This will only continue to get worse. Journalism can never be truly objective. But as we move more and more along this line, where journalists seem content with moving away from the facts, and more towards yellow journalism, and see themselves more and more as activists changing the world, and less as people bringing the truth out. this will only accelerate. As the old guard retires and leaves the news room, we will have completely lost any sense of journalistic integrity.
I did my masters in journalism in 2015... you have no idea how right you are. It was more or less a masters in blogging about your feelings on a topic you just heard about.
It's this opinion shaping that convinces people not to care about the imprisonment of someone acting as a mere conduit to the dissemination of information.
You should be just as bothered, if not more, by the news not making a huge deal out of this and instead reporting on FUD rape allgations against Assange.
It's not just lies and slander, but lies and slander in place of reporting this abuse. It's the media's job to make people aware of their government's wrongdoings.
> They no longer see themselves as a medium to disseminate events but rather shapers of opinions about events.
Journalism has always been shaping opinions, alone by selection aka what gets reported in the evening news and what not. The only ones who manage to pass that mark are the huge news agencies with a worldwide presence, but no reasonable human can consume all of that content.
Reporting about science is another ... hotly debated issue. It is scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and that the virus SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19, a disease that has caused the death of at least 600.000 people in the US and about 3.9 million people worldwide - but for some parts of the country, mostly on the right wing, simply the act of reporting these facts is already seen as "opinion shaping".
And finally, even reporting on events can be seen as "shaping opinions" - think of events like mass or school shootings, where the 2nd amendment crowd complains that the victims or their relatives are being interviewed and calling for gun control. Or BLM and LGBT events - some people see the mere mention of these as "political".
The funny thing about this comment is that it is the perfect demonstration of how media/people omit or spin facts to control the narrative.
Some missing facts:
The CDC and Fauci recommended against masks to protect the mask supply for health providers. Media pushed this messaging.
The vaccines seem to cause heart issues with some people dying from it. Only months later is the CDC admitting supposedly minor heart issues. Furthermore they are pushing people to take it (even those who stand to lose more than to benefit from it). Media pushes this narrative.
The vaccines do seem to work for most people and seem effective against the variants of COVID-19.
Many BLM protests were peaceful but some were taken advantage of and just became opportunities to loot.
Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime.
LOL. "And how long have you been beating your wife?"
babesh is adding facts, mixed with pure opinion, of his own choosing to also further a narrative. Is "Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime." a verified (or even provable) fact? If so, what was omitted from that statement that would have made it less biased. And ultimately, how is he not committing the same sin as corporate media?
> retail executives, police officers and city officials have attributed the surge to Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent larceny as a misdemeanor
Your sources don't even support your opinion/narrative? If anything, I'm afraid your claim to the high ground has worsened.
> In July, the Los Angeles City Council voted to slash $150 million from the LAPD budget.
> Amid the wave of violent crime, Los Angeles voted to increase police funding.The Los Angeles County Metro voted to increase police funding by $36 million.
> The city was even forced to reinstate its gun violence task force after disbanding the Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) only months earlier.
I'm genuinely curious. Do you think if you just scream something loudly and hysterically enough that it will become true? Or do you have some sort of higher goal that you feel can only be achieved by lying to people and that doing so is therefore justified? Or is it simply just malice?
Apparently you can’t read because it isn’t just because it is a misdemeanor but because of the refusal of Chesa Boudin to prosecute.
Look who is picking and choosing which facts to ignore and choosing to spin a narrative. Go watch all the news even of left sided news. There are a lot of complaints about how businesses and communities are hurt. There are increasing calls to fund the police and some communities are starting to do that. Even Chesa Boudin is now saying that businesses need to protected. Even London Breed is saying the same.
They just arrested a person who was on a serial shoplifting spree. Police were complaining that they would arrest people and the DA would just let them free.
“ Homicides and aggravated assaults in the city has increased over the last two years. Year to date, homicide up 26.5 percent over 2020, up 44.9 percent over 2019. Aggravated assault is up 12.8 percent year over year, and 11.3 percent over 2019. Overall violent crime is up year-over-year 5.8 percent, driven by homicide and aggravated assault numbers.”
It's absolutely shocking that homicides are up in 2020 given that a good chunk of SF's population fled during the year and most of the bars/stores were closed and the streets were empty. If homicides were up in that environment, this is very, very bad news for 2021 and 2022.
Which facts is it he's left out? You don't get to just lie and say he's doing it without stating which is being left out.
So given that you are baselessly attacking him, and the only thing that drew you to him was the facts he stated; clearly you don't want him stating them. So again. I ask, why do you want those facts suppressed? And why are you being evasive about answering the question?
Attempted robbery of reporters in front of Oakland City Hall in broad daylight while the reporters were interviewing a cop about Oakland supervisors defunding the police and shifting resources to his crime prevention division.
I think the big changes has been the fracturing of “opinion shapers”. Back in the JFK era nobody talked about his affairs - that was an agreement among the media.
Then the disruption of the 60’s happened and the Vietnam War drove a schism between official govt stance and the truth on the ground and some media personalities were famous for exposing it.
Now everything is fractured and when you dig into it you realize both side are trying to shape the narrative, so both are being selective about the truth.
By fighting over whose wool to pull over your eyes they inadvertently pulled it off entirely.
> The interesting question is what will replace what we now call "journalism", and how it will work.
One might well call it for what it is, PR and propaganda, but in my experience one will want to retain the title "journalist" for all the positive emotional weight it contains.
I've had drinks with a few local paper "journalists" of the current, young generations and the reality of their work is shaping of narrative rather than reporting, but on the topic of job title view themselves in the same light as an Upton Sinclair. Brings to mind the early 2010s "positively changing the world" startup software engineers building Orwellian systems.
I don’t think there such a thing as objective journalism—- there is only who is honest about the lens from which they view the world.
For instance, CNN is left leaning and Fox is right leaning. They should just explicitly state their viewpoint so viewers can calibrate how much credence they give to unsourced claims and see past the political posturing.
I keep seeing allsides.com recommended here but I don't get why people find it valuable. First, it locates things like NPR and BBC news services in the "Center" (whatever that is). I had radical leftist professors that would be to the right of today's NPR. Second, the left->center<-right spectrum is becoming less and less relevant to today's media/political industrial complex. A relevant question for any media outlet re "trust", imho, is of partisanship rather than political preferences. The major media outlets are extremely partisan today and will generally not report outside of their affiliated party's talking points. The DNC/RNC control the Overton window. The distinction between outlets like NPR or Fox and Jacobin or American Conservative is on a Partisan<->Politics spectrum. The other important factor is that the Media is the cultural arm of the Professional-Managerial elite and represents that class's interests. Most on HN are also in that class and can't see past their ideological blinders.
Personally, I find the https://realclearpolitics.com model of just putting headlines from different outlets in a list to be more useful than outsourcing some sort of "bias rating" and "fact-checking" to YAMO (Yet Another Media Outlet).
It's not valuable. One of the things it does is chart "opinion" sources alongside "news" sources, so that the reason you see NPR in the center is that they're talking to a small (and poorly defined) subset of NPR. You see the same thing with NYT "opinion" (allegedly equivalent to Jacobin!) vs. NYT "news" (allegedly equivalently partisan to the Epoch Times!).
I think the real subtext of this chart isn't so much to portray any particular outlet further to the left or right than it is, but rather to boost the credibility of fringe outlets.
... They consider The Economist leftist? Note that The Economist is extremely open about supporting neoliberal economics, being generally anti-tax and anti-regulation. The only way you'd call it left is if you ignored its voluminous discussion of finance, business, and economics and instead observe that it's generally uninterested in prosecuting any culture wars.
Personally prefer the Media Bias Chart from ad fontes. Has the helpful axis on who seems to intentionally leave things out.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/
That being said, I do appreciate that allsides uses an interesting method to blind bias surveys to help categorize. But sometimes things don't always line up.
This is like the statement: “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
It is a true statement, but it doesn’t mean that all models are equally wrong, or that all journalism is equally biased. Objective journalism is an ideal to strive for, even it if cannot be perfectly achieved.
> For instance, CNN is left leaning and Fox is right leaning.
One of these "news" outlets is know for allowing people to repeat baseless, fabricated lies on their station on a daily basis. And when they aren't fabricating lies, their journalists write in such a way to deliberately confuse and mislead their audience.
I say this as an avid reader of Fox News. They straight up lie or mislead constantly. Even their mundane reports are chosen to incite their audience. They once reported on the "Best BBQ places in the US." Weird choice for a national news network right? Well reading through the comments section and people were going berserk because some of the restaurants were not located in the South.
Anyone equating Fox News with any other news outlet is doing America a huge disservice. The place is straight up nothing more than an 1984-esque, pro-authoritarian brainwashing device.
While journalism was/is the fourth estate, the watchdog of the government, the people as the watchdog of journalists is becoming the rising fifth estate. This fifth estate isn't so organized or always of much quality, but observable signal is emerging. Truly, I've noticed a more substantial signal coming from HN comments questioning the veracity of the fourth estate. It's great to see.
That describes it exactly. I think it will have to completely fail, and then a new generation (tragically, probably not the present one, or even then next) will have to rebuild it from the ashes. Maybe the positive way to see the present is as being that prelude to a better day for your grandchildren.
If you aren't objective to the best possible degree, your readers don't trust you anymore. Newspapers are in economic peril, but the trust issue is something a lot of journalists brought on themselves.
Interesting point, but I saw a judge took that to the extreme with a libel suit against Rachael Maddow, by saying no one would ever think she was offering news, only her opinion, thus no one would ever believe her. But people often believe things they've been told, even when it comes from people who are clearly not objective on the matter, so perhaps the judge was wrong.
