How objectivity in journalism became a matter of opinion (economist.com)

That’s an awfully cynical take when all you have to ask is how these publications could stay afloat without drawing readers in. They’re in a tough spot when people are opting for their Facebook feed over paying for articles from proper journalists.

Yesterday I suggested that we need to get rid of the downvote button. I see a problem where prevailing opinions only become reinforced with double the efficiency. It may even be greater because of the psychological effect of "grey = bad" or "collapsed = bad".

edit: typo desired->designed.

This is spot on. The major problem here is that content is now largely generated based on maximizing ad revenue. News publications developing content aren’t all that different from SEM campaigns. When editors and publishers use article clicks as a performance benchmark, as many do these days, this is bound to happen.

Also since the articles are laid out physically before you in a predetermined order, far more of your senses are engaged. You are also more likely to serendipitously read an article far from what you would normally be interested in.

Objective journalism was never ever a thing. That's why Manufacturing Consent happened and all the works from Edward Bernays and all the way to Noam Chomsky.

What journalism had before though is just more consistency in worldview, because mass media was very centralized and pushed much more consistent propaganda with nothing to oppose it.

My theory is that the Fed is printing so much easy money that money has become effectively worthless to those who already have it. Some people can throw it out the window and it will come right back to them. In such an artificial environment, the only assets that have real value are those which can transcend the current monetary reality.

If interest rates ever go up, fiat currency will become more valuable. That means that the price of everything would drop (since prices are determined relative to fiat)... One of the few assets whose value would not drop so much if fiat becomes more valuable is "brand awareness" aka "consumer mindshare". That's why value creation is worthless and everyone is focused on zero-sum games and why some of the most valuable startups in the world don't make any profits. Their rich investors are not interested in today-money (of which they have an unlimited amount), that's worthless, they want tomorrow-money! They will throw away as much money as necessary on advertising to secure their current economic position in tomorrow-land.

Also, I think that the reason why the quality of journalism degraded is also because consumer mindshare has become too valuable relative to everything else to let the truth get in the way. The truth doesn't efficiently align with the goals of corporate sponsors to increase brand awareness and gain consumer mindshare.

Fed money-printing broke investors' financial compasses such that most of them can't tell the difference between creating real economic value and flushing money down the toilet. If anything, flushing money down the toilet tends to yield higher returns; this is because corporate exits at the end of the VC funnel are fueled by corporate debt which is freshly printed by the Fed.

Instead, journalism got marginalized and polarized. It's sad.

"An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by 'availability entrepreneurs,' individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines."

So I think the challenge is well illustrated by the example they gave of when a president says "Go back to where you came from" to X-th generation immigrants.

- I feel like I'd be kidding myself not to read this as nationalist/racist. However, newspapers have traditionally been hesitant to make "value judgements" about current politicians. How can the press be honest and realistic, without condoning or condemning such remarks? (Or to make the example harder, could you hypothetically write an article about Hitler without legitimizing nor condemning him? Would failure to condemn him in a "purely objective" historical piece not read as an endorsement?)

- Or, just as easily, take Bush an Iraq. What was the correct phrasing to describe a war in Iraq based on evidence that proved to be false? Is there a way to communicate the facts without anchoring the value judgements?

Bias is inevitable, even given the constraints. Resource allocation to stories, physical space and dealing constraints, advertisers ... so many parts of the business and reality of producing journalism make the ideal unachievable. The goal is to be as close as possible.

The BIGGEST problem is journalists are now highly visible social media presences. Their casual pseudo personal accounts give an eye into the thoughts, preferences and opinions of journalists. And that brings their potential biases to the forefront

But journalism cannot escape politics. Journalists have to choose what to write about, and to do that involves an evaluative judgement about which issues are worth discussing, and which aren't.

Similar things can be said about what journalists choose to focus on within individual pieces - whose voices they elevate, what issues they emphasise, the context they include, and so on.

