Ha! What a scam. Greece in the blue zone? Oh boy, I really want to see the full dataset of this "report". The journalist scandals and corruption in mainstream media in Greece has gone through the roof. If these "analysts" put it at the blue zone I can't imagine what's the situation at the yellow zones.
Edit: I know it's teal, by saying blue I meant the lower-end zone, doesn't change my point
I would agree with your point but there is a problem on the scale. The scale starts from 0 and goes to 100. It is thus imperative that when you see a country near the 0 zone you think "Ah! Things are good there!". So the visualization is missleading, that' why I said I want to see the dataset. I don't want to see it in relative score, but in absolute score. If every country on earth is on the red zone, then paint it all red.
Greece's government paid millions of euros to the mainstream media so that they allign with the government's narative on how the pandemic is being handled. They also give out non-papers to prevent media from saying bad things about the president. The police recently heavily restricted the freedom of journalists covering demonstrations. Is it clear now? That's just the tip
I think that's very different than what they're attempting to capture here.
Bribery is a little different than coercion by force. Bribery is something even the freest of institute is susceptible.
Edit: it very explicitly defines this in the article. Media's ability to provide unbiased journalism independent to the state is not a metric. Indeed in a relatively free US there is terrible journalism everywhere you look. It's just not under the thumb of the state.
I don't think your argument is very valid based on what they say their metrics are. Listing the relevant ones: Pluralism, Media independence, Legislative framework, Transparency.
These are the metrics relevant to the examples I gave earlier. I don't think the score is fair. I did a bit of diging on their website and there is some coverage on many of the examples I listed, which surprises me. It may truly be a visualization issue
>The criteria evaluated in the questionnaire are pluralism, media independence, media environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information.
Bribery clearly falls into "media independence", perhaps also "self-censorship" (censor yourself to get free money).
Their description of media independence:
>Measures the degree to which the media are able to function independently of sources of political, governmental, business and religious power and influence.
Again I think bribery and other soft/financial coercion should clearly be included here.
Even if something is unavoidable, it can still be a barrier to freedom.
Besides, I think there are lots of steps possible to limit bribery, from better living standards to closer scrutiny of money flows to the general culture of tacit acceptance, making it easier to report, etcetera. Also I don't see why bribery is different than e.g. violence or state persecution. "Even the freest institute is susceptible to state violence", you might say just as well.
It's usually not necessary to announce you're done unless you want to get the last word for some reason.
In the case that you are interested, ability to be bribed is not a feature or attribute unique to freedom or lack thereof and therefore cannot be a discriminator.
Kites can be red. Shoes can be red. If red then kite is an example of the logical error.
You are looking at things in a vacumn and that's what preventing you from seeing the point here. When a gov actively bribes media it's not "just" an act of bribing that could or couldn't have happened. It implies pre-existing relationships between gov and media. It implies allignment of interests between gov and media. It implies will to comply to yhe gov. It implies future bonding between gov and media. Technically, the media are still "free". But we don't really care about the freedom of media to allign with the status quo. We care about the opposite. The reason media is useful and thr reason we care for oppression of the press is because we want media that can report against the gov who may have potentially done something bad. In that context, in real life, bribery is an indirect form of control. It's an indirect form of restricting freedom
Ok, let's not talk semantics then. Let's talk essence. If these metrics portray this country as a "good enough" place for journalism, then these metrics are of no value, because the reality is: mainstream journalism is broken to the point of causing harm to the citizens. Soft bribe, hard bribe, little corruption, much corruption... Does it matter? Not to me, the end result is bad. I don't care if journalists willingly play the government's game or not.
Maybe I'm not the intended audience for this report
> Are there more examples you left out? Because freedom does not preclude the susceptibility to bribery.
Yes there are multiple reports of police preventing indepedent journalists from covering hot controversial topics. There are reports of that on the site itself
If they are bought and paid for, then powerful entities don't need to suppress them through blackmail or violence.
So without accounting for corrupt journalism the metric of journalistic freedom alone is misleading.
Bribery is on the same axis as honesty, not freedom. It would be a metric in the World Press Honesty Index. There are countries where the government doesn't even have to bribe press to make journalists write and say what the regime wants.
At Security First (https://www.secfirst.org), we build an open source mobile app for journalists and activists to learn about digital and physical security topics ranging from phishing to kidnap. We also do training for journalists and activists all over the world. At present we suspect that 2021 is trending towards being one of the worst years on record unfortunately. Myanmar for example has proven to be a disaster.
