality itself.
Distributing information in its written form used to be the domain of the Church. Printing press has democratized that, for a while. Eventually the diversity of information was roped in to serve the agenda of the new, capitalist elites. While individual journalists often thrive to deliver the best work, the editors inevitably arrange things to serve the interests of particular business groups, and those who don't toe the line fall into obscurity for lack of funds.
Now, the Internet has produced a new information diversity, which is bubbling and foaming as we speak. That too will get roped in. The viral effect will become the domain of well-funded teams, not of lone geniuses. As the art is perfected it will become more capital-intensive, we will see consolidation in the business. Eventually the bulk of it will be divided between few large players, well-aligned with other businesses, and the whole thing will become orderly and predictable once again. Maybe.
The printing press needed a newsroom with typists and ad salesmen and a team of people wrestling with an ink belching mechanical beast. The minimum corporate interest required to feed such a beast is substantially more than the Internet business, the physical plant of which costs pennies a day in overhead to maintain (i.e. your cell phone and a few gigs of bandwidth.)
The amateur hour will come to an end. Especially now that the presidential election campaign has shown us how it's done.
It seems you are afraid, but you shouldn't be. The professionals are funded by big businesses, they aren't looking to take your life, they want you buy their products, and they want you to be happy while doing it.
It's really the same picture we've had for the last few decades, only the technology is a bit different. If you weren't upset back then, there is no reason to be upset now.
It's comforting if you believe you can keep yourself and your friends out of that second category.
I keep making new friends in low places so that's not the case for me.
I'm the last person you will find defending Zuck or Facebook (which I do not use and have deleted other apps as facebook buys them). But this Atlantic article felt like a desperate plea for charity of some sort, and preferably cash since the Chan-Zuckerberg Empire has so much. This is yet another editorial complaining about themselves but the author does not offer an alternative idea for journalism to avoid its own demise. Why and how would she? Journalists don't seem to understand business at all and are scared to try.
In just 3 months since the election, journalists and many people in this country seem to have forgotten how biased, incompetent, clueless, fake and corrupt even the "real" news organizations are today. There was no mea culpa in the article for these issues, just a misguided complaint. The pre-internet old days were not so perfect either if anyone reads history...can anyone explain why newspapers, these supposed bastions of objectivity for communities, even endorse political candidates? Is that a newspapers job?
This whole situation reminds me of another time there was a Harvard guy's looong manifesto that no one had the patience to read in full and it was on a very similar topic...the news industry was running around like a chicken with its head cut off back then too [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Socie...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...
Most agents that are skirting the rules have some notion that they shouldn't be overtly recording their misdeeds. In other words, where there's smoke, there's often fire.
The 'one incident' wasn't just smoke, though. It was a full blown conflict-of-interest fire in and of itself.
What does that have to do with a corporate media conspiracy to elect Hillary Clinton over the obvious victor Bernie Sanders?
A number of studies have indicated that media displayed substantial bias during the primaries. That bias was directly in line with Clinton's campaign strategy, as stated in another child to the parent comment.
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-presidentia...
I'm not sure what else you're looking for. More on the causation front? Studies on the effects of media coverage on candidates in political races have thoroughly discussed here and elsewhere since the election.
More on the media bias side? I'm sure you can review the DNC leak as well as other post-election frequency reviews.
There's a reason why people were outraged at the media post-election and subsequently why the 'fake news' scapegoat was trotted out as a narrative to salvage the worth of mainstream media's reputation.
Did I ever claim the media wasn't biased? Of course the media had an effect on the election, and that effect wasn't neutral. The fact that the media has systemic biases does not imply that major media organizations conspired in favor of a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was actually considered by most to have been negatively impacted in the general election, and according to the link you posted, was covered more negatively than Bernie Sanders.
This is a giant mess conflating DNC problems with fundamental realities of news media with an unproven conspiracy theory. I have always been responding to this: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump." I promise you, that is not the position of the Shorenstein Center or any other academic research organization focused on journalism.
The numbers bear this out, and you're welcome to do further homework on the issue, as well as the importance of variables at play in media coverage. Sentiment analysis is not the only element of reporting coverage that matters. Here's some more analysis which shows the putative internal mechanism for the frequency of media's reporting, which is consistent with the internal stakeholder incentives. The analysis shows that there is a dramatic decoupling in reporting frequency as between Clinton and Sanders. http://decisiondata.org/news/political-media-blackouts-presi...
