Even though the graphs do show some correlation between politics and media trust, I believe there may be other factors at play here. For instance, the need to make headlines ever more clickbait may also be eroding trust. Since the body of the article and the headline often don't agree.
That doesn't really hold for TV news, though. And even though it is annoying in print when articles fail to stand up their headlines, it doesn't necessarily mean that readers dismiss such articles entirely. It's more that they get pissed at the headline writers. Cf any number of articles headlined as a cancer "breakthrough" or an asteroid "heading for Earth" etc.
Or the opposite (that information literacy is on the decline, and people who are more intelligent and better educated trust the news more, at least from credible sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and CNN).
"Musk tells Twitter he wants out of deal to buy it. Twitter says it will force him to close the sale" <-- neutral
"Here's what's in Biden's executive order on abortion rights" <-- neutral
"Trump considering waiving executive privilege claim for Bannon but prosecutors say he was never shielded" <-- neutral
The top headlines on foxnews.com at the moment are:
"Dems reportedly full of 'outright worry' president won't be able to rescue plunging polls by midterms" <-- neutral
"Twitter squawks back after Musk reveals he's terminating $44B purchase" <-- neutral
"FBI director issues stern warning about biggest long-term threat to US" <-- neutral
"Mom gets terrifying call after dropping young daughter off at airport gate" <-- neutral but click-baity
"BORDER BATTLE: Biden admin fires back as governor takes spiraling migrant crisis into his own hands" <-- biased (alternative version: Biden admin criticizes Texas governor after executive order)
"GAFFER-IN-CHIEF: Biden widely mocked after he appears to read instruction right off teleprompter" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
"'Joe Biden and the Democrats are lying' to the American people: Rep. Malliotakis" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
"School choice advocate slams 'despicable' criticism from unions of Arizona school voucher bill" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
Fox and other conservative sources publish a lot of "conservative personality SLAMS liberal personality"-type articles. Left-wing publications do the opposite of course, but credible sources rarely publish this kind of article unless it's from someone important and about an important subject, and try not to use formulae like "as governor takes SPIRALING migrant crisis INTO HIS OWN HANDS" or "widely mocked".
You're right of course but the effort to check each day would be excessive. However what would you think if for the last 30 days it was similar to today? Would you switch to cnn? Probably not.
The effort Victerius expended was markedly greater than you had.
You're more than welcome to provide your own data, or at a bare minimum, state your standards or criteria for what a sufficient or credible response might be.
Keep in mind that there are in fact organisations which do just this over time, with Ad Fontes Media being among the better known and more credible:
I'll give you a hint: the results would have been the same on any other day. Clearly you're only interested in having your opinions validated. I'm sorry that reality is so disappointing to you.
Looking at just headlines doesn't give you the full picture of bias, but it's a good start.
The most notable CNN bias indicator would be having to pay out nearly half a billion to a minor for slandering him. It's not the only event of that nature either.
But usually the bias is omission of facts and even stories, speculation, and slant within the story. In the Sandman case it was only showing partial footage that cut out him being approached and made him look like the aggressor.
I would compare CNN/WSJ, and Fox/MSNBC. Much closer in terms of tone and target audience.
Reason Magazine is probably the pinnacle of very good right-leaning journalism, filling the same niche as VICE on the left. I really enjoy the excellent journalism of both.
EDIT: I have reproduced your original comparison with WSJ taking the place of CNN
CNN:
"Highland Park gunman's family was in turmoil for years before shooting" <-- neutral
If you're interested in looking at broadcast rundowns by day, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is invaluable. It permits keyword searches (for how a specific story was covered), or looking at broadcasts from the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News), dating to as early as 1969 (for ABC, CBS, and NBC, with CNN and Fox being added at later dates).
For websites, navigating archives by date on the Internet Archive can be useful. It's difficult to pick a canonical time of day for stories, and archive timing varies, but you might choose a target such as 6pm US/Eastern to designate the end of a daily news cycle and find the copy that most nearly matches that.
As noted, there are organisations which perform this work themselves, including Ad Fontes (which I've already mentioned), Media Bias Fact Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/), and more. Sourcewatch (https://sourcewatch.org) is another.
There are of course partisan bias-check organisations (e.g., the Media Resource Center on the right, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on the left). There are also groups which look for under-reported stories, most notably Project Censored (https://www.projectcensored.org/).
Thank you! I'm the director of public policy for a non-profit firearms advocacy group, and we do quite a bit of news analysis. This could be super helpful for a piece I'm writing on how gun owners of color have been treated by the media at large over time.
What is being identified here isn't bias though. You're picking up style, target audience and how blatant it is.
Eg, "Highland Park gunman's family was in turmoil for years before shooting" isn't neutral, it is narrative building. It isn't relevant to anything important - there are lots of families in turmoil out there. Most families, I suspect, face some sort of turmoil every few years. But the style is more high-brow and their clearly targeting people who are/want to be emotionally sensitive.
Bias is different from whether the headline is pitching at high- or low- class audiences. You're probably picking up that Fox news isn't written with people like you in mind and CNN might be.
I might have agreed with you on the first 3 many years ago. Even NPR has gotten really bad with the burying of headlines.
At this point, the best thing people can do is to just glance at the news when it presents itself and then otherwise move on with their lives. If there's any good to come out of the age of disinformation, it's that maybe people will stop doomscrolling the news.
Wikipedia Current Events portal is an alternative to scanning CNN, Fox, BBC, NPR etc. I like that you can tab open links to further research around a topic.
If those are your picks for credible sources, you might be less informed than you believe yourself to be. I don't think they're the _most_ biased, but they're certainly not the _least_ biased.
The AP calling Abe names right after he was assassinated was stunning to me. AP news wire has traditionally been very neutral, given its wide syndication.
I don't consider any single source or group of agreeing sources as credible in isolation. I've witnessed bad reporting from all major news sources. In cases where I wish to be well-informed, I'll seek out multiple sources, see if there's any disagreement, and try to figure out where and why the disagreement happens. When there is disagreement, I'll also examine the primary sources of the articles I've read. Do this enough, and you'll start to smell BS in most places.
However you said _those_ weren't good, or least not unbiased enough. So what are the unbiased, or at least better about handling bias than those they posted.
It's not that you can't believe anything they report so much as relying on only those sources is going to give you a distorted and biased representation of ideas and events, same as somebody who only reads Fox News. I read articles from those publishers. I don't _only_ read articles from those publishers.
Credibility is not about absence of bias, which is not a reasonable thing to expect from anyone. Credibility is about journalistic practices like checking sources and using editorial discretion about what level of certainty is needed to print something. Surely you have seen one of those charts that plots credibility vs politcal bias? e.g. https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc
If only! The "traditional media" bubble is merely getting augumented with the help of "influencers", sketchy Twitter accounts, state-run networks, fringe outlets, social networks, web celebrities and so on. Just because someone thinks that TV isn't "trustworthy", doesn't mean much and chances are they're getting even lower grade reporting under the guise of it being "non-traditional media" (it must mean something...right??).
What's the point of publishing a report if they only intend to explain part of why they think only one of three interest groups in those categories don't trust them? The abysmally low numbers in the first place could start with an explanation, maybe one that doesn't shift the blame onto the viewer and takes accountability?
I say this as someone would be an independent or Democrat on this graph.
As an American both right and left leaning news outlets don’t seem trustworthy. I find right wing news particularly annoying as it seems to amount to anger spewing and name calling in many cases. Left wing outlets are no angels either and present an extremely biased and hyperbolic picture of the world.
They both produce the same outcome, they feed the consumers existing biases/priors and reinforce the notion that the other side is contemptible. They just do it it in different ways.
I’m confused about what you’re trying to say. CNN ran the jobs and unemployment numbers this morning when they came out. And they are in fact on the homepage.
Contrast with FoxNews.com, which doesn’t have the numbers at all on the homepage (as far as I can tell, maybe I’m missing them, it’s late) and instead has an opinion from Larry Kudlow about how he thinks a recession is coming. Also after much scrolling. They did report the numbers though.
On the current CNN mobile page, the jobs numbers are more than halfway down, under something about Ford and VW self driving operations.
The point is that, at best, CNN is out of touch with what people actually care about, and also milking tragedy for profit. Less charitably, they’re focusing on stories that could help democrats in the midterms while burying economic stories that are bad for democrats, while milking tragedy for profit. In the last decade they’ve completely dropped the pretense that they’re not openly rooting for one side.
Fox News is partisan entertainment, and deliberately so. I’m not sure why you’re even bringing them up.
Fox News and CNN some of the largest news networks, and not all of Fox is partisan entertainment. Same for CNN which aired critical stories about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails every single day for months in 2016.
The point was to bring another datapoint into the mix. If CNN were burying economic stories bad for Democrats, why isn’t Fox News the partisan entertainment network featuring them? Maybe the stories just aren’t so interesting to people? Or maybe they’re not so bad as you think?