For those looking at such things. It's always worth considering the wider civil society also.
Often for example we may be doing an analysis of risk in a country and while there may not be currently some on journalists, there may be some on human rights defenders so that may frame how we view things. Let's say we know NSO Group is used in the country against activists or that local intelligence puts civil society members under physical surveillance.
Of course risks tend to be quite different. For example journalists more likely to be arrested or intimidated, aid workers more likely to be kidnapped etc.
There is also a lot of under reporting. This is because of the nature of each sort of position. For example environmental defenders tend to be more local, say someone defending their land in the Amazon, compared to a journalist. So those attacks are often harder to record.
Also, people sometimes may wear multiple hats. So an LGBTIQ+ activist in Russia might also be a blogger. It might be difficult to figure out exactly why some threat to their safety occured.
You expect China and Myanmar to attack journalists, but we've seen journalists arrested live on TV in the USA [0], we've seen police attacking journalists in the UK [1], and we've seen attacks on journalists encouraged by so called "leaders of the free world" [2][3]
It feels to me that things have massively regressed in the last 10 years ago and we're in a far more dangerous world
Yes very true. Also press freedom in a lot of states includes stuff like media ownership and local law. I know for example Ireland was ranking quite low considering it's pretty safe for journalists physically but libel law and media ownership are problems here.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve also lost a lot of respect for the press over the past few years. Their desire for clicks are taking precedent over objectivity.
That said, the press shouldn’t be restricted just because they do a bad job.
In fairness to the US, there were many more encounters between police and the press during tense situations than there have been in prior years. I doubt we’ve regressed much, but rather police probably aren’t thoroughly trained for dealing with the press under those circumstances (nor likely were they previously) and they had far more encounters with journalists while working long hours at anti-police protests. That alone would explain an uptick in conflicts with the press. Also, kindly note that I’m not expressing support for police or suggesting journalists “had it coming”—only pointing out that there might be a better explanation for the uptick in conflicts besides a rise in authoritarianism.
I see so much self-regard from journalists, so much concern about their own safety, their freedom, their economical well being, the competitive threats they feel from substack. I have yet to see a single article from any main stream journalist accept a shred of responsibility for their part in eroding public trust and inciting division and hatred. It is as of all the people who had integrity or any sense of duty left the profession. We live in a sea of mis-information, we desperately need help making sense of the deluge of nonsense coming our way every day and the societal organ responsible for that spends its time contributing to the chaos or flattering itself. As far as I am concerned main stream journalism has sold its sold and it cannot die fast enough.
This year, last year and many years before that, brave journalists got up in the morning to report the news, to inform the public. They never made it home. They were arrested and killed because of the work they do.
150 million people read a newspaper every day in India alone. Your "whatabboutism" based on Substack, a tool that few outside the US bubble even know or care about, is really missing the mark here. I've lost count on how many massively complex investigations I've helped journalists work on to expose everything from war crimes to Trump's finances. Sometimes dozens of people working on it at a time, multiple countries, a few different news outlets, skills ranging from investigation to IT, with centuries of experience between everyone involved, over months or years. No way in hell a glorified blog is going to replace that.
> This year, last year and many years before that, brave journalists got up in the morning to report the news, to inform the public. They never made it home. They were arrested and killed because of the work they do.
The parent’s point seems to be that the “brave journalist” has become supplanted by the sensationalist masquerading as journalist. No doubt there are some brave journalists or even journalists with integrity, but they’re a dying breed.
Additionally your post seems condescending and snarky, which is always inappropriate and all the more so when you’re the one not following the plot.
It is not the journalists that are dying, but the system that supported their work.
Journalism takes a lot of resources. If you starve it of it, you kill it's integrity and end up with a least effort / highest impact product. Firing the fact checkers, because in "digital" you can fix stuff after publishing; reduce correspondents networks because you can now just copy stuff from some random person on Twitter that is supposedly there; offer people money to send in pictures of events so you don't have to pay a photographer/agency; maximizing reuse of content; hire journalists based on their klout score to increase reach; racing which outlet is the first to send the push notification and follow up story after an event, etc.