The finding regarding his airtime in comparison to Cruz in the Shorenstein report is damning. So is the search interest correlation decoupling between him and Hillary.
Those are hard numbers. Numbers which bear our a narrative which was raised and repeated during the primaries, and then vindicated by numerical analysis afterwards by a number of reputable sources. Additionally, when the DNC leaks did occur, they revealed that Clinton's preferred media outcome did occur, and that the DNC systemically favoured her over Sanders.
Put simply, we have the act laid bare by statistical analysis, the relationships between the actors in question mapped out by the leaks, and the incentive for the parties to act all mapped out, yet your position is that there is no evidence whatsoever that something happened.
"The problems associated with press coverage of the 2016 nominating campaign are rooted in the mismatch of journalism values and the structure of the nominating process. There is little question that the nature of the 2016 campaign—Trump’s presence, particularly—brought the mismatch into sharp relief. But the broad tendencies in press coverage of the 2016 coverage are ones that exhibit themselves every four years."
The truth is that Sanders was considered by everyone to be a long shot candidate, so he got less coverage. The coverage he did get was much more positive than the coverage of Clinton. They both got radically less coverage than Trump. So, no act laid bare by statistical analysis, just a long-standing bias in favor of covering the most famous candidates with the most celebrity status.
The relationships between candidates and reporters is totally public and was in no way revealed by any leaks. It's an obvious part of doing the job of political reporter that only people who had never closely followed a campaign were surprised by, and that was willfully misrepresented by the likes of Breitbart and Fox News as somehow nefarious. Remember, there was no corresponding RNC leak, which would of course show that reporters were talking to politicians there constantly too. There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert with the DNC to influence the outcome of the election in Hillary's favor, only that the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals (to get new information and to win the election, respectively). So, no relationships between actors mapped out.
Anyway, if there were a scheme to use frequent mentions to favor a candidate, it's clearly Trump, not Clinton. It's well documented that Trump stories drove the most clicks, which is why news outlets focused so much on him. Was there a massive conspiracy between all the Republicans, including Trump himself, who spoke to reporters every day, clearly tilted the general election in favor of Trump, and had a direct incentive to get a scandal-prone celebrity into office?
Most people who follow politics closely know that Clinton has a famously bad relationship with the media and has earned incredibly negative coverage as a result. She's very famous and so she gets covered but there is definitely no giant multi-company conspiracy to support her.
Your hypothesis has been debunked in the provided sources, as well as elsewhere.
Even when viewer intent is controlled for in models, Sanders was consistently substantially underrepresented in coverage, while Hillary was substantially over-represented. Additionally, pole results correlated poorly with coverage volume.
If you read the leaks, you will note that contrary to your statement that "There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert", there is substantial evidence that key, impactful information was provided to the Clinton campaign and that Clinton's campaign desires aligned with reporting in fact.
Clinton wanted Trump to be a frontrunner because she thought she could eviscerate him. This is contained in the leak.
That she did not, in fact, do so, doesn't indicate that there was no conformity between her campaign strategy and the media coverage in fact. Most media narratives leading up to the election indicated that Hillary was substantially ahead.
Your argument that 'the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals' doesn't indicate that there wasn't an improper collusion. If you and I own companies, and we agree in service of our own goals to raise prices and reduce competition, in most jurisdictions we would be thrown in jail. Which is why the conversations in which these agreements happen (and they do) are not. written. down.
Indeed, the burden is on you to show how they ever lifted the tiniest finger to NOT do what we all knew they were up to from the start: coronate Clinton as heir apparent.
The fact that career democrats feel strongly about the outcome of a democratic primary is not a corporate media conspiracy. Should there be reforms to the Democrats' primary process? Yes. Is that at all relevant to the subject of this part of the thread? No.
With that point standing, the statement is opinionated but hardly tinfoil-hat. Hillary and the DNC are definitely due for a great deal of blame for our current disaster -- if they had lifted a finger to accomodate the Bernie side -- make him VP maybe, or pick someone less nasty than freaking KAINE -- they might have been able to pick up on his momentum a little. Would Bernie have beat Trump, or even won without the DNC collusion? I don't know -- but you don't either.