That ruling was used later to defend Tucker Carlson for basically the same thing. A good way to tell if a source is left or right leaning is to see which of those stories they reported on and how.
Fox News circa 2000's is the best example. A huge outlier for media bias at the time but Republicans tuned in because it reinforced and validated their beliefs.
If you aren't objective to the best possible degree, your readers don't trust you anymore.
That just isn't the case. People trust you if you re-enforce their biases. The news sources that are getting the most traction aren't the most objective ones.
I think maybe you're attributing to malice what can more easily be attributed to the fact that most journalists these days wanted/want to become creative writers, but that doesn't pay consistently so they became journos with the intent to write their novel in their spare time, but then realized they can just scratch the creative writing itch as part of their day job.
I guess maybe I don't understand why one would go into journalism, but if your goal isn't to effect change why be a journalist? Were the journalists working on stories detailing the Catholic Church's pedo problem just doing it for kicks or a book deal?
The silver lining: people recognize that the move from traditional to online journalism has created echo chambers that leave the public unsatisfied. Even though we're being fed what reinforces our view we realize it's not what we want, the article states that this is true for partisans as well.
Hopefully at least some news organizations will figure out a better path, I'm sure we won't go back to the old days but the fact that the younger demographic has pretty much left news media behind means that that generation will have to figure out something more balanced.
I think that rather than creating the echo chamber, it has just made them more visible and more niche. In the old days, most of the country was part of the echo chamber that Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, et. al. led. Since we were (mostly) all in it, it didn't seem like a bubble, just reality. Now internet tech is letting us inflate our own bespoke bubbles, and easily peer into the the other bubbles.
Yes this causes conflict. But in the end multiple echo chambers are an improvement over one big one, plus a few small alternatives that only weirdos like me were in.
Well, everyone being in the same echo chamber is much better than what we have today. At least that's the conventional wisdom. Agree about technology making an existing problem more visible, though. It's not like human nature has suddenly changed.
Coverage (let's say) of left-wing bias in the media has been a major part of right-wing media since at least the early 90s. Limbaugh, for instance, talked about it a lot back then (and I doubt he ever stopped—don't know why he would have), and if he wasn't receiving payment from the advertising department of Fox News, when they started up, he sure should have been (there was a lot of, "well, except Fox News" in his, ah, coverage of left-wing bias). The "the media hates conservatives" thing got his treatment where he acted like it was just a fact that he and his listeners, of course, knew to be true, sometimes calling out what he perceived as examples, but more often just stating it on the way to some other point. From what I've seen, the rest of right-wing punditry (I suppose you'd call it) picked up on this and took a similar approach to it.
The media leftist bias is real, I guess it’s hard to notice from inside the bubble
I was never interested in politics , left or right and never listened to conservative or liberal commentary you mentioned but the coverage of BLM riots, Trump etc especially in 2020 was mostly fake news and blatant propaganda. That’s what brought me to vote for Trump in the first place, the constant lying and manipulation by the media.
I don’t know how otherwise reasonable people can not notice these 24/7 lies by CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. I’m a first gen immigrant, from former communist country, we have a good nose for propaganda and can smell it from afar, I’m surprised American-born Americans are so easily fooled.
I didn't claim it's not. I just meant to point out that people on the right have been told, consistently and repeatedly, that it exists since at least the early 90s, by people whose opinions they sure seem to take seriously, so it'd be unsurprising that many wouldn't trust the media even if it weren't true. The truth of it's almost irrelevant to the poll results.
So you'd predict that without Fox and talk radio telling those people that almost everyone working in national mainstream media falls somewhere on the spectrum of "has no respect for you" and "likes to sincerely fantasize in public about the elimination of your culture", most of them wouldn't be able to independently observe that fact with their own eyes and ears?
I don't think the media abruptly changed at exactly the same time right-wing personalities started talking a ton about media bias, no. Yet I'm sure perceptions did. So yes, I think deliberate promotion of a view to a huge audience, whether it's correct or not, will result in more people believing it's true than people's "own eyes and ears".
I think it's obvious and I haven't spent a second of my life voluntarily consuming any mainstream right-leaning news, but maybe I'm just way, way smarter than all those rubes who you believe have basically no connection with reality outside of when their propaganda happens to be accurate. shrug!!!
Let me be more precise: I think your claim that "The truth of it's almost irrelevant to the poll results" is obviously very wrong. The truth of it does have a lot to do with this perception, especially given 1. the rather more "sincere" journalistic norms we see even in the paper of record in 2021 compared to a few decades ago and 2. the fact that social media makes it easy for people to organically show each other the most egregious examples of this stuff, and I would even go so far as to say that it probably matters more than whatever Fox and talk radio are telling their audiences. Obviously that does also matter somewhat even now, and perhaps it was even more important than the truth of the matter when these right-wing news outlets were first making this claim decades ago, but to think that this widespread perception is "merely accidentally" correct and mainly a result of propaganda is to give the typical right-leaning American far too little credit.
I'm not sure "cherry-picking while removing context has been crowd-sourced" is a great argument for the victory of truth (of the idea of media bias, presumably) over propaganda, but I take your point that the initial drive over a few relatively-centralized media to promote and categorize a "left-wing media" is no longer the main source from which people are receiving that message.
(FWIW, I actually agree with you that many outlets have a consistently left-wing slant, for certain values of "left-wing", on a variety of issues, and I think most of what passes for news media generally is absolute garbage—but I also think that perceptions of that, on the right, tend to be only loosely related to reality, and that media coverage of media bias, to include social media, is itself ground zero for bias)
Actually, I would. It's a priming effect; by focusing on the notion that the rest of the media hates you, you're priming your audience to look at that media specifically to find examples of where it hates you, and indeed to specifically interpret it in a way that finds that the media hates you. The actual truth of that statement is rather less self-evident, and I suspect that far fewer people would agree that it is true without that priming effect.
To give a salient example: I read an article this morning about the ongoing attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan, clearly something that has no respect for those people. Except... it actually has a lot of respect for them, far more than I think they deserve. It treats the request for an audit as nothing more than a request for the audit; there's no questioning on what purpose it could serve other than overturning the election results. There's also this quote: "Last week, a few hundred demonstrators carrying boxes of affidavits signed by thousands of people demanding a state ballot audit showed up at the Capitol." What it doesn't go on to explain is that the "affidavits" are actually foisted contracts that say in effect "if you don't agree to my demands in X days, you are in violation of the law," which has 0 legal effect whatsoever. Does it really "have no respect for [them]"?
Really, if someone suggests that such a push would not be effective at convincing a lot of people, regardless of the truth of what's being promoted, then I'm not sure why they care whether media is biased.
Yes, media's biased. Yes, media lie a lot, often about serious things. Yes, some outlets on some topics tend to slant "left" pretty consistently. It's also true that, in the early days of post-fairness-doctrine right-wing broadcast media, there was a concerted and deliberate effort to promote the notion of the "left wing media" to a much greater degree than it was actually true, at least at the time that effort began, and that it was highly effective.
... but, if it's not possible that suddenly emphasizing the notion of a "left-wing media" may have significantly affected public perception of same, including possibly even if it wasn't true or was being grossly exaggerated, then I suppose we don't need to care about any of that. Right?
Not every article -- not even most articles, really -- need go out of its way reflect the author's and editor's ideology for it to be quite clear that most national news media organizations lean heavily in the same direction and aren't afraid to let that determine what they report on and how they frame it.
But note also that there is a distinction to be drawn towards a media source being biased versus "on the spectrum of 'has no respect for you' and 'likes to sincerely fantasize in public about the elimination of your culture'."
I claimed that almost everyone working for these organizations (or to be more pedantic but more accurate, almost everyone involved in content for these organizations) is well-described by the latter, not that almost every article will reflect that perspective in an obvious way or even at all. For someone who tends to see the world differently from the average journalist or editor, the question then becomes: why take even the articles that aren't obviously biased at face value when you have a good idea of how the individuals involved feel about your culture and your priorities?
Don't be surprised. Our journalists grew up on Cold War propaganda. They don't hire people from the 'other' team. I don't see the Western public ever breaking free from their IC narratives. Imagine a news report on the good deeds Russia/Iran/China do, automatic label of foreign state propaganda.
'Otherwise reasonable' does not negate ignorance and we are overflowing with ignorance thanks to our journalism(propaganda). Logic is some math term which automatically gets trashed because lolol im no good at math who needs that stuff amirite?.
>how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
...to itself be dishonest 'journalistic' spin, in this case perpetuated by John Oliver among others.
"How many" local news outlets is irrelevant when you consider a vast majority of Sinclair's outlets are for tiny rural channels, meanwhile large urban and coastal channels will undoubtedly skew more liberal but be fewer in #.
When else has the metric of "how many channels" ever been used to determine reach and engagement?
Not sure of the numbers, just wanted to point this out.
Decent point, but I think the relevance is that there are large swaths of the US that are blanketed by this conservative news bubble, and that our Senate is apportioned (and to a lesser extent the House) to land, not people. So the fact that lots of land is covered by this bubble is relevant at least to the functioning of the Senate.
But for the Senate the size discrepancy is at the state level not within state races. A senator from Connecticut has less constituents than Texas but still has to win a pure majority in Connecticut.
In any case I think you'll agree this is now a much narrower point about Sinclair than ppl like Oliver intended to make.
(Got my account rate limited cuz too many fellow liberals downvoted me w/o comment. Seems like HN might not be a good place for reasonable discussion on controversial topics.)
Couple targeted messaging with gerrymandering and Sinclair doesn't need full coverage to ensure conservatives can control or make gains in state governments/the house.