Independent journalists on blogs or Youtube, no matter how well their intentions, can not easily replace it. You don't have a legal department backing you up for critical stories; extensive network of sources and experts; you can't work extended periods of time on a single story because the algorithm overlords demand high frequency short form content. So they often end up doing not much more than summarizing what others have written. Which is valuable, but it is not where the heavy lifting is done.
I do hope, new, better forms of journalism evolve from it, but I'm a bit skeptical, given that so far it seems, that to be successful monetarily, the key ingredients are being loud, controversial and highly opinionated.
I agree with most of this. “Journalists (of integrity) are dying out” is a simplification. To your point, the whole of journalism is changing—as you mention, fact checkers are being fired and so on, but to my point, newsrooms are hiring and promoting the journalists (and editors, etc) who show a penchant for sensationalism and/or partisanship because that’s the new business model. And the journalists with integrity are increasingly relegated toward obscurity (although of course there are exceptions who prove the rule). That’s the sense in which I meant “journalists with integrity/bravery are a dying breed”.
I also agree that Substack isn’t going to reinvent the Walter Cronkite era of journalism overnight if ever. Replacing sickly institutions (which evolved over many centuries) is hard, especially when those institutions’ illness is derived at least in part from the same cultural pathogens that the new platform is likewise subject to. On the other hand, it feels necessary to at least try something different than the mainstream toxicity. I doubt Substack will be the answer, but I think it could either be a first step toward a new media landscape or perhaps the threat that causes the established media to shape up.
First, Substack isn't even mentioned, but I'll assume the author removed it, which likely means it wasn't core to their argument and you missed the forest for the trees.
Second, whatabboutism implies a certain level of intent to derail a conversation in my eyes, it's not about simply saying "what about".
One of the problems I've noticed with modern discourse is that everybody has this narrative in their mind that the "others" are here in bad faith and have some box of psychological trickery at their disposal. In this way, maybe it's more expedient to people to attack the presenter instead of the idea, but it's impact on discourse is palpable.
Policeman, fireman, soldiers, all get killed doing what they do. Your average journalist, trolling for outrage porn on Twitter is not fit to be mentioned in the same sentence. The fact that Substack is a threat to "journalism" and the defensiveness of your post is another indicator it indeed is, should give you a clue as to how badly the journalistic class has fallen. Their best people, the ones that have any integrity and independence are leaving in troves to places like substack, despite the lack of resources you correctly point out. All that will be left in a few years are a bunch of middle-aged, navel gazing pseudo-activists, writing for each other, all wallowing on their own special brand of poison.
Agreed. Circa 2016, I was hoping that institutions like the NY Times would be a bulwark against the coming wave of misinformation and propaganda.
Instead, the Times realized that propaganda was profitable, Brooklynites or wannabe-Brooklynites were wealthy enough to fleece, and that "real news" was boring. And here we are: hoping that some random Silicon Valley startup can save the Truth for civilization.
I have no truck with MAGA folks, but NYT joined the rest of the media in maligning a group of teenagers wearing MAGA hats as initiating a conflict with a Native American “Elder” when the source video shows a more bizarre (and frankly more newsworthy) story: the boys were waiting for their busses during a school trip and they were accosted by some Black Hebrew Israelites (including racist and homophobic slurs) after which the Native American man, Nathan Phillips (who was initially falsely reported to be a veteran, although I don’t recall if the Times also propagated this particular falsehood), tried to match his group through the group of kids in a very odd and confrontational style (by his own admission he didn’t think he ought to have to go around the group because he was tired of being made to yield to whites or some such). Hardly the “Boys with MAGA hats surround Native American Elder” headline that NYT and others ran.
I suspect if this wasn’t some viral social media nonsense established publishers wouldn’t wasted any effort on this. When you are funded by advertising you go where the eyeballs are.
I encourage you to watch the video and read the various descriptions of what happened. I don’t believe even Mr. Phillips alleges that the boys were attempting to intimidate anyone. I don’t think anyone could consider their actions to be “intimidation”. If you have such a tenuous definition of the term, then surely Mr. Phillips by drumming directly toward the boys (who had just been accosted) is the guilty party. But again, I think that would be absurd to consider it intimidation rather than a bizarre misunderstanding or mere bad behavior.
Sure. For example, in the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting, the NYT and other news organizations frequently described him as "unarmed" (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/us/politics/trump-kenosha...). This description was false - the famous video shows police officers instructing him to "drop the knife", both local law enforcement and the DOJ said that he was holding a knife, and Blake himself has since acknowledged that he was.