I tend to watch all 3 cable networks and inflation, recession worries, good jobs and unemployment numbers, and high but declining gas prices have been topics on all 3 this week. I just don’t see how anyone is hiding anything. The information is there, as you pointed out. Every story I saw yesterday about good jobs numbers had caveats about inflation and recession worries. I mean, are you suggesting that people aren’t aware of these things?
The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that as the Internet and cable tv gave news organizations greater reach they tended to become partisan in order to differentiate themselves. Truth is no longer profitable to the extent it contradicts what their audience wants to hear.
Public opinion is bimodal in the US, shaped by the two party system. During the broadcast era media were forced to tailor their message for the median because you can only broadcast one message. However the median is actually smaller than the two modes on either side. When multicast messaging became technologically possible, it made economic sense to tailor your message for one of the modes, both to differentiate and to tap into a more engaged audience, the extremes of which had been ignored during the broadcast era.
They burnt through all the cultural capital they had by spending it on short-term political victories. Now people see the media not as a source of information, but as an instrument of the establishment to influence and control.
The same will happen with the other institutions. We already have large amount of people skeptical of the CDC, WHO, and other health oriented orgs. We have growing skepticism of large financial institutions (fed & inflation, IMF & "you will own nothing", etc.). There is widespread skepticism of academic institutions, which will cause the value of academic titles to depreciate.
All this because the people who control these institutions insist on using them as political instruments (at certain times).
I wonder what the situation will be 50 years from now...
They turn there because what could be less establishment? The establishment gives its imprimatur to the news media, and they've proven untrustworthy, so the (weak) reasoning goes, why not turn to whatever the establishment condemns? Listen to Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Q, the Doomsinger of Alexandria (okay, I made that one up). They don't trust any of it anyway, except a few of the worst Q addicts, but they figure, we know CNN lies and twists, and they hate us, so might as well listen to the liar who's on our side.
Maybe I could have phrased it differently. I really appreciated what you wrote and wanted to add to it, saying that often people don't realize they implicitly trust the sources that they do.
Many of them are turning to new sources of opinion-driven news, like the daily wire and the young turks. I can't say for certain that this is a worse future than what we have had over the last 5 years in mainstream news, but it cements the balkanization of information channels.
Maybe folks want to be responsible and eat their vegetables, but if they’re going to be served nutrition-free calorie bombs either way, it makes sense to go with the flavor you prefer.
The problem with saying institution X is "not as a source of information, but as an instrument of the establishment to influence and control" is that most people who say this do believe some institutions. The ones that tell them what they want to hear are obviously honest. The ones that say otherwise are obviously corrupt.
Believing "institutions are corrupt" without addressing specific instances of corruption is an abandonment of critical thought itself.
You can LARP life for a while, but reality continues outside your fantasy, and at some point you will have to reconcile the two. You may find at this point that you weren't on the side of truth and justice after all.
That may be true of some people, but what we’re seeing right now is people’s trust swinging to media vehicles and political leaders that have done nothing to earn trust aside from charismatically asserting that they are more trustworthy.
Trump’s brand isn’t built on trust, it’s built on fighting.
Trustworthy institutions enable people with conflicting interests and values to cooperate. When people lose trust and believe institutions are biased against them, they don’t seek an alternative source of trusted authority. Instead, they seek a champion who will be biased in their favor and fight for them.
You see this in third world countries all the time. The factions there aren’t built on leaders being trustworthy, but instead sectarian affiliation.
The article we're discussing specifically talks about the run-up to the second iraq war. I didn't watch the link, but I assume they highlight when the New York Times helping trick the country into war.
Maybe this is part of the picture, but it is far from the whole picture. You are just completely ignoring the attacks on the trustworthiness of institutions that have come from outside forces. For example, was it the people controlling the National Weather Service that made it a political instrument by covering climate change? Or was it politicians and other powerful people who made the factual reporting of a changing climate a political issue?
> was it the people controlling the National Weather Service that made it a political instrument by covering climate change?
This USA Today comic explains it well: https://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13. For better or worse, climate change is used as tool for advancing political agendas with a certain vision for the future.
An interesting current example of political interests at stake far beyond the on-face discussion of sustainability is the Dutch farmer protests. Discussed a few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989112
> You are just completely ignoring the attacks on the trustworthiness of institutions that have come from outside forces.
Conservatives have been complaining about “liberal media” since forever. But the divergence in media trust between Democrats one hand and Independents/Republicans on the other grew dramatically in the Bush era, and again during the Trump era: https://www.allsides.com/news/2020-12-31-0913/trump-era-driv...
In the 1980s I assume most NYC news anchors hated Reagan, but they at least tried to hide their contempt.
Trust is low because I read a science journalism article recently that claimed mit (or somebody else) had found, but we’re not sharing, drugs that prolonged life spans by 30%. In reality, the report said that they found a drug that raised levels of a certain chemical predictably in mice and humans, and did not venture further claims. The article is fraudulent and almost every science news post does it.
If the media wants to be trusted, they need to stop lying
It's interesting to me because the original subscription model of newspapers was built to counter the perceived low information quality that came from an era where papers were based entirely on sales and ad revenue (leading to the original 'clickbait' headlines).
It seems like the internet, powered by advertising, brought the 'attention' economy roaring back. In its wake news organizations and their hard-won subscriber bases were eroded.
Now we seemed poised to relearn the same lessons about what happens when your incentives are not for truth and accuracy but rather attention.
Before that though there were interest based papers and local news that was hard hitting and relevant, union papers, private investigation, and generally a high interest in journalism that was worth a damn.
As the internet has evolved inexorably to take advantage of our psychology, I don't think we are going back.
Sorry to hijack your comment and kind of unrelated, but does anyone have any books that discuss the beginning of mass media/newspapers. Your comment about the internet brining back the “attention” economy has me interested in the origins of mass media. Just seems like it would be an interesting topic that probably has some relevance today.
Not exactly what you’re asking for but Ryan Holiday makes the “yellow journalism is back again” point in “Trust Me, I’m Lying - Confessions of a media Manipulator”. It’s a (terrifyingly) good book and he goes into how he engineered nationwide protests and counter protests starting with a billboard he paid for and defaced - all to drum up interest for a movie. Also includes other shenanigans he did that the attention-driven media ate up and never fact checked.
I also have a friend who has fooled/manipulated the media on a National scale to humiliate the US Navy (he’s a Westpoint grad). So… there’s likely truth to the book.
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. It was written in 1988 but is still one of the greatest breakdowns of the formation and behavior of mass media I’ve ever seen. Still manages to be relevant today.
The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw and Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power by James McGrath Morris both cover the time period I'm referencing through the lens of two of the most powerful men in the industry at that time.
The Form of News: A History by Barnhurst and Nerone is a dry and academic take but a pretty informative one.
Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, written 100 years ago but honestly just as applicable today. Libre Vox even has a free version up on YouTube[1]. Chomsky actually took the title of his book from Lippmann's, but Lippmann's is a much more advanced and nuanced take (also Chomsky has grossly misrepresented what Lippmann was saying, so I find it hard to trust him).
One of the most delightful takes I've run across is a 1909 lecture by Hamilton Holt, himself a magazine publisher, titled Comemercialism and Journalism. It's a short, engaging, fact-filled, and highly-informative read:
Other than that, I've compiled a "light reading list" which I still feel is a good starting point though I'd probably add to it. Previously mentioned in this thread, and inlcuding Holts's work, as well as several of the other suggestions responding to your question.
Or just report god damn facts like a wikipedia article. I'm sick of all these opinions being passed off as news these days. If something is an opinion or assessment by the journalist, it should be marked in bold with red flashing letters. Yes facts can be omitted or selectively woven to support a narrative, but that's a different problem, and can be relatively easily detected by cross referencing sources.
nothing really, but for some reason I trust an army of unpaid pedantic nerds over editors at actual newspapers. you still see some heavily slanted articles on wikipedia from time to time, but rarely do they trip my bias meter as hard as your average NYT or Reason article.
These "unpaid pedantic nerds" have as you can imagine common interests, opinions and ideas. Its only logical that they also have the same or similar biases.
And the more they align with yours the less likely they will trip your bias meter.
Wikipedia does not report facts for journalistically relevant events. It documents journalistic "reactions".
"Newspaper X wrote Y" is factually true if newspaper X indeed wrote Y and NOT if Y is true.
This in combination with the fact that they (who?) decides which newspapers are accepted, makes Wikipedia very much a propaganda tool when it comes to politically relevant topics and events.
They do the "selecting and omitting" to support a narrative all the time.
Save themselves? Isn’t their strategy doing alright business-wise? Your users are passionate and retained when your partisan enough (but not so partisan they can’t trust you).
Republicans view NYT as very biased, but democrats almost entirely believe it’s unbiased and accurate. The NYTs rides the line really well and continues to grow.
On the flip side, both democrats and republicans largely regard Fox News as entertainment news and more biased. They don’t ride the line too well.
> Republicans view NYT as very biased, but democrats almost entirely believe it’s unbiased and accurate.