Then why talk about the number of channels they have when this is what you actually mean? Like I said, it just strikes me as dishonest in that specific way.
The post was about SBG's influence among those on the right (for one example, when it comes to telling its viewers to distrust the media), not about a specific number of channels.
*Disclaimer: working on a news startup to combat some of these issues*
I find it interesting first of all that local news -- and weather, especially -- are the most trusted in the US. It reminds me of that old half-joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson -- but more likely it's that the issues that hit close to home are less likely to be polarized across traditional political lines.
We've long passed the inflection point where people seem to judge trustworthiness based on alignment to their own predetermined biases. If I tell you that what you think is wrong -- even if I have a factual basis for that; or more mildly, just frame something in a way that you might disagree with, you can label me as biased.
How did we get here? I think a lot of the blame comes from social media. Local news really cannot trend -- by definition it appeals to a narrow audience, and no one is sharing city council minutes. People do share outrage -- forcing the most polarizing content to the top. And, not for nothing, newsfeeds often put propaganda and disinformation -- or just lowest-common-denominator ("7 child stars: where are they now?") -- to compete at the same level as traditional journalism.
Local news stations get their agenda for their parent companies. They are told what to cover, what not to cover, and how to cover things to fit the overarching narrative from executives/producers.
Sinclair viewership numbers dwarf MSNBC’s. They own local news affiliates reaching 40% of American households. MSNBC gets south of 2m viewers in prime time.
Yes, see this post from earlier in the week. It is a youtube video in which dozens of local news stations repeat the exact same script.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27550122
I have lived in places where I had a lower opinion of my congressperson than of the rest of congress, and where the majority voted the opposite direction from myself on laws and ballot measures.
I still found the local news to be much more professional about doing a matter-of-fact reporting job than national news, even for national outlets I may agree with in terms of bias.
Also PBS news has been quite good over the years that I watched it (though I haven't watched any recently, as the current events themselves have become such stress-inducing toxicity, regardless who reports it).
>"Cynthia Bashant, dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that even Maddow's own audience understands that her show consists of exaggeration, hyperbole, and pure opinion, and therefore would not assume that such outlandish accusations are factually true even when she uses the language of certainty and truth when presenting them (“literally is paid Russian propaganda")."
But Fox News argued that Carlson "cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect," the ruling said.
US District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed with Fox's premise, adding that the network "persuasively argues" that "given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statements he makes.""This 'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary,'" the ruling said
This was the same defense used in the rachel maddow lawsuit. Why not use a defense that is known to work?
"For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context," Bashant added.
But Fox News argued that Carlson "cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect," the ruling said.
US District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed with Fox's premise, adding that the network "persuasively argues" that "given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statements he makes.""This 'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary,'" the ruling said
This was the same defense used in the rachel maddow lawsuit. Why not use a defense that is known to work?
No they are not. You just want things to be simple. Left vs right, black vs white. Nuance is necessary and you appear to lack it.
"For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context," Bashant added.
Where did I say anything about humor? I think one's a joke who froths at white rage and the other is a Rhodes scholar with a PhD who obviously engages in hyperbole but is informative, and more importantly is not a Nazi.
I generally agree, but I don't think foreign agitation can be completely dismissed. I've heard there's evidence that Russia was contributing to the rise of both the BLM and Blue Lives movements. The media can exasperate the issue, and may even be a necessary part of that agitation.
In this respect the U.S. is ahead of the rest of the world by a few years. It isn't as though media is siloed geographically. Wherever there's the internet, there's media that is locked in a ratlike struggle for survival, cannibalizing its reputation and standards to stay alive. That pressure is already evenly distributed, even if the dawning realization that it exists is not.
It’s because we have only two major political parties and one of them has increasingly right wing authoritarian and nihilistic tendencies. It’s in their interest to sow distrust of the media / reality despite the damage it is doing to the country, and they have a willing coalition of right wing traditional (Fox, Sinclair) and social media properties to tow the party line on grievance and mistrust, with this latest astroturfed meltdown over “critical race theory” a prime example. As far as I am aware, no other rich Democracy has a set up as bad.
I think you might want to look at the actions of your party. You may not have meant both, but you should understand why somebody who is not on your team would think you did.
I'm trolling? No, I'm being completely genuine. The present-day Democratic Party is objectively more right-wing, authoritarian, and nihilistic than it was 50-60 years ago.
Partisanship and old loyalties make it very hard for people to see the Democratic Party has changed dramatically in the past few decades. Dems used to be the party of the working class, now it's the party of the global elite. Used to be the party of labor, now it's the party of big capital. Used to be the party of civil liberties, now it's the party of censorship, surveillance, and totalitarianism. I tore my membership card up after the past year.
The distrust is so high because people realize CNN, MSNBC and Fox do opinion based journalism, not actual objective reporting as there is no money in the latter.
See this article about the concerted effort between the democrats and the media to defeat trump:
https://archive.is/CRSYG
How many times has the NY Times or the WaPo ran a story about Trump which has proven to be absolutely false?
How about spending years on some false Russian collusion theory about 2016 election? Google: "The Washington Post forced to admit Russia “collusion just isn’t there”"
Trump tells immigrants to not come illegally across the border - "Far right Nazi playbook!!!!"
Harris tells immigrants to not come across the border illegally - "Harris discouraged illegal immigrants from making the journey"
I'm at the point where I instantly dismiss any "world" news that comes from the US. I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.
I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself. Every argument is wedged into an imaginary Team A vs Team B battle and it seems that to remain relevant as a publisher, you have to play that game. People feel personally attacked/validated by every article now because those are the most engaging and publishers will omit certain contexts and facts in any story to facilitate that emotional trigger.
Given that the journalism industry is energised by advertising and political propaganda, it has reached a point where it has become nothing more than an itchy wound that the public keep scratching.
The 24 hour news cycle isn't an issue in itself, but the power games combined with a dangerous economic model and all of the mass media manipulation on sites like reddit, are the core of the issues imo. Having the 24hr cycle (online, and on cable) just amplifies it all and makes it so omnipresent to the fact that despite the great efforts of dictators who put their picture in every place they can, I can bet that Trump managed to become a part of everyones daily life, and in a much more direct fashion, than any dictator could ever dream of, in the anglosphere during his term.
> I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.
Which countries specifically? I know that German-speaking news outlets aren’t any less partisan, and I have little reason to think that the rest of Europe is much better.
I think if you arithmetically add a US and a Russian article and divide it by two, you are as informed as if you had read them separately. Obvious advantage: You can read two articles in one.
In fact, when I was growing up in Germany there was a discussion about whether the US' noble goals of achieving a balanced media was possible or even desirable. The general agreement was that recognizing news sources implicit bias made more sense than trying to balance out reporting. This was in the 70s and 80s, I've been away from Germany for so long now I have no idea which direction things have taken there.
The Guardian is openly biased. But it is at least open.
That's not to say its reporting on the facts is wrong, but its editorials are very definitely partisan and what they choose to report/how they choose to report it often shows this too.
In general it's my favourite news source, but you do have to account for its slant.
I just mean for news that comes directly from US sources. I find things like the Wuhan lab theory to be fascinating, worrying and plausable. But I struggle to find any reliable information about it because (not just, but mainly) US publications have saturated the media with politically driven articles instead of just trying to get to the bottom of it.
I get the impression that most Americans see the rest of the world like some form of a cartoon. They are weirdly detached from the reality of it all. I even get that impression when speaking to regular Americans about other countries and I think the media feeds on, and feeds, this incredibly strange outlook.
If there is any truth to the Wuhan lab leak story, it is an incredibly important thing for every single human on the planet. The idea of a country purposfully, or accidentally, releasing a lab made virus is such a massive threat to every society in the world, even worse than chernobyl, that we need the story to be scrutinised and and reported on with perfect accuracy. Instead, it has somehow become a fuel left/right wing driven click-bait. The articles I have come across on this subject have been pretty much baseless nonsense, or incredibly untrustworthy, and that is just scary.
Europe has problems of course, but it is definitely better. They are partisan but they are less at taking digs at the opposition. America seems to be going through a media war. In the UK it is pretty rotten too, but the writing is usually more accurate and one can find well researched articles.
The most striking thing for me during covid was when it started to make daily news in the US. Up until that point, I felt like I had a really good understanding of what was going on. I found there to be a lot of scientific reporting making it to the mainstream etc.. As soon as it reached America though, it was game over. I was lost. I genuinely just couldn't follow what was going on because of all the noise generated by US media, which inevitably spills over, and intertwines, with all other media.
I probably can't explain it very well, but the amount of noise in American news just seems to drown out anything that can actually help regular people get a grasp on what is actually happening.
> They are partisan but they are less at taking digs at the opposition.
Funny, just yesterday I got convinced of the opposite. So yesterday Germany played Hungary in the European Soccer Championship; before that Hungary passed some anti-gay legislation and in response some German activists wanted to light the Munich stadium up in rainbow colors, which UEFA ultimately forbid.
Watching the match on ZDF (the most well known German TV channel), literally 50% of halftime was spent talking about how great of an effort that was. There was zero talk about the actual game (and there was enough to talk about), instead they showed people handing out rainbow flags and snippets of interviews, where everyone basically agreed that "soccer is unpolitical but the Hungarians definitely crossed a line with this law."
They never mentioned the actual law. Hungary banned homosexuality from children's movies. If you ask me that's about as softcore as homophobia gets, yet everyone in the segment was completely dramatic, like the Hungarians were going to deport gay people or something. The whole thing was devoid of actual information, instead basically just repeating "Hungary bad! UEFA bad! Activists good! Everyone agrees!" (keep in mind, without telling you what Hungary even did!) It was kind of surreal to watch, completely unlike what you would expect from a reputable TV station, and utterly out of the blue if you just followed the sport casually. Definitely a cheap stab at the opposition.