Journalism is not science!

This is an interesting analogy but an inversion of how I see it. The defense attorney must abandon their natural biases and behave as if they had an unconditional and irrational faith in their client's innocence. This does not come naturally.

The Economist article, tends to conflate objectivity with balance. I see objectivity as critical thinking coupled with tricks to overcome our innate biases. Objectivity is what a judge is supposed to do, to further the original analogy.

You're describing a robot. People don't work like that.

I believe this is sadly similar to doping. As soon as the first journalists started becoming "more entertaining to read" with salacious details or moralistic rhetoric, other outlets had to do it too to not lose readers and keep up.

The better question is why people respond more to Fox News than proper, grounded publications. Until we figure that out, said publications will either maintain a sense of duty and impartiality and inevitably go under, or just start churning out the same clickbait trash to keep the lights on.

The implication you're making here is that the current reporting is neutral/objective.

>I personally think it’s really frightening. If journalists at our most major institutions believe their work should pursue an agenda like combating racism, that’s horrific.

Biased newspapers have existed for a long time[0]. I'm not quite sure why "Racism is bad" is considered a political agenda though

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Argo

    My rag of choice attempts objectivity.
    Yours is biased.
    Theirs are state controlled.

"The collected news of any modern country contains more truth each day than any one man can could read in a lifetime. The reporters, editors, writers, announcers who collect truth not only collect it; they select it. ... If they select it to "affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose," it is propaganda. If they report that a little girl fell out of bed and broke her neck—with the intent of frightening parents among their listeners into following the Safe Homes Week Campaign—that is propaganda. But if they report it because it is the only death in the community, and because they might as well fill up the program, it is not propaganda. If you put the statement on the air, "An American negro workman in Greensboro, N. C., got eighty cents for a hard day's work last week," that can be presented and interpreted as:

(a.) simple news, if there is something more to the story, about what the man said, or how he spent the eighty cents on corn meal to feed his pet tarantula;

(b.) anti-capitalist propaganda, if you show that eighty cents is mighty little money for American business to pay its workers;

(c.) pro-capitalist propaganda, if you show that the eighty cents will buy more than two weeks' wages of a worker in the city of Riga, when it comes to consumer goods;

(d.) anti-White propaganda, if you show the man got only eighty cents because he was a Negro.

And so on, through a further variety of interpretations. The facts—man, happening, amount, place, time—are true in each case. They could be sworn to by the whole membership of an interfaith conference. But the interpretation placed on them—who communicates these facts to whom? why? when?—makes them into propaganda."

"If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."

No. I still get the NYT daily email briefing and it shows a clear bias and agenda every day. Which reminds me, I need to cancel that.

Maybe it is the target audience. If you want to make money, you do not want your information to be politically biased.

But government regulation is only effective against individual bad actors in a democracy. When the regulators themselves can be expected to be corrupt, government regulation is a cure at least as bad as the disease. Unfortunately, I don't see much hope for the US mainstream until a "Sputnik moment" happens that makes it clear to even those gaining the largest relative advantages from the status quo that they too stand to lose big if current practices continue. And that'll be too late for my family if the Sputnik moment takes the form of Taiwan falling to the PRC.

Perfection is impossible as well. But we should all strive to better ourselves.

Objectivivity may be impossible. But journalists can still strive to be as unbiased as possible.

Yeah, people say they want objectivity, that they want facts, but then they'll complain about bias when they read that their opinion on something is objectively not based in fact.

As an example, how many people are complaining about objectivity, while also refusing to even entertain the idea that someone who says "COVID-19 is a hoax" is a liar?

There are facts to support most viewpoints, but most can also be readily attributed to other factors. However, when presented in certain lenses it's near impossible to tell who is correct (without going off and doing independent research).

There was period where objectivity was defined as asking both sides and then being seemingly neutral. But it is debatable how objective it was and how much it was just shared consensus.