That is not true of Democrats. In fact, everyone dislikes the NYT (which is excellent evidence that they are good journalists). For example, progressive Dems have long seen they NYT as a tool of the corporate mainstream, almost the epitome of it. For centrist Dems, the Times broke the Clinton email server scandal and covered the Wikileaks DNC emails.
Dems generally have more skeptical views and get news from more sources.
> democrats and republicans largely regard Fox News as entertainment news and more biased. They don’t ride the line too well.
They are exceptionally influential and profitable, so it depends on your standard for 'well'. And don't forget the Wall Street Journal, the elite outlet for the same organization.
Despite the down-votes, you are likely right on the money. I know several people whose eyes were opened regarding the media for the five year 2016-2020 period.
If you look at the linked page, pretty obvious that the source of the divide is politically driven and largely tied to republican distrust of the media — which goes back Regan destroying objective reporting with deregulation in 1987 and Clinton enabling media monopolies in the 90s:
It was popularized by fox news. They declare themselves as the only source of "fair and balanced news" and lot of less sophisticated people buy into it because they feed them stories, regardless of the truth behind it, they want to see and rub their opinion all over it instead of just reporting the facts of the story.
Prior to deregulation, all news organizations were required by law to present both sides of the story fairly — after it, the were not. Without deregulation, Fox as is would not have been legally possible. Policy was explicitly pushed by Regan’s executive team at the FCC and Regan vetoed bill passed by US Congress to over turn it; if that’s not the definition of being politically driven, not sure what is, given Supreme Court had already ruled FCC was allowed to enforce fairness in the media.
Without fairness being legally regulated, media will never gain the public’s trust again — which at this point is unlikely because the government has become so corrupted by its own self interest to do so; this includes governments preferring monopolies in industries that relate to national security such as media & telecommunications. Decline in the public’s trust is not a result of fair media not being trustworthy, but of biased media intentionally sowing distrust.
I have repeatedly seen individuals who lean towards biased sources be more biased when presented with fair accounts of news events. On flip side, my experience is that individuals seeking balanced accounts of news events tend to be more fair when accessing the events.
Such rules don't work. The UK does have such rules still written into law and the BBC's charter but they are simply ignored. The regulators are fully captured and act as enforcers of the chosen agenda, e.g. at the start of lockdowns Ofcom created a new rule that broadcasters weren't allowed to question government health advice!
Fox is not the problem the USA has. Fox is the solution. Would all the people who think news media is untrustworthy be lapping up CNN if Fox didn't exist? Again, other countries provide the answer - no, they wouldn't. They would just assert that all TV news is biased and refuse to watch any at all, whilst simmering in anger at the system that tries to eliminate them from public life.
All American broadcast media would be illegal under an actually strict interpretation of such a doctrine, which is why such doctrines are never actually enforced as written. The fairness doctrine would not make US media "fair". It would be exactly what it is everywhere else that tried this - state censorship of viewpoints that upset the establishment. I understand that fact very well indeed, given that I can and do directly compare media between a place that has such a rule and places that don't. Congress was correct to abolish it. The UK should do the same thing.
I think the US needs to regulate "news" vs. "entertainment news" and so on.
I remember speaking to some younger folks recently, and I mentioned journalistic integrity, and they didn't even believe the concept ever exists. I doubt they have ever consumed any significant amount of content produced by professional journalists operating under the stricture of formal editorials and fact checking, but it is still somewhat concerning that they don't even acknowledge its existence.
There's some things to be said in this space:
- Newspapers were never competently replaced, business model wise
- Web ads were never sufficiently constrained to not break web pages
- Ad blockers ultimately started to completely destroy any last chance that ad powered solutions could pay for professional journalism
- Entertainment journalism has a different business model, enabling it to be more readily available, and popular, than formal journalism
- I don't think anyone knows where to go from here
I really dislike the term "media" in these discussions, because it seems to lump "entertainment news" squarely in with formal journalism, and I do not think they're equivalent - moreover it's clear the difference is not well observed anymore, and that's extremely concerning.
I know where to go: away from the internet and back to real life, observing what is around me with my own two eyes and drawing conclusions from that. If I find myself ignorant about a particular topic, I will go study it myself rather than rely on "the experts."
That's just a stop-gap solution. We have small bandwidth and can't be expected to figure out the truth on our own for every relevant topic.
That's why it's a travesty that there aren't journalistic outlets that can be reliably counted on to stick up for the truth when that truth happens to be contrary to their political leaning.
There are almost no communities left in the world who do not at least use a manufactured mechanical device to create fire every day, and even the production, sale and distribution of those devices has some significant and politically relevant implications to our world.
I don't think the eyes only world exists anymore. You're absolutely free (I hope) to try to ignore the rest of it, but you'll interact with it regardless.
> Could it be that the younger folks are less inclined to acknowledge the existence of objective truth than older generations?
Does anyone really question the existence of objective truth in general? Even those who claim they do, don’t actually act like they do-when it comes to non-controversial factual claims such as “1+1=2” or “Canada is north of the (mainland) United States” or “World War II happened”.
People only really question objective truth when it comes to issues connected to social/political/ideological/ethical/philosophical/etc controversies-on issues distant from those controversies, everyone accepts it in practice.
And I think a lot of people don’t make a careful distinction between the existence of objective truth and our ability to know it. Some people who question the existence of objective truth, what they are really trying to say, is our ability to (confidently) know what is objectively true has been significantly overrated-which is a claim far more worthy of intellectual respect than what they are literally claiming, especially if one restricts the scope of that claim to certain topics.
As a simple thought experiment on objective truth: if we are having a debate about objective truth and you say objective truth doesn't exist is it then acceptable for me to beat you to death with a crowbar?
If not then why?
There is an external reality independent of people's thoughts. We have spend so many centuries insulating people from it that they can believe all sorts of nonsense that would have killed them near instantly in previous ages.
The media reports a subjectively chosen mixture of objective truths and objective falsehoods–always has, always will. That's got nothing to do with the question of whether objective truth itself exists or not.
> Could it be that the younger folks are less inclined to acknowledge the existence of objective truth than older generations?
I tried to ask this part in the conversation. It was their belief that no one producing media demonstrates any interest in trying to be objective. They expressed a belief that no individual or organization ever even attempts to do so, that agenda is ever present. This expression seemed to imply that they believe it is possible, but that no "they" can be trusted to attempt do so.
At minimum labelling entertainment news clearly as such, and applying some amount of industry standard requirements. There are many bodies working on this, but most ombusman organizations remain in-house. I suspect we can broaden that, such as the Press Complaints Commission.
Democrats are curiously uninterested in media bias. I suppose that, as soon as you admit such a thing, your political world starts collapsing. "We're in charge? And have been for decades? And everything is colored to both fool and please me?"
And consider Hunter Biden, who is actually small potatoes. Consider just his comment "10 percent to the big guy"--that statement alone and nothing else about him--from the desk of Donald Trump Jr., would be 24/7 news month after month from 95 percent of the media. They'd be cutting back on their kangaroo court coverage and everything! And Hunter was talking about Ukraine! That's pretty curious (you'd think).
But I think your average dope isn't even aware of what a goddamned crook Biden is. So why would an informed person have "trust" in the media? Educated Soviets didn't trust the Pravda either.
"The leaders of today’s Democratic Party ... despise this country,” he said. “They have said so. They continue to. That is shocking but it is also disqualifying. We cannot let them run this nation because they hate it. Imagine what they would do to it.”
That’s completely false. The news is owned by massive corporations pushing far-right agendas. The left can hardly get any coverage, while people who would be considered moderates in Europe are branded as far left radicals in the US news.
What are things like on Planet Labster? If there's a press conference and Biden only calls on "friendly" reporters that his staff has told him to call on, does your news outlet even report it?
If a BAD reporter asks a question about a Biden voicemail with his son and the press secretary refuses to discuss it, do you even read about it?
The planet where Biden is considered a middle of the road moderate. He’s to the right of the UK Conservative Party on health care, but to the left on immigration.
I hear plenty on Hunter Biden but don’t really care. I’m not sure why anyone cares the president’s son is kind of a screw-up. Most people don’t like to talk about family embarrassments in public.
LOL: "middle of the road moderate." Given a 30% approval rating, it doesn't seem like he's hitting his target.
Get your sons right, at least. Beau is the one who died. Hunter is the one trading on his father's name, getting on the board of Ukrainian gas companies despite lacking any conceivable expertise.
> "middle of the road moderate." Given a 30% approval rating, it doesn't seem like he's hitting his target.
Actually, with a bimodal distribution of political positions, and sharp intolerance for divergent positions, a “middle of the road moderate” position is going to have very poor support.
The Whig Party learned that in the mid-19th Century.
It gets repeated constantly by Americans but on social issues Europeans are way more conservative and the ideas your progressives hold considered bat shit insane.
On economics you have a point.
Which US progressive ideas are batshit insane in Europe? Is it immigration and freedom of movement, or universal health insurance, or taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor, or is it strong environmental regulation? Is it legal abortion, or the right to form a labor union? Those are the main goals of progressives here.