A current example of such bad journalism is the May 15, 2020
edition of the New York Times. On the front page of the
Times (and “above the fold” to boot) is Peter Baker’s article
on Trump’s latest campaign against President Barack
Obama, now given the politically charged catchphrase of
“Obamagate.” The charge is a typical Trumpian diversionary
tactic that has no substantive or evidentiary basis in fact.
Meanwhile, on the inside pages of the Times, we find the
testimony of a courageous whistleblower, Dr. Rick Bright, the
former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Authority, who documented the Trump
administration’s dereliction of duty in responding to the
Covid-19 crisis. Bright’s testimony was definitely front
page news.
The “Obamagate” charge is disinformation, a total fraud. It
should be confined to the echo chambers of Fox News and
right-wing social media. But Baker’s article gives the story
greater legs, and it is a perfect example of the false
equivalence that has dominated the Times’ coverage of Trump
since his campaign in 2015. Half the article was devoted
to Trump’s grievances with his predecessor, and Senator
Lindsay Graham’s immediate willingness to investigate the
phony charges. And half was devoted to the fact that the
accusations involved “undefined and unspecified crimes.”
The following day, an article in the Times concluded that it
was Trump’s “unbending…belief” that Obama was “personally
involved in a plot against him.” It is impossible to know
what Trump actually believes so why would the Times give
him the benefit of the doubt?
> We live in a sea of mis-information, we desperately need help making sense of the deluge of nonsense coming our way every day and the societal organ responsible for that spends its time contributing to the chaos or flattering itself.
The easiest way to start is by not confusing mainstream journalism for its editorialists. Due to that I have completely written off FoxNews and anything that refers to itself as liberal or conservative news.
An ever better way to avoid nonsense and misinformation is not use social media as a news source.
If you aren’t willing to do, or incapable of, just those two things it’s hard to take you seriously.
Lately, I have really fallen into favor with France24 and Al Jazeera for news.
The same can be said of the BBC. That is actually how journalism is funded in much of the world, state-sponsor or state official news. That is potentially but not necessarily problematic.
BBC has also trended sharply away from neutrality and objectivity in its pursuit of clicks, so I’m not sure this is the best example to make your point.
This is not my perception at all, do you have any evidence or anecdata for that claim?
The BBC has always produced a varied mix of palatable mainstream entertainment, niche entertainment, independent news and investigative reporting. Criticism of the BBC for being too mainstream or not mainstream enough is as old as the BBC.
In any case, compared to the US it's a completely different world.
There was a speech given by Sharyl Attkisson explaining the issue with today’s “journalism”.
In short, the slanted media is what is being taught in school and writing slanted articles that please the corporate owner will get rewarded. Truth has no place under the current environment. However, there is hope.
Her Wikipedia entry states that she formerly worked for an outfit funded by the Heritage Foundation, and now Sinclair. She also is involved in anti-vaccine reporting and tries to link autism to vaccines. So sounds more like the pot calling the kettle black.
You’ve kinda conveniently skipped over her 21 year stint at CBS. Maybe she did just go off the deep end, I can’t vouch for her credibility myself, but I think you’ve gotta consider the possibility that she’s speaking about problems she saw from personal experience.
I think it’s fair to wonder who is monetarily behind her stating as such when the entire problem is that moneyed interests are creating slanted pieces. It could entirely be that this itself is a moneyed interest creating a slanted piece.
However I still think it’s quite useful, just that I’d want a second opinion that might also be being paid to be slanted in another way. Somewhere in between is truth maybe.
Not really, the entry states she left CBS because they weren't pushing Benghazi enough in her opinion ... following which she moved to stints with a Heritage funded outfit and Sinclair. Both clearly partisan organizations and both instances of "rewarding the corporate funders" while pushing misinformation. So yes, pot meet kettle.
Indeed. The boring Truth has been drowned in favor of outrage and sensationalism. Sometimes I think there should be a World Press Abuse of Freedom Index.
I don't know yet. Perhaps a bitcoin backed reputation market for pundits. Maybe independent, direct to market writers. Maybe a 4th branch of government. We need to try new things.
I agree with your general point that journalists have contributed to the decline of journalism, yet your rant is an unconstructive mix of sweeping generalisation and disregard for underlying systemic issues.