There's nothing wrong with being partisan. Bias is inevitable but you can still be biased and correct. Known biases can be compensated for so long as the source is otherwise principled.
The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness. While luckily it's rare major media sources to just straight up fabricate false claims, fact checking has become virtually non-existent. Parroting the reporting of other journalists word for word is considered acceptable, and it has become common to see articles cite "according to another paper's anonymous sources." Articles get stuffed with filler disguised as context which often gets filtered as it gets rereported to cut out important details. Retractions are rare, and never prominent despite the clear prioritization of publishing quickly over taking the time to write a well researched article. They've also noticed its cheaper and easier to put the words "breaking news" in front of a headline which by no measure is than to actually go out and find urgent stories.
The partisanship and hyperpolarization is simply there to kind of cover up the laziness. Someone questions my lack of evidence? They're just a sea-lioning troll with an obvious partisan goal. Lots of other sites disagree with me? Clearly they're just shills. Someone points out I don't know the difference between a russian and a ukrainian? How would you know unless you're a russian bot! The gibberish of a monkey with a typewriter would be defended if the monkey had the right political leanings. We accept the shortcomings of many institutions because the ends justify the means, even though those ends could have been achieved with better means.
> The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness.
After Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, I heard a discussion on NPR where they talked about failures of the coverage of the primaries [1]. There were a lot of candidates in the Republican primaries: besides Trump there was Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and a few others.
The reporters in the field covering each candidate would send in items, both positive and negative, about all the candidates.
For all the candidates except Trump, they were seeing about the same ratio of positive to negative. For Trump, the ratio of positive things he did/said to negative things was quite a bit lower than that of other candidates.
The editors and producers had an implicit assumption that all candidates would be about the same in this regard and so killed a lot of the negative Trump items so as to keep in line with the number of negatives for the other candidates.
It wasn't until after Trump had locked up the nomination that they realized that Trump really did do/say more negative newsworthy things than the others, and that in trying to avoid bias or the appearance of bias they had actually introduce a pro-Trump bias.
[1] For those not familiar with the US system, each major party holds elections to determine who its nominees will be, and then those nominees compete with the nominees from the other parties in the general election.
> I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself
What does "fabric of the country" mean? Is it a euphemism for American culture? If so, I definitely think there's a problem with American culture (i.e., political polarization), but I think it's largely a product of this manipulative media model rather than the cause. Note that we're not just seeing this in America, but also in Britain and Europe (and certainly elsewhere), although perhaps to a lesser extent.
I would be interested in solutions. Specifically, I'm curious if there's an intelligent way to limit the amount of revenue media companies can generate from online advertising. For example, 75% of a media business's revenue must be from subscriptions.
Can you elaborate on the ad revenue vs subscriptions issue?
Naively it seems like people are more likely to subscribe to news that aligns to and reinforces their political ideology, which could lead to more polarization/bifurcation, not less
I don't exactly understand the mechanics, but it seems pretty widely accepted that the polarization of media outlets and the rejection of journalistic ethics are a consequence of the online advertising business model. Before the last decade, a larger share of media business revenue came from sources other than online advertising, and the media was less polarized as a consequence.
As for my speculation about the underlying mechanics, perhaps people who are willing to subscribe to media (rather than consume it for free) are more likely to be interested in the truth (i.e., useful information about the world) rather than having their biases reinforced and their hateful prejudices stroked.
The online advertising business model simply made it possible for small publishers, which in an earlier era would have been small time tabloids, to reach a wide audience that previously would have required a vast media empire. Back when things had to be printed on paper, it was really hard to get an article in front of millions of people, and throwing lots of shit at the wall to see what sticks was simply impossible. Nowadays, instead of competing with a dozen national papers and a handful of local ones, there were essentially unlimited numbers of competing headlines. In this new land of competition, everyone raced to the bottom. There is virtually no cost in publishing 100 crappy stories to have 1 take off and go viral, indeed that's an optimal strategy.
There's nothing special about advertising revenue. It's incredibly rare that I see an ad on a site that's related in anyway to the article that I'm reading, nonetheless that there is some financial motive to modify the article. I'm no more likely to click on an ad for diet pills on an article saying there was voter fraud then on one saying there wasn't.
If I were required to read every single thing published by an outlet I subscribe to, then I would definitely reserve my money for institutions that published a small number of high quality works. But if I can select which articles I read, it makes sense for an institution to produce as many options as they can so that I'll be more likely to find at least one thing I want to read.
> I don't exactly understand the mechanics, but it seems pretty widely accepted that the polarization of media outlets and the rejection of journalistic ethics are a consequence of the online advertising business model
I don't know that this is true, nor widely accepted. I think it'd be accurate to say that the decline in general _quality_ of journalism is downstream of the dynamics you describe. But there are ways to be click-driven beyond building closed-loop narrative worlds for your readers. The obvious example is sensationalism and disproportionate emphasis on catastrophizing negative news for your readers, and this is entirely possible without being partisan. If anything, committing to a dishonest narrative view of the world cuts off half of your potential pearl-clutching: if the New York Times were breathlessly writing about the dangers of critical race theory the way Fox does, they would get _more_ clicks, not less.
Subscriptions work the opposite way here. Most people don't care about (or aren't capable of?) being informed, and subscriptions to the correct news source serves roughly the same function as choosing a church to hear your Sunday sermon at and make a part of your identity.
As far as I can tell, it fits the evidence much more cleanly to model journalism's narrative/polemical turn as downstream of the broader increase in polarization in society in general. The NYT spins alternative-fact fantasies not because of the economics of ad-based serving, but because of the characteristics of contemporary consumer demand.
> I think it'd be accurate to say that the decline in general _quality_ of journalism is downstream of the dynamics you describe. But there are ways to be click-driven beyond building closed-loop narrative worlds for your readers. The obvious example is sensationalism and disproportionate emphasis on catastrophizing negative news for your readers, and this is entirely possible without being partisan.
No doubt there are other ways, but partisanship seems to be the optimal way at least in today's social media landscape.
> If anything, committing to a dishonest narrative view of the world cuts off half of your potential pearl-clutching: if the New York Times were breathlessly writing about the dangers of critical race theory the way Fox does, they would get _more_ clicks, not less.
That's kind of the point: NYT isn't going to write breathlessly about CRT because that's a conservative boogeyman (to be clear, there are a lot of valid criticisms of CRT or at least the movement born out of CRT, but as it's just entered the conservative lexicon 5 minutes ago they don't understand it well enough to critique it gracefully). NYT have their own topics about which they write breathlessly, consider from whence the 1619 Project came, after all.
The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.
> Subscriptions work the opposite way here. Most people don't care about (or aren't capable of?) being informed, and subscriptions to the correct news source serves roughly the same function as choosing a church to hear your Sunday sermon at and make a part of your identity.
I agree that most people aren't interested in being informed, but I disagree that subscriptions work the opposite way. First of all, there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low. IIRC there was some increasing partisanship as a consequence of cable news advertising which is just a less-gripping form of online advertising (if only because online media is truly on-demand and we carry access to it in our pockets 24/7), which is to say this observation supports the thesis that advertising and not subscriptions drive partisanship.
Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.
> As far as I can tell, it fits the evidence much more cleanly to model journalism's narrative/polemical turn as downstream of the broader increase in polarization in society in general. The NYT spins alternative-fact fantasies not because of the economics of ad-based serving, but because of the characteristics of contemporary consumer demand.
As previously discussed, if traditional and social media companies' ad-based revenue model were torpedoed tomorrow (say, due to legislation prohibiting ad revenue altogether, or at least online ad revenue) I strongly suspect the market for partisan media would largely evaporate. To say that media companies increasing polarization is just &qu...
> No doubt there are other ways, but partisanship seems to be the optimal way at least in today's social media landscape.
Yes, of course, but the statement I'm responding to was claiming that the economics of ad-based publishing drives agenda-driven "news". I'm saying that this doesn't fit the evidence, as agenda-driven reporting is if anything more consistent with a subscription-based system. The fact that it's agenda-driven instead of broadly sensationalist has roughly nothing to do (at least first-order) with the Internet and everything to do with consumer demand. To put it another way, in a hypothetical parallel universe where ad-funded news was banned, you would still see the turn towards agenda-driven reporting, as it's reflective of much broader trends in journalism and independent of ads-funding.
> The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.
Yes, I agree, but my point is that this is an _exogenous_ factor. Competition from an ads-funded Internet had nothing to do with driving newspapers towards partisanship; an exogenous shift in consumer demand did. I brought this example up not as a description of the world as it is but as a contradiction in your hypothesis. My claim is that consumer demand for partisanship is driving partisan news. Whether it's funded by ads or subscriptions is irrelevant.
> there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low
I know it's trite to say that correlation doesn't equal causation, but it's very relevant in this case. The postwar decades of relatively high journalistic standards were a historical anomaly. Yellow journalism existed in the past, well before online advertising, and the strategy that got people to buy newspapers was broad-based sensationalism, not the construction of elaborate filter bubbles.
I get that it's cheap to dismiss correlation without elaborating, but the causal hypothesis (ads -> partisan news) both has data pts contradicting it[1] and a more-plausible alternative mechanism, or at least the sketch of one[2].
> Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.