Speaking of the US, and generally, we have the media and the politics that we deserve. I just laugh at these polls. Yeah, our news media is super low quality, but so is our average citizen.
edit: To clarify, I laugh not because it’s funny, but because all the other more appropriate emotions have long since run out.
That's a slippery slope thinking - if the average citizen is low quality and easy to manipulate why would the bureaucrats and politicians avoid stealing bits and pieces of the common good - leading to corrupted societies like Russia and many/most African countries where no progress is made/can be made.
Obviously the West is not there yet, but if the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for, we'll get there.
Yes we will. So far the institutions that have been built up have continued on cruise control avoiding much in the way of large scale or persistent corruption. But, the 4 years of Trump demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
> But, the 2 years of Biden demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
> But, the 8 years of Obama demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
> But, the 8 years of Bush demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
I'm sorry, I just really don't like statements like this. It literally tells me nothing except what political affiliation you have and it does not give any coherent argument for/against why "the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for".
I don’t believe those three statements can be reasonably supported.
And no, it doesn’t tell you my political affiliation. It tells you that I believe Trump to be a brazenly corrupt individual and that I hate brazen corruption.
I strongly disagree with this characterization. I am a registered Republican. There has never been overt corruption like there was during the Trump administration and it was horrifying.
I also respectfully disagreed with a lot of things about the Bush, Biden, and Obama administrations but they were in no way comparable to the transactional corruption of Trump.
I'm genuinely curious how his presidency was a conflict of interest. All the other presidents in this list happily took their salary of $400,000 a year, while Trump donated his salary to various government projects[0] (at least until the last 6 months).
>> In business, a conflict of interest arises when a person chooses personal gain over duties to their employer, or to an organization in which they are a stakeholder, or exploits their position for personal gain in some way.[1]
I fail to see how giving your paycheck away results in any sort of personal gain other than some tax write offs. In that article you linked, it also said he handed his business over to his sons. I recall our current president had his son making business deals in China based on his dad's name and reputation[1].
>> But the new documents — which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden — illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.[2]
How is that not the same level, or greater corruption than what you posted? Seriously, I don't get why people believe any administration is not corrupt.
Hmm. You think the 4 years of Trump proved the institutions broken? My perspective was always that they were quite resilient during that time. I mean, he literally tried use all of his power to do a coup - and it didn't work.
Perhaps I'm misreading, but are you implying that politicians and bureaucrats in the US aren't currently stealing bits and pieces of the common good? I'd agree that it's not currently as bad as Russia or some African nations, but obviously American politicians are already doing this.
How many senators, congressmen, and presidents have made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from their "government service"? Why, I can think of a president off the top of my head who used his earlier position heading US anti-corruption in a country to get his son paid millions of dollars by corrupt people in that country.
Nothing to do with politics, I started to lose trust in news when I started coming across more articles on topics that I was actually knowledgeable about and noticed they're misleading, just wrong, or had some bias in it.
If you think about it, does the typical journalist who probably trained in just writing really understand some of these complex topics they write about.
> If you think about it, does the typical journalist who probably trained in just writing really understand some of these complex topics they write about.
No, but I like to think that journalism is supposed to be about finding the real experts, asking good questions that the general populace would want answered, and judiciously recording and reporting the answers they get. I feel like most of the journalism we get today is more akin to bad interviews, where the interviewer doesn't know when to shut up and let the expert talk haha.
Go to nytimes.com right now and search for the string “far-right” and then the string “far-left”, counting the number of times these respective phrases were included in an article in the past year. Then, do the same on foxnews.com. Symmetric opposites.
Even readers with relatively low media literacy understand now that mass media doesn’t just give you curated stories about what is happening, they are also telling you how to feel about what is happening. This has probably always been happening but ordinary Americans are more aware of it now.
They are about as credible as the US Supreme Court which claims to apolitically “call balls and strikes”.
While I find Fox News odious politically, at least the news desks at Fox News and the New York Times are dedicated to factual reporting, even if bias can be found in choice of story or omission. At least both are dedicated to public discourse and a certain regard for verifiable truth. The scariest by far thing to me is the increased movement towards total trust in media bodies that are happy to live in a realm of utter fabrication and appeal to raw paranoia and hatred of other groups.
Is that actually true? Historically? If you go back to the first newspapers, they were basically rags. Throughout history, newspapers have been censored, they've been biased, partisan, used as propaganda. At the turn of the American Revolution they became political weapons. Later the robber barons used them to shape public opinion and punish rivals.
Lately we seem to make a lot of proclamations about how terrible things are, and then we feel bad because we think things are "worse than ever". But usually they aren't as bad as they used to be.
The comparison isn't with Gilded-Age era Yellow Journalism (generally 1890s -- 1910s), but the period of professionalised journalism born from Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion and dating roughly from the 1920s through about 2010, with a significant decline being noted beginning with the consolidation and financialisation of news in the 1980s.
In reality, there's been a long-term secular decline remarkably constant over decades dating to the 1950s and the end of WWII. That's been punctuated by a number of factors --- the advent of television and television news, mass advertising, cable TV, media consolidation, financialisation, the Internet, neoliberalism, 9/11, the US-Iraq War & War on Terrorism, the 2008-09 global financial crisis (which tanked ad spend), and the rise of the smartphone and mobile social media.
I.F. Stone interviewed on the PBS show Day at Night in 1974 spoke of what he saw as a golden age of American journalism in the 1970s, largely with the reporting on Watergate and the Vietnam War. That's the zenith to which the present situation might be compared.
You might want to consider adding Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another to your list. It follows a similar theme to many of the books you have listed and discusses more modern topics like the coverage of the Iraq War and the Trump presidency.
I've somewhat tried to stick with older sources, preferably over 25--30 years old, for similar reasons to the Ask Historians subreddit: the works are time-tested, and older history is more settled and generally less liable to stir up present partisanship. The general principles seem to be surprisingly consistent over time, and it's often useful to consider modern information technologies and implementations through the lens of earlier forms and variations. Scale and speed do seem to be a significant deviation from that rule.
Where I've made exceptions for newer works, it has been those which focus more on the technology, organisations, and institutions rather than the parties involved.
In my dad's view Watergate was itself the first signs of the decline, the press was unfair to Nixon, etc. Don't get him started on the press and Reagan.
There has certainly been a rise in the availability of low-quality crap since then - especially post-Twitter - but I have a pet theory that if people's politics hadn't shifted towards the extremes in a way that caused them to distrust the old mainstream, there would be less interest in the crap. (E.g. Fox News didn't "convert" anyone in that house, it was just a previously-unavailable sort of preaching to the choir that hit a ready audience. Funnily, after a couple decades of it, though, it lost its flavor to them.)
tldr: common view is "lower quality media" -> "partisanship and division" and I don't know how we'd be confident in that vs "partisanship and division" -> "more demand for low quality media."
This was evident to me during the 2020 election, when many Republicans denounced Fox News over their early (but correct) call for Arizona, and starting advocating for everyone to ditch Fox and switch to Newsmax or OANN. Fox then had to do a lot of damage control to assuage their audience (essentially lowering the bar to satisfy them).
Edward Jay Epstien's News from Nowhere (1973) discusses the considerations in national television news production. Many of those constraints have been lifted (it's now far easier to capture, transmit, and edit content), others have been introduced (there's far more competition for audience), and some remain largely constant (there are only 60 minutes in an hour, or 30 in a half, of which a substantial portion is lost to advertising). The news business is a constant juggle between sourcing material, producing it for broadcast, audience maintenance, and working within the confines of a time-bounded medium.
(Several of these works are NOT on my previously-linked biography.)
A general consequence is that commercially-organised media and majority-based governance seem to have a number of factors and dynamics which drive them toward demagogic / nationalistic populism. This may be problematic.
There's this interesting dynamic, which links those who insist on "quality news media" and those canceling their subscription for the media not being partisan enough and allowing opinions or stories which do not necessarily fit the editorial policy of the media. (Where this policy defines a safe space for what may show up as a confrontation with reality).
Which may feed the thought that it was never that much about "quality journalism", but about "quality debate arguments". So another view on this may be rather about the decline of the quality of prefabricated debate arguments, which are arguably hard to find on social media. As it seems, the apparent answer for subscription based media was to double down on partisanship, but also to embrace the easy-to-digest quality of electronic media formats.
There's a more general principle I've been arriving at regarding epistemic systems, which is that quality should be exogenously determined.
One basic principle is the "I cut, you choose" heuristic for fairly allocating some resource (e.g., cake). The agent who determines the portioning is not the agent determining the allocation.
This appears in the context of central bank management policies in the case of the US Federal Reserve whose dual mandate is to address concerns over inflation and unemployment. The Fed regulates these, but does not measure them --- both are instead calculated by the US Department of Labour, through the Bureau of Labour Statistics. The Fed acts, Labour judges.
In biological contexts, we can refer to external or internal selective pressures. The latter are often called "mating preferences", and are the explanation often given for (biologically) expensive, but generally non-functional adaptiations such as antlers on deer, elk, and moose, or the peacock's tail. These are generally seen as signalling mechanisms demonstrating indirectly fitness criteria.