Further, the incredibly contingency of all of this means that we can't actually prove such vague cause and effect relationships. We can't know that the media unilaterally crushed Bernie's candidacy. Maybe if the media had covered Bernie more, it would have led to more scrutiny or some kind of gaffe that destroyed his campaign. Maybe if he had gotten one more news story he would have been reading it on his phone, slipped on a banana peel, and broken his neck. I have no idea if more coverage would have made Bernie more popular, or if the "the media is ignoring me!" narrative was actually a key engine of his campaign's growth.
Collusion means "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others" according to Google. DNC collusion is fair—there are arguments that this is less than nefarious, but I disagree with them. Multi-corporation media conspiracy with the purpose of anointing Hillary over Bernie? Still waiting to see any evidence of that.
I was clearly wrong on the relative electability of Hillary & Bernie, but I'm voted in the primary for the candidate that better represented my views. I didn't vote for Hillary because the DNC made me do it or the media lied to me. I watched their speeches, I read their websites, I watched the debates, and I decided I'd rather have Hillary than Bernie. That's it.
It's not a giant conspiracy, there's just a lot of rank and file Democratic voters that aren't all in on Bernie's worldview. If you want to make an argument for why I should be more in on the Bernie plan than Hillary's plan I'd hear it (I guess not on HN), but stop pretending like the majority of Democratic primary voters were duped.
However, I'm surprised that you aren't offended by the DNC's corruption and dishonesty. Say what you want about Bernie -- you can't deny he attracted much new blood to the party; he was the last hope of reclaiming the lost passion of the 2008 Obama campaign. The DNC's open hostility to his candidacy was shameful. If you're trying to imply that somehow it had no effect on the primary outcome, you should share whatever you're smoking with the group.
There are a number of people advancing the 'we have no evidence' banner in this thread, which is strange because studies of electibility were commonly discussed here during the primaries.
What it comes down to is that I don't think electability polls taken before the conventions can really tell us much about how people would feel about Sanders after he started getting hammered in a general election.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...
We have hit a paradox in news publication. If we let everyone disseminate the news, we end up with Lord of the Flies esque cults surrounding every rumor. If we only allowed figures of authority to disseminate the news, we'll never know if a story was intentionally buried or misrepresented. There's no easy answer here. This is human nature.
[1] https://www.scout.ai/story/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-pro...
How do "we," as a society, function and thrive when there are people like those leading the BLM movement, who are willing to seize on fake news, and create entire polemical fictions, well aware of their specious basis, trying to extract what personal benefit they can from the situation until the truth comes to light?
I stopped reading here since the author obviously doesn't know what he/she is talking about and didn't bother looking it up.
> Advertisers adjusted spending accordingly. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst.
I don't know if it's accurate, but New York Times citing an analyst at a major financial services firm seems more credible than user "cerved" on Hacker News. Do you have better information?
One proclaims that two companies take 85% of all online ad revenue, the other 85% of the growth in one quarter. So the first problem is the reference to the source is incorrect.
The other is the assumption that only news orgs and Google and Facebook are the ones taking a part of the pie. Disregarding the other hundreds of companies that are a part of the online advertising ecosystem as well as other types of publishers.
I would assert that the Atlantic misquoting a quote from the New York Times, which is a quote from a note a Morgan Stanley analyst wrote to clients the 7th of April 2016 is in and of itself not credible.
I don't know the real figures but one could calculate this by estimating global ad spend in 2016, take Google and Facebooks ad revenue minus the cost of revenue, ie money spend on buying ads from publishers (ie. news organisations etc), and compare that to other actors.
Bottom line, I refer to my previous point that the author doesn't know what he/she is talking about.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-22/google-an...
Now advertisers can track the last red cent. Thank you, W3C. Well done, even if that wasn't the intention.
(Beware answered prayers, etc., etc.)
The Register had some recent bits on this ("what part of advertising is wasted? All of it" is my recollection of the headline), and I've been kicking around this topic for a while.
Without understanding the real problem, any proposed solution will be lacking.
Is this true? Have there been times when news was funded by other means than advertising?
https://www.worldcat.org/title/amusing-ourselves-to-death/oc...