Ha, we differ pretty strongly on this factual question. Though perhaps this is my fault for being a little glib: when I say people aren't interested in being informed, I am very much (perhaps centrally!) including the modern information junkie, the core of the NYT (or Fox, or CNN, or MSNBC, or WaPo) subscriber/viewer base. They would probably claim they like being informed, but my point is that watching infotainment opinion shows and reading whatever the fuck the NYT calls what they do these days is a grotesque mockery of "informing oneself". There are undoubtedly hyper-literate, intelligent news consumers out there that have every subscription and use them all sparingly, but these are a vanishingly small minority; my claim is that anyone who thinks that a single-source news subscri...
So, i get the sense that the political shape of the US has led to a kind of proxy war in the media. I see it as a powder keg and I really can't see it ever changing without exploding into something more real, like a succesful foreign invasion, an actual civil war, or a dictator taking power etc. Obviously some kind of regulation would be a much better approach but in my pessimism, I don't think that will ever happen in the current political climate.
Just to clarify, I don't think any of the events listed above will ever happen in our lifetime. I am just using them as a way to reinforce my expression of non-expectation on any real change to this in our new found normality.
I agree it will take something dramatic to fix the divisive political environment in the US. I would add one possible mechanism to your list which I am sure we all hope is not the solution - the country uniting against a common enemy in a war, the obvious choice for now being China.
A significant portion of our economies are interdependent at the moment. The US pays China to manufacture our products because the Chinese have fewer scruples about human rights or pollution (which obviously implies that our American scruples are at best superficial). So the only way I see us coming to a head with China is if we decide that we care about people (workers and the environment that we all depend on) and make China account for their pollution and human rights costs (either by forbidding trade with them outright or making them pay steep import taxes to level the playing field with countries who don't profit off of slave labor and pollution, including hypothetical US domestic manufacturing). That might make China desperate.
Subscriptions make it worse: now they only publish content palatable to their audience, and only those rabid enough to subscribe. Relying on ads at least means they have to maximize eyeballs (and broad appeal means more of those)
> I'm at the point where I instantly dismiss any "world" news that comes from the US. I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.
A huge problem is that the US does not have many foreign news correspondents posted abroad anymore. This leads to uncertainty and confusion when a crisis occurs. I personally rely on the Financial Times for foreign correspondent coverage. It also has great tech coverage. I have only been disappointed once when reading a tech article over 3+ years of being a subscriber.
What has been most shocking to me is the normalizing of postmodern thinking in American politics and journalism. The idea that there is an objective reality, facts, truth/falseness, e.g. the sum of votes for candidate A was greater than for candidate B, seems quaint and naive. There are now only competing narratives and “alternative facts” that you have on the menu to choose from. It all seems quite fucked up to me.
> "What has been most shocking to me is the normalizing of postmodern thinking in American politics and journalism. The idea that there is an objective reality, facts, truth/falseness, e.g. the sum of votes for candidate A was greater than for candidate B, seems quaint and naive. There are now only competing narratives and “alternative facts” that you have on the menu to choose from. It all seems quite fucked up to me."
the irony being that this is all assertive, emotive opinion and no rationale, no chain of plausible statements to consider and weigh, a narrative to either agree with or implicitly be relegated to the "fucked up" contingent.
emotions, which lead to narratives, are (perhaps more primitive) mental processes that help us survive (perhaps imperfectly) in the world. it's worth understanding and exploring that, rather than reeling off an overly dismissive, and ironically twitter-worthy, rant.
I know. This epistemological self-referentiality, i.e. "whether or not objective reality exists is itself a matter of opinion, therefore there is no objective reality", is why I consider postmodernism an intellectual dead-end.
but you're railing against the limits of epistemology then, not postmodernism, but ascribing your frustrations to the latter. the amount of things we can know with any certainty is (infinitely?) many, many orders of magnitude smaller than all the information in the universe, doubly so for sociopolitically-mediated information. postmodernism is simply a mechanism for understanding/coping with how little certainty there actually is.
It's no coincidence that the following events seem to coincide
* Distrust of traditional media
* Collapse of local media
* Rise in social media platforms
Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.
Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.
I guess your American? If so, please consider that you are not just one of the voices putting US at the lowest trust in the media, but currently also arguing that it would be better if America was literally at the bottom of the list.
The internet has opened pandora's box of mass psychological hacking.
The only way from here is to wait and see whether we can survive like this indefinitely - maybe we'll all collectively build a resistance to media constructed to hijack our emotions. In the meantime we will each have to one by one watch our friends and relatives dive down rabbit holes of propaganda and rage. I've seen this firsthand over the past year and it's not pretty.
I wouldn't hold my breath. This stuff operates on an emotional level, not a cognitive/intellectual level. Emotions are powerful because they are largely opaque to most people most of the time and are a strong driver of behavior. Like the old saying: you can't reason a person out of a position or belief that they didn't reason themselves into. As long as this emotional manipulation is profitable (e.g., 'engagement'), I don't see a way out of this.
USA is not the world. There are other countries that have social media as well as struggling local media yet distrust in media is not skyrocketing.
I can’t help but speculate that the extremely polarized and partisan politics of the US has some thing to do with this. I know it gets old connecting everything to Trump, but he did hold the highest office in the country for four years and during that period systematically claimed that every bit of media coverage he didn’t like was false and fake news, while also helping to spread obviously fake conspiracy theories that still seem to be popular with half the population.
It's amazing people pay for WaPo, they literally have so much power, they get to decide what internal government info to leak or not leak and create the sentiment for ruling party.
Trust is very loaded term. Trust what? If the article says there is a tornado in progress at such and such place I trust it. As for the rest I think that journalism now is distorted to the point of no return. Most articles are heavily riddled with propaganda, things taken out of contest, hypocrisy etc. etc. It does not really matter to me whether it is Canadian press, US or whatever other country. All the same.
>This study, like many others, found extremely high levels of distrust — 75% of those who identify as being on the right thought coverage of their views is unfair.
When one party consistently attacks "the mainstream media" for decades for telling the truth about reality, you get this. It's not a "both sides" problem, the problem is only on one side.
>Interestingly, partisans, including conservatives, at least say that they prefer a range of views (74%) and neutral treatment of issues (66%) rather than reports that just reinforce their views.
People say they want that, but people also say they hate negative political attack ads, and we get something other than what we say we want because the product we actually get instead is appealing to many people.
That France ranks so bad is much more newsworthy than the US. News in the US is terrible, and everybody knows this. In France, it is not so bad, yet, people equally distrust the industry.
Social media conveyed news took over the country like crazy. People are so misinformed, it's beyond scary.
The article mentions a higher level of trust in local news. My local news in Detroit is very matter of fact, here’s an event that happened, here’s visual proof, and with a few exemptions free of opinion. National news, in my experience, is more pundits talking about the events and extracting larger meaning from it. I personally have a very hard time consuming news outside of the local because of this.
The US political system has weaponized religion for political power and minority rule. Gasoline has been thrown on the flames of anti-intellectualism legitimizing feelings over peer-reviewed scientific research. The US political system is under siege by what is essentially minority rule. Every public institution (notably including the judiciary and elections themselves) is simply fodder for a scorched earth policy of politicization. Ayn Rand billionaire acolytes have poured billions into reshaping policy to the benefit of the 0.01%.
What I'm most sick of seeing of psuedo-intellectuals who say in a self-satisfied tone "both sides are biased" usually followed by "I only read independent news". This is the definition of false equivalence.
The so-called "left media" in the US isn't without fault but it's fine. The "right media" is an active participant in the subversion of democracy that panders to and enables anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, insurrectionists and white Supremacists.
"Bias" is just an excuse to justify the self-reinforcing unsubstantiated echo chambers that people like to inhabit.
You check all the boxes of having been very effectively propagandized by pseudo-State media. Don't give in. Think for yourself. It's not too late. There's the road to Damascus. Take it. Good luck.
For comparison, a 2019 survey of 33 European countries ranked countries by their trust in the written press [1]. The UK ranked last (75% do not trust the written press, just 15% trust the press, 10% don't know).
Unlike newspapers, TV and radio in the UK is regulated by a government-funded body called OFCOM (Office of Communications) where broadcasters are required to follow rules around impartial news coverage. These rules exclude opinion-based shows e.g. talk radio shows.
These impartiality rules apply to all broadcasters i.e. public service broadcasters (PSBs) like the BBC and Channel 4, and commercial broadcasters like ITV and Sky News. People often criticise PSBs for their news coverage (justified in some cases), but there is no editorial standard or code of ethics for national newspapers in the UK.
Most of the national newspapers in the UK lean to the right, and a few to the left. But they are all awful. The Financial Times is the only half-decent national newspaper in the UK and even they have their biases.
I have long held the belief that the national press in the UK has poisoned political discourse in the UK for decades. Despite declining newspaper circulation, they continue to exert outsized influence on public discourse (and on politicians). The relationship between journalists and politicians is uncomfortably close and unhealthy. (Journalists often move to positions of influence into political parties).
Interesting tidbit about UK newspaper columnists: attendence at private schools makes up just 7% of the general population. Yet, in UK national newspapers, the proportion of news columnist who were privately educated is disproportionately high: 44%. [2]
[1] EBU (European Broadcasting Union) Media Intelligence Service – Trust in Media 2020 Report
News needs to become a protected class of information that has strong controls against misinformation. It should not be in a similar class of freedom of speech which includes any and all opinions.
Hahaha. Yes, the solution is more centralized control. More power concentration... less competition... There is alternative media for anyone who actually looks for it. We don't need to save the media. We need it to die.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadThat is the main problem.
They no longer see themselves as a medium to disseminate events but rather shapers of opinions about events.
Like laughtracks for situational comedies, they see themselves as having a responsibility to tell people how to think of an event.
It’s like Pravda but worse. Pravda at least had the decency to not want to pit a population against itself.
Not so sure about this, there were a lot of purges...