At the end of the day society as a whole agrees how much they value independent journalism and if no consensus is found (or an existing consensus erodes), independent journalism will slowly separate from the main stream.
And while you can observe this progression in most Western democracies, the US sticks out. So the question becomes: Does the US have particularly bad journalists - or - are there US specific factors that fuel the decline of independent journalism in the US?
> And while you can observe this progression in most Western democracies, the US sticks out. So the question becomes: Does the US have particularly bad journalists - or - are there US specific factors that fuel the decline of independent journalism in the US?
On most things post WWII, the US has lead the Western World by 5-15 years. And they also have a culture of very public, very loud debates.
Well, yes, I agree the rant is not constructive, but its at least pointing out a problem that does not seem to be universally seen as such and I like to think there is some use in that.
I’ve worked in journalism for 25+ years and been employed by three of the four major media companies.
Mainstream media is not necessarily left or right; it is corporate. Media bends to the demographics that can bring in revenue.
If it wasn’t apparent before 2016, that election stripped any façade of journalism being separated from the business of media companies. Everyone benefitted from Trump’s antics and they rode stories about them all the way to the bank.*
You would think only “right-wing” media would have benefitted from the Trump campaigns and presidency, but the death of the fairness doctrine made it easier for these media companies to target siloed demographics — left and right — and feed off them.
There was also a seismic shift in newsroom mentality when media companies downsized and went with cheaper, inexperienced journalists and editors. A great deal of the industrial knowledge accumulated by veterans was never appropriately passed on to the new generation.
Also: Too many journalist see themselves as personalities and brands because of the potential financial benefit outside of the newsroom. This has been exacerbated by social media influencer culture. It is hard to be impartial when you insert yourself into the story.
That said, there are good journalists out there who are not looking to do anything other than report on interesting and important matters. Unfortunately in the current media landscape, it can be very tough to filter signal from all the noise.
* not a political statement; simply an observation on how, regardless of leanings, media corporations exploited high ratings.
Fake news at its best. Didn't used to be that way. Just check cnn.com and foxnews.com, are they both reporting from the same planet? Neither is good, they're both polarizing.
In North America, though nations have historically respected the press, journalists in these countries are being challenged by the very institutions on which they report. Journalists and the media regularly face verbal and physical threats, denied access to information, as laws and lawsuits restricting their rights multiply.
Is that it?
How about: “journalists in these countries are being challenged by the very institutions they used to be part of, as pluralism plummets, self-censorship rises to heights not seen since the 1950s and tribal ideology becomes more important than objective reporting in a world aswim in misinformation and deliberately encouraged bias”.
Just a glance at the map tells me they have zero credibility.
My guess is not that they are overtly lying, just juking the stats, devising a test by which “the press” passes but which fails to capture the real heart of the question which is whether the press is a net positive source of information, useful for informing the body politic such that they can make wise long-term decisions. Or not. Or the opposite of that.
Anyone not living under a rock can see the trend is moving in the wrong direction, and this bullshit map is not persuasive of anything except maybe that the Reporters Without Borders organization has been subverted by the same incentive landscape that’s twisting and subverting the press as a whole.
I'm well aware of the proxy metrics they chose, and have thought of several ways each could be juked. I'm talking about the heart of the matter which the proxies were selected to measure.
You can reasonably dispute my claim about what the heart is or what underlying reality the proxies were selected to measure, but regardless this whole thing is a big Motte and Bailey:
I say the proxies are bad and poorly measured for the spirit of the matter, and you (in a broad sense I mean--like anyone inclined to reply like you are), point out that there is no spirit, it's just the metrics themselves and nothing more, and that I can't read more into it than that. That I can't impugn the results for not measuring something it never intended to measure.
Fine.
But then, also, separately, these results are in fact (I predict, and would bet) going to be used to support broad, "spiritual-style" claims about the health and usefulness of the global press in general, that are misleading and overbroad based on what was actually measured and how.
This trick is one of the main problems with the way science and journalism are conducted today. I have heard it termed "Distributed Motte and Bailey."
> real heart of the question which is whether the press is a net positive source of information
Having read through most of the comments I get the feeling there is an underlying expectation that "the press" or "journalists" are independent and free by default.
They aren't. It's a democratic achievement that was decades in the making and comes at a premium of either paying journalists directly, or setting aside tax money to fund it. If a society decides it doesn't want to bear the cost, the media will reflect it.