Market-based feedback mechanisms for epistemic systems seem to me to be dangerously endogenous, in the sense that the recipient of the information is also engaged in judging that information. We have the term "shooting the messenger" as a description of this.
Robert Anton Wilson expressed what's come to be called Celine's Second Law: "Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."
That is a necessary but insufficient criterion. My extension would be that accurate communication is possible only when the ONLY reward criterion is accuracy of the information.
That is, popularity, entertainment, commercial viability, ideologcial conformance, convenience, conformity with tradition or institutions, are all bias-inducing reward mechanisms. Most of these can be found expressed in various informational biases or discredited bases for truth. Virtually all of them have the characteristic of being positive feedback loops, that is, information satisfying the biased reward system strengthens that reward system. Generally until it doesn't.
News that comforts or feeds narratives should be immediately suspect. Truth is generally inconvenient.
How to apply these principles to human epistemic systems remains something of a challenge. Though I'd argue strongly that the market is a distortionary mechanism.
> For those ignorant of history every day is an incomprehensible shock, for those well versed in it a reminder that human nature never changes.
That's a popular claim - just like the claims against journalism - but also historically ignorant. Human biology hasn't changed in ~200K years, but human nature has changed dramatically. It took 190K years to discover agriculture and 195K years to discover writing, and look what happened since then! Look at our natures compared with humans 200, 500, 1K, 10K, 100K years ago: We're democratic, free, incredibly prosperous and safe and peaceful, etc. etc.
That’s because when we started farming and writing, we created a larger creature of which we are the constituents - civilization. It is now evolving much faster than we are.
I can’t claim much about what people thought or did in their daily lives before the advent of written history but I do know that we still experience all of the same thoughts, feelings, vices, worries, failings and dreams that anyone who has ever kept a written record has throughout history. Our wider scale dealings and political intrigues are largely the same although dealing with different natural or technological events, the ones regarding interpersonal or strictly human matters are practically identical though.
You say that agriculture, writing and democracy have changed human nature but I argue they have only changed the backdrop against which the play takes place, the players and the lines are the same as ever. People didn’t think any differently when they were hunter gatherers, illiterate and living in a family group instead of a city. The subject matter would differ but the nature of the thoughts would be the same as if you were thinking about the same things.
> we still experience all of the same thoughts, feelings, vices, worries, failings and dreams that anyone who has ever kept a written record has throughout history
That I agree with to an extent. I don't have thoughts that a witch cursed me, for example, or that I can accuse people based on a revelation rather than objective evidence.
> Our wider scale dealings and political intrigues are largely the same
Unless I misunderstand your meaning, that claim is clearly untrue. There was no democracy, rule of law, freedom, etc. etc. etc. for most of human history. We handled political issues much differently; intrigues don't involve murder and civil war.
Completely true. When compared to the history of the US, most Americans operate with the perspective of a gold fish trying to remember the Fibonacci sequence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism is a term used to vilify Hearst and Pulitzer. The highest prize in journalism is still named after one of the canonically worst actors in journalistic integrity.
Everyone who was alive then is now dead, so of course we are having to relive that era.
Given that we think of someone like John D. Rockefeller as a robber baron due in part to journalists like Ida Tarbell, it seems like the newspapers were being used to shape public opinion of people like Rockefeller rather than the other way around.
News used to serve a very necessary purpose. People simply didn't get much information and the news was a very necessary way to learn what was happening in the world around you. But times change. Now we live in the information age. People are constantly bombarded by information, so much that they can't even process it, myself included. The news media simply had no hope.
So they executed a strategy that absolutely succeeded in the short term: reporting to induce mass hysteria. Covid is the worst pandemic ever, Trump destroyed the entire country, the US is a fundamentally racist and awful country that must die, etc. As I said, they succeeded in the short term to boost revenues, but the truth is that it was all mostly bullshit. And this strategy could only work once. Most things the news reports are just idiotic bullshit or opinions of people who don't matter, and people en masse are recognizing this.
So yeah, I think this was inevitable. In the words of CBS president Les Moonves, the whole shift was "bad for the country, good for [CBS's] business". I definitely agree that the modern clickbait news is bad for the country, and I am not a shareholder of CBS, so I personally celebrate the collapse of trust in news and can't wait for it to completely die and for the new grassroots era of information to take hold (but I do dread the impact of deepfakes and the like).
We see similar approaches with social media. Fear and anger drive engagement, and engagement creates more ad revenue. I point this out whenever anybody expresses outrage to me over something they read off social media.
Why would grassroots journalism be more trustworthy? More people with no oversight or consequences?
The amount of money spent on some research stories is tremendous how will grass roots journalists be able to do that
The news was the only thing capable of pointing out corruption in business and politics. It was perfect, it didn't always work, sometimes they lied, and many had an agenda. Now it isn't trusted. Guss who will benefit.
Between one party practically running on the media being evil, the news covering every little thing no matter how stupid as a big event to keep up ratings, and barely doing any journalism (just showing press conference soundbites as fact) I’m not too surprised.
> the "single most important factor" in media distrust was "the horrible coverage" in the run-up to the Iraq war and "the disastrous media coverage in the years after 9/11,"
This is certainly true of my own experience. I am surprised to see it being pointed out so plainly in what appears to be a relatively mainstream sort of news outlet.
There was also zero consequences for both the horrible coverage and the lies. We have people like David "axis of evil" Frum holding prestigious positions at media companies. He should be pumping gas or flipping burgers somewhere.
I'm no expert but the news was a big part of causing American fervor when we started wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were united in a very unique way after the attacks and the news took advantage of that to drum up war support. We went to war with Iraq that literally had nothing to do with it. Wild when you think about it. I was young at the time and even I was calling for their country to be nuked. News 24/7 talking about the invasions.
I was in college then, and remember thinking that there was a disturbing disconnect between what the news was reporting and what any third party sources were able to verify. The "yellow cake uranium" canard in particular, but anything related to the war on terror. And this was not Fox News, this was my college town's left-leaning NPR station.
Basically all of the major news companies took the Bush administration at face value and parroted whatever they were told to say in order to sell the US on attacking Iraq. Then shortly afterwards, it came out that Bush, Cheney, and co. had completely lied to the American people and fabricated a false justification for an unnecessary war that ended up killing thousands of innocent civilians burning trillions of dollars.
The media consistently favored pro-war sources and ignored anti-war sources during the run up to the Iraq war. Publicly holding an anti-war opinion was a dangerous career move in the media at that time.
Journalists like Judith Miller of the New York Times were accused of being "stenographers" who reported whatever they were told by sources in the government without doing any independent verification, with many of the claims they reported later being shown to be false. They would report on things like Colin Powell's testimony to the UN on Iraq rather uncritically, when Colin Powell's own privately stated opinion of the draft of his speech was, "This is bullshit".
The effect of this was that the US public was misinformed about the role of Iraq in terrorism and the 9/11 attacks, as shown by surveys where a majority of the public would get the facts wrong about basic questions surrounding Iraq and 9/11, and both the public and politicians supported the war more than they would have if there was a more balanced debate in the media.
The argument is, basically, "If the US public knew the truth, they wouldn't have approved of going to war". Which of course is the case in most wars the US gets in - the role of the US media in the run up to a war is to make sure the public doesn't know the truth.
Here's a related video I watched last night (not mine). Kinda goes over the historical events that changed what journalism is. Money and McCarthy era backlash are a couple big ones.
Why News Used To Have Less Bias
Exploring the claim that American news in the 50's and 60's was unbiased.
Journalism as both an industry and an institution is going through a global "subculture" phase: from the arrogance of "you can't sit with us" attitude of ideologically driven media to those who follow neutrality for the sake of neutrality to please every audience possible.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadCan't say I agree:
Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-blast-minister-id...
"Highland Park gunman's family was in turmoil for years before shooting" <-- neutral
"Shinzo Abe's assassination shocks Japan" <-- neutral
"Musk tells Twitter he wants out of deal to buy it. Twitter says it will force him to close the sale" <-- neutral
"Here's what's in Biden's executive order on abortion rights" <-- neutral
"Trump considering waiving executive privilege claim for Bannon but prosecutors say he was never shielded" <-- neutral
The top headlines on foxnews.com at the moment are:
"Dems reportedly full of 'outright worry' president won't be able to rescue plunging polls by midterms" <-- neutral
"Twitter squawks back after Musk reveals he's terminating $44B purchase" <-- neutral
"FBI director issues stern warning about biggest long-term threat to US" <-- neutral
"Mom gets terrifying call after dropping young daughter off at airport gate" <-- neutral but click-baity
"BORDER BATTLE: Biden admin fires back as governor takes spiraling migrant crisis into his own hands" <-- biased (alternative version: Biden admin criticizes Texas governor after executive order)
"GAFFER-IN-CHIEF: Biden widely mocked after he appears to read instruction right off teleprompter" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
"'Joe Biden and the Democrats are lying' to the American people: Rep. Malliotakis" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
"School choice advocate slams 'despicable' criticism from unions of Arizona school voucher bill" <-- biased (alternative: none, because it's not news worthy)
Fox and other conservative sources publish a lot of "conservative personality SLAMS liberal personality"-type articles. Left-wing publications do the opposite of course, but credible sources rarely publish this kind of article unless it's from someone important and about an important subject, and try not to use formulae like "as governor takes SPIRALING migrant crisis INTO HIS OWN HANDS" or "widely mocked".