Journalism has always been shaping opinions, alone by selection aka what gets reported in the evening news and what not. The only ones who manage to pass that mark are the huge news agencies with a worldwide presence, but no reasonable human can consume all of that content.
Reporting about science is another ... hotly debated issue. It is scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and that the virus SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19, a disease that has caused the death of at least 600.000 people in the US and about 3.9 million people worldwide - but for some parts of the country, mostly on the right wing, simply the act of reporting these facts is already seen as "opinion shaping".
And finally, even reporting on events can be seen as "shaping opinions" - think of events like mass or school shootings, where the 2nd amendment crowd complains that the victims or their relatives are being interviewed and calling for gun control. Or BLM and LGBT events - some people see the mere mention of these as "political".
Some missing facts:
The CDC and Fauci recommended against masks to protect the mask supply for health providers. Media pushed this messaging.
The vaccines seem to cause heart issues with some people dying from it. Only months later is the CDC admitting supposedly minor heart issues. Furthermore they are pushing people to take it (even those who stand to lose more than to benefit from it). Media pushes this narrative.
The vaccines do seem to work for most people and seem effective against the variants of COVID-19.
Many BLM protests were peaceful but some were taken advantage of and just became opportunities to loot.
Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime.
babesh is adding facts, mixed with pure opinion, of his own choosing to also further a narrative. Is "Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime." a verified (or even provable) fact? If so, what was omitted from that statement that would have made it less biased. And ultimately, how is he not committing the same sin as corporate media?
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra...
https://neonnettle.com/news/14685-los-angeles-votes-for-36m-...
Which facts would you like to dispute? What are you calling an opinion?
Your sources don't even support your opinion/narrative? If anything, I'm afraid your claim to the high ground has worsened.
> In July, the Los Angeles City Council voted to slash $150 million from the LAPD budget.
> Amid the wave of violent crime, Los Angeles voted to increase police funding.The Los Angeles County Metro voted to increase police funding by $36 million.
> The city was even forced to reinstate its gun violence task force after disbanding the Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) only months earlier.
I'm genuinely curious. Do you think if you just scream something loudly and hysterically enough that it will become true? Or do you have some sort of higher goal that you feel can only be achieved by lying to people and that doing so is therefore justified? Or is it simply just malice?
Look who is picking and choosing which facts to ignore and choosing to spin a narrative. Go watch all the news even of left sided news. There are a lot of complaints about how businesses and communities are hurt. There are increasing calls to fund the police and some communities are starting to do that. Even Chesa Boudin is now saying that businesses need to protected. Even London Breed is saying the same.
They just arrested a person who was on a serial shoplifting spree. Police were complaining that they would arrest people and the DA would just let them free.
https://youtu.be/2jrnhaLzCqA
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/suspected-shoplifter-fr...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/san-francisco-confronts...
Here is the shoplifter that they finally arrested after letting shoplifting go on for the past year.
“ Homicides and aggravated assaults in the city has increased over the last two years. Year to date, homicide up 26.5 percent over 2020, up 44.9 percent over 2019. Aggravated assault is up 12.8 percent year over year, and 11.3 percent over 2019. Overall violent crime is up year-over-year 5.8 percent, driven by homicide and aggravated assault numbers.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-car-...
So given that you are baselessly attacking him, and the only thing that drew you to him was the facts he stated; clearly you don't want him stating them. So again. I ask, why do you want those facts suppressed? And why are you being evasive about answering the question?
Attempted robbery of reporters in front of Oakland City Hall in broad daylight while the reporters were interviewing a cop about Oakland supervisors defunding the police and shifting resources to his crime prevention division.
When was the golden age of journalism when this wasn't the case?
There tend to be exceptions to everything. What’s important is the average or the trend.
Then the disruption of the 60’s happened and the Vietnam War drove a schism between official govt stance and the truth on the ground and some media personalities were famous for exposing it.
Now everything is fractured and when you dig into it you realize both side are trying to shape the narrative, so both are being selective about the truth.
By fighting over whose wool to pull over your eyes they inadvertently pulled it off entirely.
The interesting question is what will replace what we now call "journalism", and how it will work.
Interesting times ahead!
One might well call it for what it is, PR and propaganda, but in my experience one will want to retain the title "journalist" for all the positive emotional weight it contains.
I've had drinks with a few local paper "journalists" of the current, young generations and the reality of their work is shaping of narrative rather than reporting, but on the topic of job title view themselves in the same light as an Upton Sinclair. Brings to mind the early 2010s "positively changing the world" startup software engineers building Orwellian systems.
For instance, CNN is left leaning and Fox is right leaning. They should just explicitly state their viewpoint so viewers can calibrate how much credence they give to unsourced claims and see past the political posturing.
1. https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
While I agree that NPR puts out a lot content that can be described as 'lefty', NPR News feels pretty straight down the middle.
Personally, I find the https://realclearpolitics.com model of just putting headlines from different outlets in a list to be more useful than outsourcing some sort of "bias rating" and "fact-checking" to YAMO (Yet Another Media Outlet).
I think the real subtext of this chart isn't so much to portray any particular outlet further to the left or right than it is, but rather to boost the credibility of fringe outlets.
That being said, I do appreciate that allsides uses an interesting method to blind bias surveys to help categorize. But sometimes things don't always line up.
I see it differently, subjective opinions aren't journalism.
It is a true statement, but it doesn’t mean that all models are equally wrong, or that all journalism is equally biased. Objective journalism is an ideal to strive for, even it if cannot be perfectly achieved.
One of these "news" outlets is know for allowing people to repeat baseless, fabricated lies on their station on a daily basis. And when they aren't fabricating lies, their journalists write in such a way to deliberately confuse and mislead their audience.
I say this as an avid reader of Fox News. They straight up lie or mislead constantly. Even their mundane reports are chosen to incite their audience. They once reported on the "Best BBQ places in the US." Weird choice for a national news network right? Well reading through the comments section and people were going berserk because some of the restaurants were not located in the South.
Anyone equating Fox News with any other news outlet is doing America a huge disservice. The place is straight up nothing more than an 1984-esque, pro-authoritarian brainwashing device.
That just isn't the case. People trust you if you re-enforce their biases. The news sources that are getting the most traction aren't the most objective ones.
Hopefully at least some news organizations will figure out a better path, I'm sure we won't go back to the old days but the fact that the younger demographic has pretty much left news media behind means that that generation will have to figure out something more balanced.
Yes this causes conflict. But in the end multiple echo chambers are an improvement over one big one, plus a few small alternatives that only weirdos like me were in.
That path seems to be pretty clear: charging for a subscription. But that's probably only a path open to global brands and popular niches.
This is interesting given how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
I guess it doesn't help when they run segments like this, sowing more distrust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
I was never interested in politics , left or right and never listened to conservative or liberal commentary you mentioned but the coverage of BLM riots, Trump etc especially in 2020 was mostly fake news and blatant propaganda. That’s what brought me to vote for Trump in the first place, the constant lying and manipulation by the media.
I don’t know how otherwise reasonable people can not notice these 24/7 lies by CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. I’m a first gen immigrant, from former communist country, we have a good nose for propaganda and can smell it from afar, I’m surprised American-born Americans are so easily fooled.
(FWIW, I actually agree with you that many outlets have a consistently left-wing slant, for certain values of "left-wing", on a variety of issues, and I think most of what passes for news media generally is absolute garbage—but I also think that perceptions of that, on the right, tend to be only loosely related to reality, and that media coverage of media bias, to include social media, is itself ground zero for bias)
To give a salient example: I read an article this morning about the ongoing attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan, clearly something that has no respect for those people. Except... it actually has a lot of respect for them, far more than I think they deserve. It treats the request for an audit as nothing more than a request for the audit; there's no questioning on what purpose it could serve other than overturning the election results. There's also this quote: "Last week, a few hundred demonstrators carrying boxes of affidavits signed by thousands of people demanding a state ballot audit showed up at the Capitol." What it doesn't go on to explain is that the "affidavits" are actually foisted contracts that say in effect "if you don't agree to my demands in X days, you are in violation of the law," which has 0 legal effect whatsoever. Does it really "have no respect for [them]"?
Yes, media's biased. Yes, media lie a lot, often about serious things. Yes, some outlets on some topics tend to slant "left" pretty consistently. It's also true that, in the early days of post-fairness-doctrine right-wing broadcast media, there was a concerted and deliberate effort to promote the notion of the "left wing media" to a much greater degree than it was actually true, at least at the time that effort began, and that it was highly effective.
... but, if it's not possible that suddenly emphasizing the notion of a "left-wing media" may have significantly affected public perception of same, including possibly even if it wasn't true or was being grossly exaggerated, then I suppose we don't need to care about any of that. Right?
Just curious, can I see the article?
But note also that there is a distinction to be drawn towards a media source being biased versus "on the spectrum of 'has no respect for you' and 'likes to sincerely fantasize in public about the elimination of your culture'."
'Otherwise reasonable' does not negate ignorance and we are overflowing with ignorance thanks to our journalism(propaganda). Logic is some math term which automatically gets trashed because lolol im no good at math who needs that stuff amirite?.
>how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
...to itself be dishonest 'journalistic' spin, in this case perpetuated by John Oliver among others. "How many" local news outlets is irrelevant when you consider a vast majority of Sinclair's outlets are for tiny rural channels, meanwhile large urban and coastal channels will undoubtedly skew more liberal but be fewer in #.
When else has the metric of "how many channels" ever been used to determine reach and engagement?
Not sure of the numbers, just wanted to point this out.
In any case I think you'll agree this is now a much narrower point about Sinclair than ppl like Oliver intended to make.