Look at that. Why isn't this USA number 1 in press freedom? Hell I'm surprised it's even that high with witch hunting going on in this cult following country.
The only journalists that matter like Snowden and Assange do get fucked over, the rest don't matter they're a bunch of sniveling lying rats.
Journalists aside, regular citizens in India now are hesitant to even form a collective voice, however widespread the ideals be for fear of being labelled as foreign-backed adversaries.
I don't believe all these stats... I'm pretty sure China would have their own version of the 'Press Freedom Index' which shows China as having perfect press freedom and US and Europe having terrible scores.
Based on what I can observe with my own eyes and having travelled around the world, I don't think there is much press freedom at all in US or Europe. The only difference is that in China, they suck up to the government but in the west, they suck up to corporations. There are pros and cons to either but I wouldn't say one is better than another.
74 comments
[ 185 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadEdit: I know it's teal, by saying blue I meant the lower-end zone, doesn't change my point
This is about how states treat the media, not how the media independently behaves.
Bribery is a little different than coercion by force. Bribery is something even the freest of institute is susceptible.
Edit: it very explicitly defines this in the article. Media's ability to provide unbiased journalism independent to the state is not a metric. Indeed in a relatively free US there is terrible journalism everywhere you look. It's just not under the thumb of the state.
These are the metrics relevant to the examples I gave earlier. I don't think the score is fair. I did a bit of diging on their website and there is some coverage on many of the examples I listed, which surprises me. It may truly be a visualization issue
Are there more examples you left out? Because freedom does not preclude the susceptibility to bribery.
>The criteria evaluated in the questionnaire are pluralism, media independence, media environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information.
Bribery clearly falls into "media independence", perhaps also "self-censorship" (censor yourself to get free money).
Their description of media independence:
>Measures the degree to which the media are able to function independently of sources of political, governmental, business and religious power and influence.
Again I think bribery and other soft/financial coercion should clearly be included here.
Freedom does not preclude vulnerability to greed
Besides, I think there are lots of steps possible to limit bribery, from better living standards to closer scrutiny of money flows to the general culture of tacit acceptance, making it easier to report, etcetera. Also I don't see why bribery is different than e.g. violence or state persecution. "Even the freest institute is susceptible to state violence", you might say just as well.
If it's equally possible in completely free and completely unfree scenarios how can you use it as a metric to show something is not free?
In the case that you are interested, ability to be bribed is not a feature or attribute unique to freedom or lack thereof and therefore cannot be a discriminator.
Kites can be red. Shoes can be red. If red then kite is an example of the logical error.
Maybe I'm not the intended audience for this report
> Are there more examples you left out? Because freedom does not preclude the susceptibility to bribery.
Yes there are multiple reports of police preventing indepedent journalists from covering hot controversial topics. There are reports of that on the site itself
I think that's the issue: it's measuring a good enough place for journalistic freedom. That doesn't ensure the press will behave in an unbiased way.
If I can compell you with the stick i have no reason to offer you a carrot
https://rsf.org/en/ranking
At Security First (https://www.secfirst.org), we build an open source mobile app for journalists and activists to learn about digital and physical security topics ranging from phishing to kidnap. We also do training for journalists and activists all over the world. At present we suspect that 2021 is trending towards being one of the worst years on record unfortunately. Myanmar for example has proven to be a disaster.
For those looking at such things. It's always worth considering the wider civil society also.
For example,
Attacks on human rights defenders: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/
Attacks on aid workers: https://aidworkersecurity.org/incidents/report
Attacks on environmental Defenders: https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-act...
Often for example we may be doing an analysis of risk in a country and while there may not be currently some on journalists, there may be some on human rights defenders so that may frame how we view things. Let's say we know NSO Group is used in the country against activists or that local intelligence puts civil society members under physical surveillance.
Of course risks tend to be quite different. For example journalists more likely to be arrested or intimidated, aid workers more likely to be kidnapped etc.
There is also a lot of under reporting. This is because of the nature of each sort of position. For example environmental defenders tend to be more local, say someone defending their land in the Amazon, compared to a journalist. So those attacks are often harder to record.
Also, people sometimes may wear multiple hats. So an LGBTIQ+ activist in Russia might also be a blogger. It might be difficult to figure out exactly why some threat to their safety occured.