You're more than welcome to provide your own data, or at a bare minimum, state your standards or criteria for what a sufficient or credible response might be.
Keep in mind that there are in fact organisations which do just this over time, with Ad Fontes Media being among the better known and more credible:
https://adfontesmedia.com/
The most notable CNN bias indicator would be having to pay out nearly half a billion to a minor for slandering him. It's not the only event of that nature either.
But usually the bias is omission of facts and even stories, speculation, and slant within the story. In the Sandman case it was only showing partial footage that cut out him being approached and made him look like the aggressor.
Reason Magazine is probably the pinnacle of very good right-leaning journalism, filling the same niche as VICE on the left. I really enjoy the excellent journalism of both.
EDIT: I have reproduced your original comparison with WSJ taking the place of CNN
CNN:
"Highland Park gunman's family was in turmoil for years before shooting" <-- neutral
"Shinzo Abe's assassination shocks Japan" <-- neutral
"Musk tells Twitter he wants out of deal to buy it. Twitter says it will force him to close the sale" <-- neutral
"Here's what's in Biden's executive order on abortion rights" <-- neutral
"Trump considering waiving executive privilege claim for Bannon but prosecutors say he was never shielded" <-- neutral
WSJ:
Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Former Premier, Is Assassinated <-- neutral
Musk Moves to End Deal for Twitter <-- neutral
Google Offers Concessions to Fend Off Antitrust Suit <-- neutral
U.S. Jobs Market Remains Robust <-- neutral
Investors Bet Euro’s Woes Are Far From Over <-- Somewhat editorial, but no clear bias
Housing-Affordability Index At Lowest Level Since 2006 <-- neutral
If you're interested in looking at broadcast rundowns by day, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is invaluable. It permits keyword searches (for how a specific story was covered), or looking at broadcasts from the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News), dating to as early as 1969 (for ABC, CBS, and NBC, with CNN and Fox being added at later dates).
https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/
For websites, navigating archives by date on the Internet Archive can be useful. It's difficult to pick a canonical time of day for stories, and archive timing varies, but you might choose a target such as 6pm US/Eastern to designate the end of a daily news cycle and find the copy that most nearly matches that.
As noted, there are organisations which perform this work themselves, including Ad Fontes (which I've already mentioned), Media Bias Fact Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/), and more. Sourcewatch (https://sourcewatch.org) is another.
There are of course partisan bias-check organisations (e.g., the Media Resource Center on the right, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on the left). There are also groups which look for under-reported stories, most notably Project Censored (https://www.projectcensored.org/).
Eg, "Highland Park gunman's family was in turmoil for years before shooting" isn't neutral, it is narrative building. It isn't relevant to anything important - there are lots of families in turmoil out there. Most families, I suspect, face some sort of turmoil every few years. But the style is more high-brow and their clearly targeting people who are/want to be emotionally sensitive.
Bias is different from whether the headline is pitching at high- or low- class audiences. You're probably picking up that Fox news isn't written with people like you in mind and CNN might be.
Only for the credulous
At this point, the best thing people can do is to just glance at the news when it presents itself and then otherwise move on with their lives. If there's any good to come out of the age of disinformation, it's that maybe people will stop doomscrolling the news.
Now if only I could break the news consumption habit!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
How it comes up in search results: https://twitter.com/jeremyreporter/status/154545145897532211...
How it appears now: https://apnews.com/article/japan-shinzo-abe-shooting-22ec224...
Thank you
However you said _those_ weren't good, or least not unbiased enough. So what are the unbiased, or at least better about handling bias than those they posted.
Taleb would call them IYI (intellectual yet idiot).
>Taleb would call them IYI (intellectual yet idiot).
Lenin's "useful idiots" term is always apt.
I say this as someone would be an independent or Democrat on this graph.
With both sides of the story you see what is being emphasized or downplayed by each party. You also see the shared themes.
Add in international sources and see how they differ.
For me it shows:
1) Mass shooting porn (several different items)
2) Something about Twitter
3) Different shooting
4) Assassination of the former PM of a G7 country (somehow below the fold)
5) Trump
6) Abortion
Only after much scrolling do you get to a story about the economy, which polls report is the single most important issue to most Americans.
Contrast with FoxNews.com, which doesn’t have the numbers at all on the homepage (as far as I can tell, maybe I’m missing them, it’s late) and instead has an opinion from Larry Kudlow about how he thinks a recession is coming. Also after much scrolling. They did report the numbers though.
What is your point exactly?
The point is that, at best, CNN is out of touch with what people actually care about, and also milking tragedy for profit. Less charitably, they’re focusing on stories that could help democrats in the midterms while burying economic stories that are bad for democrats, while milking tragedy for profit. In the last decade they’ve completely dropped the pretense that they’re not openly rooting for one side.
Fox News is partisan entertainment, and deliberately so. I’m not sure why you’re even bringing them up.
The point was to bring another datapoint into the mix. If CNN were burying economic stories bad for Democrats, why isn’t Fox News the partisan entertainment network featuring them? Maybe the stories just aren’t so interesting to people? Or maybe they’re not so bad as you think?
I tend to watch all 3 cable networks and inflation, recession worries, good jobs and unemployment numbers, and high but declining gas prices have been topics on all 3 this week. I just don’t see how anyone is hiding anything. The information is there, as you pointed out. Every story I saw yesterday about good jobs numbers had caveats about inflation and recession worries. I mean, are you suggesting that people aren’t aware of these things?
The same will happen with the other institutions. We already have large amount of people skeptical of the CDC, WHO, and other health oriented orgs. We have growing skepticism of large financial institutions (fed & inflation, IMF & "you will own nothing", etc.). There is widespread skepticism of academic institutions, which will cause the value of academic titles to depreciate.
All this because the people who control these institutions insist on using them as political instruments (at certain times).
I wonder what the situation will be 50 years from now...
"So might as well listen to the liar who I trust is on our side"
Believing "institutions are corrupt" without addressing specific instances of corruption is an abandonment of critical thought itself.
You can LARP life for a while, but reality continues outside your fantasy, and at some point you will have to reconcile the two. You may find at this point that you weren't on the side of truth and justice after all.
True for any social system that grants one group power over another.
Only constant and consistent demonstration of honest behavior signals otherwise. Trust is a delicate thing, and must be maintained.
Trustworthy institutions enable people with conflicting interests and values to cooperate. When people lose trust and believe institutions are biased against them, they don’t seek an alternative source of trusted authority. Instead, they seek a champion who will be biased in their favor and fight for them.
You see this in third world countries all the time. The factions there aren’t built on leaders being trustworthy, but instead sectarian affiliation.
This USA Today comic explains it well: https://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13. For better or worse, climate change is used as tool for advancing political agendas with a certain vision for the future.
Conservatives have been complaining about “liberal media” since forever. But the divergence in media trust between Democrats one hand and Independents/Republicans on the other grew dramatically in the Bush era, and again during the Trump era: https://www.allsides.com/news/2020-12-31-0913/trump-era-driv...
In the 1980s I assume most NYC news anchors hated Reagan, but they at least tried to hide their contempt.
If the media wants to be trusted, they need to stop lying
It seems like the internet, powered by advertising, brought the 'attention' economy roaring back. In its wake news organizations and their hard-won subscriber bases were eroded.
Now we seemed poised to relearn the same lessons about what happens when your incentives are not for truth and accuracy but rather attention.
As the internet has evolved inexorably to take advantage of our psychology, I don't think we are going back.
I also have a friend who has fooled/manipulated the media on a National scale to humiliate the US Navy (he’s a Westpoint grad). So… there’s likely truth to the book.
The Form of News: A History by Barnhurst and Nerone is a dry and academic take but a pretty informative one.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX1eEQVDdjA&t=1s
https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
Other than that, I've compiled a "light reading list" which I still feel is a good starting point though I'd probably add to it. Previously mentioned in this thread, and inlcuding Holts's work, as well as several of the other suggestions responding to your question.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
- present multiple extremes
- find the recommended mid ground from their perspective
- show the consequences of extremes
To simply show a single perspective isn't journalism, from my own perspective.
The same can be said of anything on the internet, largely controlled by big tech, what is stopping them from manipulating information for profit?
"Newspaper X wrote Y" is factually true if newspaper X indeed wrote Y and NOT if Y is true. This in combination with the fact that they (who?) decides which newspapers are accepted, makes Wikipedia very much a propaganda tool when it comes to politically relevant topics and events. They do the "selecting and omitting" to support a narrative all the time.