(Got my account rate limited cuz too many fellow liberals downvoted me w/o comment. Seems like HN might not be a good place for reasonable discussion on controversial topics.)
I don't wanna go back-and-forth on this too much tho sorry.
I find it interesting first of all that local news -- and weather, especially -- are the most trusted in the US. It reminds me of that old half-joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson -- but more likely it's that the issues that hit close to home are less likely to be polarized across traditional political lines.
We've long passed the inflection point where people seem to judge trustworthiness based on alignment to their own predetermined biases. If I tell you that what you think is wrong -- even if I have a factual basis for that; or more mildly, just frame something in a way that you might disagree with, you can label me as biased.
How did we get here? I think a lot of the blame comes from social media. Local news really cannot trend -- by definition it appeals to a narrow audience, and no one is sharing city council minutes. People do share outrage -- forcing the most polarizing content to the top. And, not for nothing, newsfeeds often put propaganda and disinformation -- or just lowest-common-denominator ("7 child stars: where are they now?") -- to compete at the same level as traditional journalism.
I (previously) wrote some thoughts here: https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
Why downvote if you didn't understand my point?
Still, its the most trusted of the group.
I still found the local news to be much more professional about doing a matter-of-fact reporting job than national news, even for national outlets I may agree with in terms of bias.
Also PBS news has been quite good over the years that I watched it (though I haven't watched any recently, as the current events themselves have become such stress-inducing toxicity, regardless who reports it).
Both mainline ideologies constantly and pathologically deceive and withhold information to make things one sided increasing polarization.
MSNBC argues that its audience knows that its news isn’t actually news...(!)
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
Don't both sides a phenomenon that is far worse on the right.
Court-ruled:
>"Cynthia Bashant, dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that even Maddow's own audience understands that her show consists of exaggeration, hyperbole, and pure opinion, and therefore would not assume that such outlandish accusations are factually true even when she uses the language of certainty and truth when presenting them (“literally is paid Russian propaganda")."
Key points from the article:
This was the same defense used in the rachel maddow lawsuit. Why not use a defense that is known to work?"For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context," Bashant added.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/499294-judge-dismisses-on...
If you cannot see that, you are the problem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neutralnews/comments/j04eqv/fox_new...
No they are not. You just want things to be simple. Left vs right, black vs white. Nuance is necessary and you appear to lack it.
"For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context," Bashant added.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/499294-judge-dismisses-on...
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/560042987/russians-targeted-u...
You mean the Democrats?
See this article about the concerted effort between the democrats and the media to defeat trump: https://archive.is/CRSYG
How many times has the NY Times or the WaPo ran a story about Trump which has proven to be absolutely false? How about spending years on some false Russian collusion theory about 2016 election? Google: "The Washington Post forced to admit Russia “collusion just isn’t there”" Trump tells immigrants to not come illegally across the border - "Far right Nazi playbook!!!!" Harris tells immigrants to not come across the border illegally - "Harris discouraged illegal immigrants from making the journey"
And one wonders why the media can't be trusted.
I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself. Every argument is wedged into an imaginary Team A vs Team B battle and it seems that to remain relevant as a publisher, you have to play that game. People feel personally attacked/validated by every article now because those are the most engaging and publishers will omit certain contexts and facts in any story to facilitate that emotional trigger.
Given that the journalism industry is energised by advertising and political propaganda, it has reached a point where it has become nothing more than an itchy wound that the public keep scratching.
The 24 hour news cycle isn't an issue in itself, but the power games combined with a dangerous economic model and all of the mass media manipulation on sites like reddit, are the core of the issues imo. Having the 24hr cycle (online, and on cable) just amplifies it all and makes it so omnipresent to the fact that despite the great efforts of dictators who put their picture in every place they can, I can bet that Trump managed to become a part of everyones daily life, and in a much more direct fashion, than any dictator could ever dream of, in the anglosphere during his term.
Which countries specifically? I know that German-speaking news outlets aren’t any less partisan, and I have little reason to think that the rest of Europe is much better.
That's not to say its reporting on the facts is wrong, but its editorials are very definitely partisan and what they choose to report/how they choose to report it often shows this too.
In general it's my favourite news source, but you do have to account for its slant.
I get the impression that most Americans see the rest of the world like some form of a cartoon. They are weirdly detached from the reality of it all. I even get that impression when speaking to regular Americans about other countries and I think the media feeds on, and feeds, this incredibly strange outlook.
If there is any truth to the Wuhan lab leak story, it is an incredibly important thing for every single human on the planet. The idea of a country purposfully, or accidentally, releasing a lab made virus is such a massive threat to every society in the world, even worse than chernobyl, that we need the story to be scrutinised and and reported on with perfect accuracy. Instead, it has somehow become a fuel left/right wing driven click-bait. The articles I have come across on this subject have been pretty much baseless nonsense, or incredibly untrustworthy, and that is just scary.
Europe has problems of course, but it is definitely better. They are partisan but they are less at taking digs at the opposition. America seems to be going through a media war. In the UK it is pretty rotten too, but the writing is usually more accurate and one can find well researched articles.
The most striking thing for me during covid was when it started to make daily news in the US. Up until that point, I felt like I had a really good understanding of what was going on. I found there to be a lot of scientific reporting making it to the mainstream etc.. As soon as it reached America though, it was game over. I was lost. I genuinely just couldn't follow what was going on because of all the noise generated by US media, which inevitably spills over, and intertwines, with all other media.
I probably can't explain it very well, but the amount of noise in American news just seems to drown out anything that can actually help regular people get a grasp on what is actually happening.
Funny, just yesterday I got convinced of the opposite. So yesterday Germany played Hungary in the European Soccer Championship; before that Hungary passed some anti-gay legislation and in response some German activists wanted to light the Munich stadium up in rainbow colors, which UEFA ultimately forbid.
Watching the match on ZDF (the most well known German TV channel), literally 50% of halftime was spent talking about how great of an effort that was. There was zero talk about the actual game (and there was enough to talk about), instead they showed people handing out rainbow flags and snippets of interviews, where everyone basically agreed that "soccer is unpolitical but the Hungarians definitely crossed a line with this law."
They never mentioned the actual law. Hungary banned homosexuality from children's movies. If you ask me that's about as softcore as homophobia gets, yet everyone in the segment was completely dramatic, like the Hungarians were going to deport gay people or something. The whole thing was devoid of actual information, instead basically just repeating "Hungary bad! UEFA bad! Activists good! Everyone agrees!" (keep in mind, without telling you what Hungary even did!) It was kind of surreal to watch, completely unlike what you would expect from a reputable TV station, and utterly out of the blue if you just followed the sport casually. Definitely a cheap stab at the opposition.
The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness. While luckily it's rare major media sources to just straight up fabricate false claims, fact checking has become virtually non-existent. Parroting the reporting of other journalists word for word is considered acceptable, and it has become common to see articles cite "according to another paper's anonymous sources." Articles get stuffed with filler disguised as context which often gets filtered as it gets rereported to cut out important details. Retractions are rare, and never prominent despite the clear prioritization of publishing quickly over taking the time to write a well researched article. They've also noticed its cheaper and easier to put the words "breaking news" in front of a headline which by no measure is than to actually go out and find urgent stories.
The partisanship and hyperpolarization is simply there to kind of cover up the laziness. Someone questions my lack of evidence? They're just a sea-lioning troll with an obvious partisan goal. Lots of other sites disagree with me? Clearly they're just shills. Someone points out I don't know the difference between a russian and a ukrainian? How would you know unless you're a russian bot! The gibberish of a monkey with a typewriter would be defended if the monkey had the right political leanings. We accept the shortcomings of many institutions because the ends justify the means, even though those ends could have been achieved with better means.
After Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, I heard a discussion on NPR where they talked about failures of the coverage of the primaries [1]. There were a lot of candidates in the Republican primaries: besides Trump there was Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and a few others.
The reporters in the field covering each candidate would send in items, both positive and negative, about all the candidates.
For all the candidates except Trump, they were seeing about the same ratio of positive to negative. For Trump, the ratio of positive things he did/said to negative things was quite a bit lower than that of other candidates.
The editors and producers had an implicit assumption that all candidates would be about the same in this regard and so killed a lot of the negative Trump items so as to keep in line with the number of negatives for the other candidates.
It wasn't until after Trump had locked up the nomination that they realized that Trump really did do/say more negative newsworthy things than the others, and that in trying to avoid bias or the appearance of bias they had actually introduce a pro-Trump bias.
[1] For those not familiar with the US system, each major party holds elections to determine who its nominees will be, and then those nominees compete with the nominees from the other parties in the general election.
What does "fabric of the country" mean? Is it a euphemism for American culture? If so, I definitely think there's a problem with American culture (i.e., political polarization), but I think it's largely a product of this manipulative media model rather than the cause. Note that we're not just seeing this in America, but also in Britain and Europe (and certainly elsewhere), although perhaps to a lesser extent.
I would be interested in solutions. Specifically, I'm curious if there's an intelligent way to limit the amount of revenue media companies can generate from online advertising. For example, 75% of a media business's revenue must be from subscriptions.
Naively it seems like people are more likely to subscribe to news that aligns to and reinforces their political ideology, which could lead to more polarization/bifurcation, not less
As for my speculation about the underlying mechanics, perhaps people who are willing to subscribe to media (rather than consume it for free) are more likely to be interested in the truth (i.e., useful information about the world) rather than having their biases reinforced and their hateful prejudices stroked.
There's nothing special about advertising revenue. It's incredibly rare that I see an ad on a site that's related in anyway to the article that I'm reading, nonetheless that there is some financial motive to modify the article. I'm no more likely to click on an ad for diet pills on an article saying there was voter fraud then on one saying there wasn't.