It feels to me that things have massively regressed in the last 10 years ago and we're in a far more dangerous world
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52854980
[1] https://twitter.com/MatthewDresch/status/1375606889740898305...
[2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/04/16/repor...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/23/vilify...
That said, the press shouldn’t be restricted just because they do a bad job.
150 million people read a newspaper every day in India alone. Your "whatabboutism" based on Substack, a tool that few outside the US bubble even know or care about, is really missing the mark here. I've lost count on how many massively complex investigations I've helped journalists work on to expose everything from war crimes to Trump's finances. Sometimes dozens of people working on it at a time, multiple countries, a few different news outlets, skills ranging from investigation to IT, with centuries of experience between everyone involved, over months or years. No way in hell a glorified blog is going to replace that.
The parent’s point seems to be that the “brave journalist” has become supplanted by the sensationalist masquerading as journalist. No doubt there are some brave journalists or even journalists with integrity, but they’re a dying breed.
Additionally your post seems condescending and snarky, which is always inappropriate and all the more so when you’re the one not following the plot.
Journalism takes a lot of resources. If you starve it of it, you kill it's integrity and end up with a least effort / highest impact product. Firing the fact checkers, because in "digital" you can fix stuff after publishing; reduce correspondents networks because you can now just copy stuff from some random person on Twitter that is supposedly there; offer people money to send in pictures of events so you don't have to pay a photographer/agency; maximizing reuse of content; hire journalists based on their klout score to increase reach; racing which outlet is the first to send the push notification and follow up story after an event, etc.
Independent journalists on blogs or Youtube, no matter how well their intentions, can not easily replace it. You don't have a legal department backing you up for critical stories; extensive network of sources and experts; you can't work extended periods of time on a single story because the algorithm overlords demand high frequency short form content. So they often end up doing not much more than summarizing what others have written. Which is valuable, but it is not where the heavy lifting is done.
I do hope, new, better forms of journalism evolve from it, but I'm a bit skeptical, given that so far it seems, that to be successful monetarily, the key ingredients are being loud, controversial and highly opinionated.
I also agree that Substack isn’t going to reinvent the Walter Cronkite era of journalism overnight if ever. Replacing sickly institutions (which evolved over many centuries) is hard, especially when those institutions’ illness is derived at least in part from the same cultural pathogens that the new platform is likewise subject to. On the other hand, it feels necessary to at least try something different than the mainstream toxicity. I doubt Substack will be the answer, but I think it could either be a first step toward a new media landscape or perhaps the threat that causes the established media to shape up.
First, Substack isn't even mentioned, but I'll assume the author removed it, which likely means it wasn't core to their argument and you missed the forest for the trees.
Second, whatabboutism implies a certain level of intent to derail a conversation in my eyes, it's not about simply saying "what about".
One of the problems I've noticed with modern discourse is that everybody has this narrative in their mind that the "others" are here in bad faith and have some box of psychological trickery at their disposal. In this way, maybe it's more expedient to people to attack the presenter instead of the idea, but it's impact on discourse is palpable.
Instead, the Times realized that propaganda was profitable, Brooklynites or wannabe-Brooklynites were wealthy enough to fleece, and that "real news" was boring. And here we are: hoping that some random Silicon Valley startup can save the Truth for civilization.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intimidation
I suspect if this wasn’t some viral social media nonsense established publishers wouldn’t wasted any effort on this. When you are funded by advertising you go where the eyeballs are.
I used the incorrect legal term. More precisely the boy committed a lesser offense of disorderly conduct according to what the law says for that area.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/19/how-the-new-york-tim...
The easiest way to start is by not confusing mainstream journalism for its editorialists. Due to that I have completely written off FoxNews and anything that refers to itself as liberal or conservative news.
An ever better way to avoid nonsense and misinformation is not use social media as a news source.
If you aren’t willing to do, or incapable of, just those two things it’s hard to take you seriously.
Lately, I have really fallen into favor with France24 and Al Jazeera for news.
This is not my perception at all, do you have any evidence or anecdata for that claim?
The BBC has always produced a varied mix of palatable mainstream entertainment, niche entertainment, independent news and investigative reporting. Criticism of the BBC for being too mainstream or not mainstream enough is as old as the BBC.
In any case, compared to the US it's a completely different world.