Republicans view NYT as very biased, but democrats almost entirely believe it’s unbiased and accurate. The NYTs rides the line really well and continues to grow.
On the flip side, both democrats and republicans largely regard Fox News as entertainment news and more biased. They don’t ride the line too well.
That is not true of Democrats. In fact, everyone dislikes the NYT (which is excellent evidence that they are good journalists). For example, progressive Dems have long seen they NYT as a tool of the corporate mainstream, almost the epitome of it. For centrist Dems, the Times broke the Clinton email server scandal and covered the Wikileaks DNC emails.
Dems generally have more skeptical views and get news from more sources.
> democrats and republicans largely regard Fox News as entertainment news and more biased. They don’t ride the line too well.
They are exceptionally influential and profitable, so it depends on your standard for 'well'. And don't forget the Wall Street Journal, the elite outlet for the same organization.
See https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-political-economy-of-freedom...
See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4daIk8PCPIc
It's sad that aside from the dated examples, it rings so true now: https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/
https://apnews.com/article/business-immigration-deregulation...
That’s not to diminish the role that Fox or Reagan has had, but rather, that it’s a much more complex problem.
And, you would be remiss laying it solely on Conservative feet.
Also, from the article "Independents' views are generally closer to Republicans'". How does that square with "republican distrust of media"?
Prior to deregulation, all news organizations were required by law to present both sides of the story fairly — after it, the were not. Without deregulation, Fox as is would not have been legally possible. Policy was explicitly pushed by Regan’s executive team at the FCC and Regan vetoed bill passed by US Congress to over turn it; if that’s not the definition of being politically driven, not sure what is, given Supreme Court had already ruled FCC was allowed to enforce fairness in the media.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
Without fairness being legally regulated, media will never gain the public’s trust again — which at this point is unlikely because the government has become so corrupted by its own self interest to do so; this includes governments preferring monopolies in industries that relate to national security such as media & telecommunications. Decline in the public’s trust is not a result of fair media not being trustworthy, but of biased media intentionally sowing distrust.
I have repeatedly seen individuals who lean towards biased sources be more biased when presented with fair accounts of news events. On flip side, my experience is that individuals seeking balanced accounts of news events tend to be more fair when accessing the events.
Fox is not the problem the USA has. Fox is the solution. Would all the people who think news media is untrustworthy be lapping up CNN if Fox didn't exist? Again, other countries provide the answer - no, they wouldn't. They would just assert that all TV news is biased and refuse to watch any at all, whilst simmering in anger at the system that tries to eliminate them from public life.
Did you even look at the link to the Fairness Doctrine?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
If not, and you don’t understand it, or the impact it had, maybe consider that you’re talking about a topic you don’t even understand.
Fox as is, would be illegal under the fairness doctrine and would be shutdown.
I remember speaking to some younger folks recently, and I mentioned journalistic integrity, and they didn't even believe the concept ever exists. I doubt they have ever consumed any significant amount of content produced by professional journalists operating under the stricture of formal editorials and fact checking, but it is still somewhat concerning that they don't even acknowledge its existence.
There's some things to be said in this space:
- Newspapers were never competently replaced, business model wise
- Web ads were never sufficiently constrained to not break web pages
- Ad blockers ultimately started to completely destroy any last chance that ad powered solutions could pay for professional journalism
- Entertainment journalism has a different business model, enabling it to be more readily available, and popular, than formal journalism
- I don't think anyone knows where to go from here
I really dislike the term "media" in these discussions, because it seems to lump "entertainment news" squarely in with formal journalism, and I do not think they're equivalent - moreover it's clear the difference is not well observed anymore, and that's extremely concerning.
That's why it's a travesty that there aren't journalistic outlets that can be reliably counted on to stick up for the truth when that truth happens to be contrary to their political leaning.
I don't think the eyes only world exists anymore. You're absolutely free (I hope) to try to ignore the rest of it, but you'll interact with it regardless.
I could argue that it is orthogonal to integrity seeing as I believe integrity to be about intent and not result.
What cannot be argued however is that this viewpoint definitely casts a shadow on journalism as a profession, even the "serious" journalism.
What always struck me in Chomsky’s lectures are the constant barrage of examples of big, serious publications pushing agendas left and right.
I guess what I am trying to say is that serious is a low bar here, not that much higher than entertainment news.
Does anyone really question the existence of objective truth in general? Even those who claim they do, don’t actually act like they do-when it comes to non-controversial factual claims such as “1+1=2” or “Canada is north of the (mainland) United States” or “World War II happened”.
People only really question objective truth when it comes to issues connected to social/political/ideological/ethical/philosophical/etc controversies-on issues distant from those controversies, everyone accepts it in practice.
And I think a lot of people don’t make a careful distinction between the existence of objective truth and our ability to know it. Some people who question the existence of objective truth, what they are really trying to say, is our ability to (confidently) know what is objectively true has been significantly overrated-which is a claim far more worthy of intellectual respect than what they are literally claiming, especially if one restricts the scope of that claim to certain topics.
If not then why?
There is an external reality independent of people's thoughts. We have spend so many centuries insulating people from it that they can believe all sorts of nonsense that would have killed them near instantly in previous ages.
I tried to ask this part in the conversation. It was their belief that no one producing media demonstrates any interest in trying to be objective. They expressed a belief that no individual or organization ever even attempts to do so, that agenda is ever present. This expression seemed to imply that they believe it is possible, but that no "they" can be trusted to attempt do so.
The only way his sons are not like Hunter Biden is that their dad is the bigger train wreck.
https://www.foxnews.com/category/person/hunter-biden
And consider Hunter Biden, who is actually small potatoes. Consider just his comment "10 percent to the big guy"--that statement alone and nothing else about him--from the desk of Donald Trump Jr., would be 24/7 news month after month from 95 percent of the media. They'd be cutting back on their kangaroo court coverage and everything! And Hunter was talking about Ukraine! That's pretty curious (you'd think).
But I think your average dope isn't even aware of what a goddamned crook Biden is. So why would an informed person have "trust" in the media? Educated Soviets didn't trust the Pravda either.
Tucker carlson on foxnews
What are things like on Planet Labster? If there's a press conference and Biden only calls on "friendly" reporters that his staff has told him to call on, does your news outlet even report it?
If a BAD reporter asks a question about a Biden voicemail with his son and the press secretary refuses to discuss it, do you even read about it?
I hear plenty on Hunter Biden but don’t really care. I’m not sure why anyone cares the president’s son is kind of a screw-up. Most people don’t like to talk about family embarrassments in public.
Get your sons right, at least. Beau is the one who died. Hunter is the one trading on his father's name, getting on the board of Ukrainian gas companies despite lacking any conceivable expertise.
Actually, with a bimodal distribution of political positions, and sharp intolerance for divergent positions, a “middle of the road moderate” position is going to have very poor support.
The Whig Party learned that in the mid-19th Century.
edit: To clarify, I laugh not because it’s funny, but because all the other more appropriate emotions have long since run out.
Obviously the West is not there yet, but if the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for, we'll get there.
> But, the 8 years of Obama demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
> But, the 8 years of Bush demonstrated that our institutions are currently pretty helpless against brazen corruption. Many millions of our citizens will shrug their shoulders at, or even cheer on corruption so long as their side is winning the all important cultural trolling wars.
I'm sorry, I just really don't like statements like this. It literally tells me nothing except what political affiliation you have and it does not give any coherent argument for/against why "the majority of the elite thinks the masses can't defend their interests and are not worth fighting for".
And no, it doesn’t tell you my political affiliation. It tells you that I believe Trump to be a brazenly corrupt individual and that I hate brazen corruption.
I also respectfully disagreed with a lot of things about the Bush, Biden, and Obama administrations but they were in no way comparable to the transactional corruption of Trump.
He had massive conflicts of interest from day one and refused to step back from his business interests: https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/313864-government-et...
>> In business, a conflict of interest arises when a person chooses personal gain over duties to their employer, or to an organization in which they are a stakeholder, or exploits their position for personal gain in some way.[1]
I fail to see how giving your paycheck away results in any sort of personal gain other than some tax write offs. In that article you linked, it also said he handed his business over to his sons. I recall our current president had his son making business deals in China based on his dad's name and reputation[1].
>> But the new documents — which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden — illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.[2]
How is that not the same level, or greater corruption than what you posted? Seriously, I don't get why people believe any administration is not corrupt.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-donation-salar...
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conflict-of-interest.as...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/30/hunter-bi...
How many senators, congressmen, and presidents have made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from their "government service"? Why, I can think of a president off the top of my head who used his earlier position heading US anti-corruption in a country to get his son paid millions of dollars by corrupt people in that country.
If you think about it, does the typical journalist who probably trained in just writing really understand some of these complex topics they write about.
No, but I like to think that journalism is supposed to be about finding the real experts, asking good questions that the general populace would want answered, and judiciously recording and reporting the answers they get. I feel like most of the journalism we get today is more akin to bad interviews, where the interviewer doesn't know when to shut up and let the expert talk haha.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Even readers with relatively low media literacy understand now that mass media doesn’t just give you curated stories about what is happening, they are also telling you how to feel about what is happening. This has probably always been happening but ordinary Americans are more aware of it now.