But tabloids always existed even during that period. And they were not objective at all.

Some, but probably not most; most developed democracies _severely_ limit spending on political campaigning. The US is something of an oddity there.

It depends where you are - I'm in the UK where TV news still has objectivity regulation. I know that's been gone in the US for a long time.

In general though I think when there were fewer publications and delivery channels that we had to share together (the newspaper stand), journalists had to appeal to a wider audience than they do now.

Personal devices mean they have a direct route to you, on an article-by-article basis. So they can write whatever lands in a niche.

The best we can hope for IMO is journalism that is up front about it's biases and political slant and clearly distinguishes factual and opinion reporting.

It could be, but it would turn most news organizations into simple notification services that resemble weather reports. Some folks desire the opinions and biased views.

The media can be more, or less objective. It can be more, or less impartial. Each source can have bias, more, or less. The problem becomes when sources centralize around political ideas and competition decreases. What was once nationwide respected newspapers and 1 hour evening news, became 3 major 24/7 news-channels, decimated newspaper industry controlled by conglomerates, and social media being gamed by everyone squeezing dollars out of an uneducated populace.

I genuinely challenge people on here to read old newspapers and look at the difference in reporting. There were far more newspapers - every major city had one. The nightly news didn't have time to have a "panel" of "experts" discuss how "issue x will destroy america."

And instead of addressing the real issue - the money behind politics (i.e. citizens united, coinciding with social media), you say it's "inherent to media." No it is not. media needs to be free and it needs to be decentralized. And no, it does not need to be perfect.

If we just say that there is no impartiality, we put the news outlets that do a lot of research and strive to give news reports painting a balanced view of reality at the same level as propaganda machines that completely disregard facts.

There's a difference between having a bias in your reporting and being an activist. Of course every viewpoint is biased. At the very least, there was always a heavy American bias in the mainstream media.

But today they're rabidly and without much self reflection trying to destroy any opposition to creating a society at large that strictly conforms to their vision for the world. And they're doing so without much integrity or a commitment to accept those with alternative ideas as having any legitimacy.

100%? No. But it was much more objective and impartial. Journalism ethics were more important than pandering to specific target audiences. Now it's become a popularity contest and truth is very unpopular.

"Objective" or "impartial" were never descriptive - they were aspirational. It's a philosophy that says "check your assumptions" and "let the reader draw conclusions." It's this aspiration that appears to be leaving the industry.

I recently saw an article in the NY Times.

Headline: "Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are A Major Source of Cases." Body (summarized): 650 cases linked to churches and religious events since the start of the pandemic.

I believe this was published on the same day that the US crossed 3,000,000 cases, meaning that this "major source of cases" was linked to 0.022% of all cases.

So, why I brought this up. Is there a fully objective way to share this news? Of course not - the very act of publishing an article about church transmission is political - looking for that data was a result of bias. But there clearly was a more objective way to publish it, by changing the title from one that's so obviously bullshit to one that just shares the facts.

Edit: it appears that NYT changed the headline 2 days after publishing. DDG search, top result is the old headline, click through and it has a new one: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=churches+were+eager+to+reopen+site...

With respect to the mainstream media, there was always some bias in terms of what was reported. What we are seeing today is something entirely different and very dangerous.

The original article pointed to a couple of the problems with the media today, things like there being disagreement over what the facts are and how balanced reporting has a tendency to misrepresent the facts. I would go a step further by suggesting that facts and context have been abandoned altogether.

The end result is that two media outlets can tell two very different stories about the same issue. Ignoring facts is how we end up with protests being described as riots, or being described as protests with undue emphasis upon violence (which is a clear case of balance misrepresenting the facts). At the opposite end of the spectrum, I have seen individual claims left unquestioned in the name of moral clarity. The sad part is that reporters could take a step back, look at what is happening at a societal level, and have damning evidence that backs their moral clarity with facts.