In short, the slanted media is what is being taught in school and writing slanted articles that please the corporate owner will get rewarded. Truth has no place under the current environment. However, there is hope.
Link to the speech: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4bxI803q6i8
However I still think it’s quite useful, just that I’d want a second opinion that might also be being paid to be slanted in another way. Somewhere in between is truth maybe.
To be replaced by what though? How will one get the right input that is needed to create and inform one's opinion?
At the end of the day society as a whole agrees how much they value independent journalism and if no consensus is found (or an existing consensus erodes), independent journalism will slowly separate from the main stream.
And while you can observe this progression in most Western democracies, the US sticks out. So the question becomes: Does the US have particularly bad journalists - or - are there US specific factors that fuel the decline of independent journalism in the US?
On most things post WWII, the US has lead the Western World by 5-15 years. And they also have a culture of very public, very loud debates.
Mainstream media is not necessarily left or right; it is corporate. Media bends to the demographics that can bring in revenue.
If it wasn’t apparent before 2016, that election stripped any façade of journalism being separated from the business of media companies. Everyone benefitted from Trump’s antics and they rode stories about them all the way to the bank.*
You would think only “right-wing” media would have benefitted from the Trump campaigns and presidency, but the death of the fairness doctrine made it easier for these media companies to target siloed demographics — left and right — and feed off them.
There was also a seismic shift in newsroom mentality when media companies downsized and went with cheaper, inexperienced journalists and editors. A great deal of the industrial knowledge accumulated by veterans was never appropriately passed on to the new generation.
Also: Too many journalist see themselves as personalities and brands because of the potential financial benefit outside of the newsroom. This has been exacerbated by social media influencer culture. It is hard to be impartial when you insert yourself into the story.
That said, there are good journalists out there who are not looking to do anything other than report on interesting and important matters. Unfortunately in the current media landscape, it can be very tough to filter signal from all the noise.
* not a political statement; simply an observation on how, regardless of leanings, media corporations exploited high ratings.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
The version that was live as I typed this (Sat Mar 27 12:45:00 UTC 2021):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Press_Freedom_Ind...
Is that it?
How about: “journalists in these countries are being challenged by the very institutions they used to be part of, as pluralism plummets, self-censorship rises to heights not seen since the 1950s and tribal ideology becomes more important than objective reporting in a world aswim in misinformation and deliberately encouraged bias”.
My guess is not that they are overtly lying, just juking the stats, devising a test by which “the press” passes but which fails to capture the real heart of the question which is whether the press is a net positive source of information, useful for informing the body politic such that they can make wise long-term decisions. Or not. Or the opposite of that.
Anyone not living under a rock can see the trend is moving in the wrong direction, and this bullshit map is not persuasive of anything except maybe that the Reporters Without Borders organization has been subverted by the same incentive landscape that’s twisting and subverting the press as a whole.
That’s not what they set out to measure.
You can’t say they’re doing it wrong if you change the goalposts to your preference.
You can reasonably dispute my claim about what the heart is or what underlying reality the proxies were selected to measure, but regardless this whole thing is a big Motte and Bailey:
I say the proxies are bad and poorly measured for the spirit of the matter, and you (in a broad sense I mean--like anyone inclined to reply like you are), point out that there is no spirit, it's just the metrics themselves and nothing more, and that I can't read more into it than that. That I can't impugn the results for not measuring something it never intended to measure.
Fine.
But then, also, separately, these results are in fact (I predict, and would bet) going to be used to support broad, "spiritual-style" claims about the health and usefulness of the global press in general, that are misleading and overbroad based on what was actually measured and how.
This trick is one of the main problems with the way science and journalism are conducted today. I have heard it termed "Distributed Motte and Bailey."
Having read through most of the comments I get the feeling there is an underlying expectation that "the press" or "journalists" are independent and free by default.
They aren't. It's a democratic achievement that was decades in the making and comes at a premium of either paying journalists directly, or setting aside tax money to fund it. If a society decides it doesn't want to bear the cost, the media will reflect it.
The only journalists that matter like Snowden and Assange do get fucked over, the rest don't matter they're a bunch of sniveling lying rats.
Nope, questions don't need a question mark.
Based on what I can observe with my own eyes and having travelled around the world, I don't think there is much press freedom at all in US or Europe. The only difference is that in China, they suck up to the government but in the west, they suck up to corporations. There are pros and cons to either but I wouldn't say one is better than another.