If I were required to read every single thing published by an outlet I subscribe to, then I would definitely reserve my money for institutions that published a small number of high quality works. But if I can select which articles I read, it makes sense for an institution to produce as many options as they can so that I'll be more likely to find at least one thing I want to read.
I don't know that this is true, nor widely accepted. I think it'd be accurate to say that the decline in general _quality_ of journalism is downstream of the dynamics you describe. But there are ways to be click-driven beyond building closed-loop narrative worlds for your readers. The obvious example is sensationalism and disproportionate emphasis on catastrophizing negative news for your readers, and this is entirely possible without being partisan. If anything, committing to a dishonest narrative view of the world cuts off half of your potential pearl-clutching: if the New York Times were breathlessly writing about the dangers of critical race theory the way Fox does, they would get _more_ clicks, not less.
Subscriptions work the opposite way here. Most people don't care about (or aren't capable of?) being informed, and subscriptions to the correct news source serves roughly the same function as choosing a church to hear your Sunday sermon at and make a part of your identity.
As far as I can tell, it fits the evidence much more cleanly to model journalism's narrative/polemical turn as downstream of the broader increase in polarization in society in general. The NYT spins alternative-fact fantasies not because of the economics of ad-based serving, but because of the characteristics of contemporary consumer demand.
No doubt there are other ways, but partisanship seems to be the optimal way at least in today's social media landscape.
> If anything, committing to a dishonest narrative view of the world cuts off half of your potential pearl-clutching: if the New York Times were breathlessly writing about the dangers of critical race theory the way Fox does, they would get _more_ clicks, not less.
That's kind of the point: NYT isn't going to write breathlessly about CRT because that's a conservative boogeyman (to be clear, there are a lot of valid criticisms of CRT or at least the movement born out of CRT, but as it's just entered the conservative lexicon 5 minutes ago they don't understand it well enough to critique it gracefully). NYT have their own topics about which they write breathlessly, consider from whence the 1619 Project came, after all.
The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.
> Subscriptions work the opposite way here. Most people don't care about (or aren't capable of?) being informed, and subscriptions to the correct news source serves roughly the same function as choosing a church to hear your Sunday sermon at and make a part of your identity.
I agree that most people aren't interested in being informed, but I disagree that subscriptions work the opposite way. First of all, there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low. IIRC there was some increasing partisanship as a consequence of cable news advertising which is just a less-gripping form of online advertising (if only because online media is truly on-demand and we carry access to it in our pockets 24/7), which is to say this observation supports the thesis that advertising and not subscriptions drive partisanship.
Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.
> As far as I can tell, it fits the evidence much more cleanly to model journalism's narrative/polemical turn as downstream of the broader increase in polarization in society in general. The NYT spins alternative-fact fantasies not because of the economics of ad-based serving, but because of the characteristics of contemporary consumer demand.
As previously discussed, if traditional and social media companies' ad-based revenue model were torpedoed tomorrow (say, due to legislation prohibiting ad revenue altogether, or at least online ad revenue) I strongly suspect the market for partisan media would largely evaporate. To say that media companies increasing polarization is just &qu...
Yes, of course, but the statement I'm responding to was claiming that the economics of ad-based publishing drives agenda-driven "news". I'm saying that this doesn't fit the evidence, as agenda-driven reporting is if anything more consistent with a subscription-based system. The fact that it's agenda-driven instead of broadly sensationalist has roughly nothing to do (at least first-order) with the Internet and everything to do with consumer demand. To put it another way, in a hypothetical parallel universe where ad-funded news was banned, you would still see the turn towards agenda-driven reporting, as it's reflective of much broader trends in journalism and independent of ads-funding.
> The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.
Yes, I agree, but my point is that this is an _exogenous_ factor. Competition from an ads-funded Internet had nothing to do with driving newspapers towards partisanship; an exogenous shift in consumer demand did. I brought this example up not as a description of the world as it is but as a contradiction in your hypothesis. My claim is that consumer demand for partisanship is driving partisan news. Whether it's funded by ads or subscriptions is irrelevant.
> there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low
I know it's trite to say that correlation doesn't equal causation, but it's very relevant in this case. The postwar decades of relatively high journalistic standards were a historical anomaly. Yellow journalism existed in the past, well before online advertising, and the strategy that got people to buy newspapers was broad-based sensationalism, not the construction of elaborate filter bubbles.
I get that it's cheap to dismiss correlation without elaborating, but the causal hypothesis (ads -> partisan news) both has data pts contradicting it[1] and a more-plausible alternative mechanism, or at least the sketch of one[2].
> Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.
Ha, we differ pretty strongly on this factual question. Though perhaps this is my fault for being a little glib: when I say people aren't interested in being informed, I am very much (perhaps centrally!) including the modern information junkie, the core of the NYT (or Fox, or CNN, or MSNBC, or WaPo) subscriber/viewer base. They would probably claim they like being informed, but my point is that watching infotainment opinion shows and reading whatever the fuck the NYT calls what they do these days is a grotesque mockery of "informing oneself". There are undoubtedly hyper-literate, intelligent news consumers out there that have every subscription and use them all sparingly, but these are a vanishingly small minority; my claim is that anyone who thinks that a single-source news subscri...
Just to clarify, I don't think any of the events listed above will ever happen in our lifetime. I am just using them as a way to reinforce my expression of non-expectation on any real change to this in our new found normality.
A significant portion of our economies are interdependent at the moment. The US pays China to manufacture our products because the Chinese have fewer scruples about human rights or pollution (which obviously implies that our American scruples are at best superficial). So the only way I see us coming to a head with China is if we decide that we care about people (workers and the environment that we all depend on) and make China account for their pollution and human rights costs (either by forbidding trade with them outright or making them pay steep import taxes to level the playing field with countries who don't profit off of slave labor and pollution, including hypothetical US domestic manufacturing). That might make China desperate.
A huge problem is that the US does not have many foreign news correspondents posted abroad anymore. This leads to uncertainty and confusion when a crisis occurs. I personally rely on the Financial Times for foreign correspondent coverage. It also has great tech coverage. I have only been disappointed once when reading a tech article over 3+ years of being a subscriber.
the irony being that this is all assertive, emotive opinion and no rationale, no chain of plausible statements to consider and weigh, a narrative to either agree with or implicitly be relegated to the "fucked up" contingent.
emotions, which lead to narratives, are (perhaps more primitive) mental processes that help us survive (perhaps imperfectly) in the world. it's worth understanding and exploring that, rather than reeling off an overly dismissive, and ironically twitter-worthy, rant.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
* Distrust of traditional media
* Collapse of local media
* Rise in social media platforms
Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.
Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-cal...
The internet has opened pandora's box of mass psychological hacking.
The only way from here is to wait and see whether we can survive like this indefinitely - maybe we'll all collectively build a resistance to media constructed to hijack our emotions. In the meantime we will each have to one by one watch our friends and relatives dive down rabbit holes of propaganda and rage. I've seen this firsthand over the past year and it's not pretty.
I can’t help but speculate that the extremely polarized and partisan politics of the US has some thing to do with this. I know it gets old connecting everything to Trump, but he did hold the highest office in the country for four years and during that period systematically claimed that every bit of media coverage he didn’t like was false and fake news, while also helping to spread obviously fake conspiracy theories that still seem to be popular with half the population.
When one party consistently attacks "the mainstream media" for decades for telling the truth about reality, you get this. It's not a "both sides" problem, the problem is only on one side.
>Interestingly, partisans, including conservatives, at least say that they prefer a range of views (74%) and neutral treatment of issues (66%) rather than reports that just reinforce their views.
People say they want that, but people also say they hate negative political attack ads, and we get something other than what we say we want because the product we actually get instead is appealing to many people.
More like telling part of the truth about a carefully selected aspect of reality:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/17/fact...
Social media conveyed news took over the country like crazy. People are so misinformed, it's beyond scary.
What I'm most sick of seeing of psuedo-intellectuals who say in a self-satisfied tone "both sides are biased" usually followed by "I only read independent news". This is the definition of false equivalence.
The so-called "left media" in the US isn't without fault but it's fine. The "right media" is an active participant in the subversion of democracy that panders to and enables anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, insurrectionists and white Supremacists.
"Bias" is just an excuse to justify the self-reinforcing unsubstantiated echo chambers that people like to inhabit.
Unlike newspapers, TV and radio in the UK is regulated by a government-funded body called OFCOM (Office of Communications) where broadcasters are required to follow rules around impartial news coverage. These rules exclude opinion-based shows e.g. talk radio shows.
These impartiality rules apply to all broadcasters i.e. public service broadcasters (PSBs) like the BBC and Channel 4, and commercial broadcasters like ITV and Sky News. People often criticise PSBs for their news coverage (justified in some cases), but there is no editorial standard or code of ethics for national newspapers in the UK.
Most of the national newspapers in the UK lean to the right, and a few to the left. But they are all awful. The Financial Times is the only half-decent national newspaper in the UK and even they have their biases.
I have long held the belief that the national press in the UK has poisoned political discourse in the UK for decades. Despite declining newspaper circulation, they continue to exert outsized influence on public discourse (and on politicians). The relationship between journalists and politicians is uncomfortably close and unhealthy. (Journalists often move to positions of influence into political parties).
Interesting tidbit about UK newspaper columnists: attendence at private schools makes up just 7% of the general population. Yet, in UK national newspapers, the proportion of news columnist who were privately educated is disproportionately high: 44%. [2]
[1] EBU (European Broadcasting Union) Media Intelligence Service – Trust in Media 2020 Report
[2] The Sutton Trust: Elitist Britain 2019