They are about as credible as the US Supreme Court which claims to apolitically “call balls and strikes”.
Lately we seem to make a lot of proclamations about how terrible things are, and then we feel bad because we think things are "worse than ever". But usually they aren't as bad as they used to be.
In reality, there's been a long-term secular decline remarkably constant over decades dating to the 1950s and the end of WWII. That's been punctuated by a number of factors --- the advent of television and television news, mass advertising, cable TV, media consolidation, financialisation, the Internet, neoliberalism, 9/11, the US-Iraq War & War on Terrorism, the 2008-09 global financial crisis (which tanked ad spend), and the rise of the smartphone and mobile social media.
I.F. Stone interviewed on the PBS show Day at Night in 1974 spoke of what he saw as a golden age of American journalism in the 1970s, largely with the reporting on Watergate and the Vietnam War. That's the zenith to which the present situation might be compared.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g
The topic is of course fare more complex. I've compiled a "light reading list" which I'm still working through myself, and need to add to, here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
I've somewhat tried to stick with older sources, preferably over 25--30 years old, for similar reasons to the Ask Historians subreddit: the works are time-tested, and older history is more settled and generally less liable to stir up present partisanship. The general principles seem to be surprisingly consistent over time, and it's often useful to consider modern information technologies and implementations through the lens of earlier forms and variations. Scale and speed do seem to be a significant deviation from that rule.
Where I've made exceptions for newer works, it has been those which focus more on the technology, organisations, and institutions rather than the parties involved.
That said, I'll give it a look.
There has certainly been a rise in the availability of low-quality crap since then - especially post-Twitter - but I have a pet theory that if people's politics hadn't shifted towards the extremes in a way that caused them to distrust the old mainstream, there would be less interest in the crap. (E.g. Fox News didn't "convert" anyone in that house, it was just a previously-unavailable sort of preaching to the choir that hit a ready audience. Funnily, after a couple decades of it, though, it lost its flavor to them.)
tldr: common view is "lower quality media" -> "partisanship and division" and I don't know how we'd be confident in that vs "partisanship and division" -> "more demand for low quality media."
See Umberto Eco's description of Ur-Fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
Robert O. Paxton's "The Five Stages of Fascism" (https://web.archive.org/web/20170221113224/http://theleder.c...) and The Anatomy of Fascism (https://archive.org/details/anatomyoffascism00paxt_0) make a case that I interpret as much of what we view as fascist behaviour seems to be information-theoretic, and typical of any culture or community under increasing stress. (This raises several grim prospects.)
Dwight MacDonald's 1956 take on mass media describes much, "A Theory of Mass Culture": https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...
Edward Jay Epstien's News from Nowhere (1973) discusses the considerations in national television news production. Many of those constraints have been lifted (it's now far easier to capture, transmit, and edit content), others have been introduced (there's far more competition for audience), and some remain largely constant (there are only 60 minutes in an hour, or 30 in a half, of which a substantial portion is lost to advertising). The news business is a constant juggle between sourcing material, producing it for broadcast, audience maintenance, and working within the confines of a time-bounded medium.
https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst
(Several of these works are NOT on my previously-linked biography.)
A general consequence is that commercially-organised media and majority-based governance seem to have a number of factors and dynamics which drive them toward demagogic / nationalistic populism. This may be problematic.
Which may feed the thought that it was never that much about "quality journalism", but about "quality debate arguments". So another view on this may be rather about the decline of the quality of prefabricated debate arguments, which are arguably hard to find on social media. As it seems, the apparent answer for subscription based media was to double down on partisanship, but also to embrace the easy-to-digest quality of electronic media formats.
One basic principle is the "I cut, you choose" heuristic for fairly allocating some resource (e.g., cake). The agent who determines the portioning is not the agent determining the allocation.
This appears in the context of central bank management policies in the case of the US Federal Reserve whose dual mandate is to address concerns over inflation and unemployment. The Fed regulates these, but does not measure them --- both are instead calculated by the US Department of Labour, through the Bureau of Labour Statistics. The Fed acts, Labour judges.
In biological contexts, we can refer to external or internal selective pressures. The latter are often called "mating preferences", and are the explanation often given for (biologically) expensive, but generally non-functional adaptiations such as antlers on deer, elk, and moose, or the peacock's tail. These are generally seen as signalling mechanisms demonstrating indirectly fitness criteria.
Market-based feedback mechanisms for epistemic systems seem to me to be dangerously endogenous, in the sense that the recipient of the information is also engaged in judging that information. We have the term "shooting the messenger" as a description of this.
Robert Anton Wilson expressed what's come to be called Celine's Second Law: "Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws
That is a necessary but insufficient criterion. My extension would be that accurate communication is possible only when the ONLY reward criterion is accuracy of the information.
That is, popularity, entertainment, commercial viability, ideologcial conformance, convenience, conformity with tradition or institutions, are all bias-inducing reward mechanisms. Most of these can be found expressed in various informational biases or discredited bases for truth. Virtually all of them have the characteristic of being positive feedback loops, that is, information satisfying the biased reward system strengthens that reward system. Generally until it doesn't.
News that comforts or feeds narratives should be immediately suspect. Truth is generally inconvenient.
How to apply these principles to human epistemic systems remains something of a challenge. Though I'd argue strongly that the market is a distortionary mechanism.
That's a popular claim - just like the claims against journalism - but also historically ignorant. Human biology hasn't changed in ~200K years, but human nature has changed dramatically. It took 190K years to discover agriculture and 195K years to discover writing, and look what happened since then! Look at our natures compared with humans 200, 500, 1K, 10K, 100K years ago: We're democratic, free, incredibly prosperous and safe and peaceful, etc. etc.
You say that agriculture, writing and democracy have changed human nature but I argue they have only changed the backdrop against which the play takes place, the players and the lines are the same as ever. People didn’t think any differently when they were hunter gatherers, illiterate and living in a family group instead of a city. The subject matter would differ but the nature of the thoughts would be the same as if you were thinking about the same things.
That I agree with to an extent. I don't have thoughts that a witch cursed me, for example, or that I can accuse people based on a revelation rather than objective evidence.
> Our wider scale dealings and political intrigues are largely the same
Unless I misunderstand your meaning, that claim is clearly untrue. There was no democracy, rule of law, freedom, etc. etc. etc. for most of human history. We handled political issues much differently; intrigues don't involve murder and civil war.
Things are far from "worse than ever": https://nypost.com/2018/03/03/9-charts-that-prove-theres-nev...
Everyone who was alive then is now dead, so of course we are having to relive that era.
Now it is consolidated under the control of very few.
That doesn't seem like a positive change to me.
News used to serve a very necessary purpose. People simply didn't get much information and the news was a very necessary way to learn what was happening in the world around you. But times change. Now we live in the information age. People are constantly bombarded by information, so much that they can't even process it, myself included. The news media simply had no hope.
So they executed a strategy that absolutely succeeded in the short term: reporting to induce mass hysteria. Covid is the worst pandemic ever, Trump destroyed the entire country, the US is a fundamentally racist and awful country that must die, etc. As I said, they succeeded in the short term to boost revenues, but the truth is that it was all mostly bullshit. And this strategy could only work once. Most things the news reports are just idiotic bullshit or opinions of people who don't matter, and people en masse are recognizing this.
So yeah, I think this was inevitable. In the words of CBS president Les Moonves, the whole shift was "bad for the country, good for [CBS's] business". I definitely agree that the modern clickbait news is bad for the country, and I am not a shareholder of CBS, so I personally celebrate the collapse of trust in news and can't wait for it to completely die and for the new grassroots era of information to take hold (but I do dread the impact of deepfakes and the like).
The amount of money spent on some research stories is tremendous how will grass roots journalists be able to do that
The news was the only thing capable of pointing out corruption in business and politics. It was perfect, it didn't always work, sometimes they lied, and many had an agenda. Now it isn't trusted. Guss who will benefit.
This is certainly true of my own experience. I am surprised to see it being pointed out so plainly in what appears to be a relatively mainstream sort of news outlet.
Journalists like Judith Miller of the New York Times were accused of being "stenographers" who reported whatever they were told by sources in the government without doing any independent verification, with many of the claims they reported later being shown to be false. They would report on things like Colin Powell's testimony to the UN on Iraq rather uncritically, when Colin Powell's own privately stated opinion of the draft of his speech was, "This is bullshit".
The effect of this was that the US public was misinformed about the role of Iraq in terrorism and the 9/11 attacks, as shown by surveys where a majority of the public would get the facts wrong about basic questions surrounding Iraq and 9/11, and both the public and politicians supported the war more than they would have if there was a more balanced debate in the media.
The argument is, basically, "If the US public knew the truth, they wouldn't have approved of going to war". Which of course is the case in most wars the US gets in - the role of the US media in the run up to a war is to make sure the public doesn't know the truth.