If you believe that this is nothing new, I would suggest pulling up a full newspaper from thirty years ago. You would find that news reporting is clearly separated from other content. You would also find that moral clarity is in there, but it would be clearly presented in forms such as the editorial or human interest story. Lines were drawn instead of blurred.

However there are degrees, and this does NOT mean that neutrality is not worth fighting for. The points about authoritarian states serve to highlight how much worse it could be without a constant pressure toward objectivity (or as close as we can get).

The claim to impartiality and unbiased-ness was indeed a way for certain papers to enhance their credibility and it's been concentrated more in the US than other countries, where each political party having a newspaper is a situation that doesn't raise eyebrows (still, papers in other countries do sometimes try for the mantle of objectivity, independence and so).

That said, there are degrees of spin and non-spin. The papers that make up stories are below those that exaggerate facts who are below those that get the facts correct but use "framing" to put forward their positions.

I think mass support for false facts is new for the industrializing world. It's kind of a throwback to times of pernicious superstition. And the result one can imagine are thus disturbing.

A physical newspaper has a natural tendency to incentivize payment models where the reader pays for the paper; a physical newspaper is much harder to alter after-the-fact; and a physical newspaper lends itself to a daily news cycle which gives writers time to think more carefully about what they write (with "Extra" editions being reserved for truly rare occasions like war breaking out or presidential assassinations).

Half a decade? 5 years?

Compounding that they were blind enough to use the youth and their hobbies as punching bags while getting the most basic details wrong. Then wonder why their demographics keep drifting older.

I know that is whataboutism, but what about it?

Linebarger's Psychological Warfare (1948) has a history of tradecraft that goes back to biblical episodes.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm

flame wars in the seventeenth:

"The vocabulary of seventeenth-century propaganda had a strident tone which is, perhaps unfortunately, getting to be characteristic of the twentieth century. The following epithets sound like an American Legion description of Communists, or a Communist description of the Polish democrats, yet they were applied in a book by a Lutheran to Quakers. The title of the tirade reads, in part:

... a description of the ... new Quakers, making known the sum of their manifold blasphemous opinions, dangerous practices, Godless crimes, attempts to subvert civil government in the churches and in the community life of the world; together with their idiotic games, their laughable action and behavior, which is enough to make sober Christian persons breathless, and which is like death, and which can display the lazy stinking cadaver of their fanatical doctrines....

In its first few pages, the book accuses the Quakers of obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy. Milton was not out of fashion in applying bad manners to propaganda. It is merely regrettable that he did not transcend the frailties of his time."

(europe's wars of religion were both extremely polarising and far less effective at determining who was right than who was left.)

https://nypost.com/2019/05/20/richard-carranza-held-doe-whit...

https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...

What made all this worse was the fact that Der Spiegel was looked up to for (supposedly) having a solid team of fact-checkers.

As the medium post shows (and the magazine's own investigation afterwards) was that not even basic and publicly available info was checked, such as the percentage of pro-Trump voters, let alone the rest of the original article's hilariously ridiculous claims.

Another Der Spiegel reporter who was suspicious of Relotius tried raising his concerns with the management after he did some digging of his own, which almost cost him his job and reputation:

https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/02/26/inenglish/15511...

Der Spiegel enjoyed the profits of Relotius' fiction and peddled literal fake news to the world for years, and the magazine's readers lapped it all up because it reinforced their biases.

This is definitely the real issue a lot of news sites/sources have now. They have an audience in mind, they and that audience have some ideas about what the world is like, and anything that conforms to that view isn't properly fact checked at all.

If you want to get a hoax past any news outlet, make it a story that shows their ideological opponents in a bad light.

He got busted by computer nerds outing him over a hacking story, not his articles on conservatives.

[1] The story he wrote - http://penenberg.com/story-archive/hack-heaven/ [2] The story which brought him down - https://www.forbes.com/1998/05/11/otw3.html#35e255922d7f