I'd argue that Epstein, Covid, and internet censorship touching everyone and everything had a greater impact. Those things you listed impacted Republican's trust in news for sure, but at this point even Jimmy Dore has a good laugh at the likes of Sam Harris and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's basically, "do you trust your corporate overlords?" which doesn't require that one have a particular view on economic policy.
Humans will engage in wars and genocides against other people just because they are other groups of humans. It doesn't matter what sort of thought process or ideology is used to justify it.
But sure, look up things such as "the Armenian Question". Religious genocides existed before the Shoah. Heck, read some of the bible to see some more examples. Human sacrifice also has a long, long tradition in various religions. While the toll for any particular human sacrifice will be few in number, iterated over centuries it adds up.
The media decided they didn't want to be in the broadcast booth. They wanted to be part of the action on the field. That's their choice, but we no longer trust their broadcast to be unbiased.
To an extent, sure. By default I will likely take a professional over amateur. That said, have you read an article where you are the expert on the subject and found yourself questioning whether the author understands the subject? I remember reading one like that and it was something of an eye-opener. In that case, they got some basic stuff wrong ( and if they spoke with anyone in the industry, they either misunderstood or misrepresented what they said ). I have certain faith in printed word, but I will admit I trust it less and less.
“Real professional journalism” ain’t what it used to be.
Market forces have gutted the workforce, disincentivized long-form content, encouraged partisanship, and most importantly of all, consolidated most media under a handful of large companies.
“The Media” is not a monolith, but a substantial amount of press is owned and operated by a select few institutions.
Personally, I read The Economist on a weekly basis and feel that is very good quality. Not that I think it's 100% accurate or always right (though they admit when they are wrong and put in corrections), but the writing is also good and just enjoyable to read. Like reading a novel from a good author. It also gives a good breadth of coverage even if not always super in-depth.
This is a very different experience from watching cable news for example. Yet both are considered "The Media"
Maybe it's obvious manuvering like this that's to blame:
>Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information, as long as it’s genuine, by whatever means and with whatever motives. Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him.
So basically, "we're saying something that will turn our audience against him, but as an aside we mentioned that a couple organizations you've probably never heard of spoke out against something we're not going to explain, and that on balance means we're defending him."
I was gonna say, it honestly feels like there's evidence in this article that would go great lengths to explain the real problem. I feel there is a huge disconnect between journalists and the public, and I think that having journalists be on Twitter helped make people aware of that disconnect.
I also thought it was eye-widening where they described access journalism as a happy and productive equilibrium involving the tolerance of "some hypocrisy on both sides."
Good grief yes. If that was a sincere paragraph in that article, than I have to admit that there is no hope there, because any kind of self-reflection and soul searching is basically pointless with that kind of revelation. This weird patina of technically true sentences structured in a way that is intended to mislead or lead onto a specific thought pattern is just sad for anyone paying attention.
This weird variation of navel gazing is very weird though. Is the author seriously suggest they should stop doing that? At that point, even the remnants of their current credibility will perish with the first source they burn since no one sensible will be stupid enough to disclose anything of value.
If it is not sincere, then I am in full agreement with you. It is a poster child why Americans lost faith in news.
How could you rewrite that paragraph without bias? That seems an impossible task to me because there is no objectively truthful way to describe someone accused of a political crime.
This is not intended as a shot, but you just did by saying classifying Assange as 'someone accused of political crime'. I guess my general point is that it obviously can be done, but pre-ordained agenda seems to be clogging basic language faculties of people who live by the printed word.
To pick just one incident: He's alleged to have selectively released information specifically to damage the Clinton campaign, and at a time where a Trump scandal was at the top of the news. That's not really even very arguable. To believe that Wikileaks release was non-political just strains reason. Clearly the Podesta emails were released for political purposes.
You have an easier time arguing that it's not a crime. Certainly the Podesta hack itself was a crime, but it's plausible that Assange merely got the emails after the fact and published them because they were newsworthy. That's... pretty arguable, but it's at least an argument.
Broadly... I just don't see the bias here. Assange is credibly accused of political crimes. Stating so isn't "bias", it's just describing a reasonably held opinion. That it isn't your opinion isn't the point.
> To pick just one incident: He's alleged to have selectively released information specifically to damage the Clinton campaign, and at a time where a Trump scandal was at the top of the news.
Maybe pick an incident that he's charged with?
> You have an easier time arguing that it's not a crime.
Especially since nobody has claimed that this is a crime, and he's never been charged with it. You're spreading misinformation in order to justify the prosecution of a journalist.
>This is not intended as a shot, but you just did by saying classifying Assange as 'someone accused of political crime'.
I'm confused what you mean here and whether you are saying I used biased or unbiased phrasing. If you are saying it was biased, why was my comment neutral when the original "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal." was not? If what I said was biased, how would you describe the fact that he has been accused of crimes?
I'm not asking rhetorical questions here. I'm challenging people to write an unbiased version of that original paragraph. I don't think it can be done. We can't address "Americans Lost Faith in the News" without being honest that this ideal of a universally agreed upon unbiased reporting of facts isn't truly possible.
I apologize. I am mid other things and I clearly typed too fast without considering clarity.
What I meant is that the sentence you wrote was sufficiently neutral in tone along the lines of 'this guy accused of a political crime.'
<< why was my comment neutral when the original "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal." was not?
I think the issue is with the context. Would you be willing to rewrite the paragraph written by article's author, because you may be right in a sense that it is hard to judge it based on that one sentence fragment alone? My initial response is that the article pushes a clear agenda vis-a-vis Assange even though it seems to have a tenuous connection to the point author seems to be trying to make. So initial difference is there ( possibly criminal vs guy accused of crime reads very differently ) and it is hard to argue in good faith for an entity with a lot of editors no one thought that may read a tad biased.
All that said, my own personal bias may be showing here, but then I am not sure Assange was obligated to keep that information secret -- whatever else you may think about qualitative goodness/badness of that action. Naturally that leaves 'hacking' angle, but I will admit I did not follow story closely enough to offer a useful analysis.
edit: "Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information"
I am starting to think you may be right in general. This paragraph cannot be rewritten in an impartial manner, because it is at its core very partial. It is arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind.
> Would you be willing to rewrite the paragraph written by article's author, because you may be right in a sense that it is hard to judge it based on that one sentence fragment alone?
No, because I don't think I can do better than the original author.
>I am starting to think you may be right in general. This paragraph cannot be rewritten in an impartial manner, because it is at its core very partial. It is arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind.
I don't think the paragraph is necessarily "arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind". It is remarking on a world which has an anti-Assange bias because many powerful people in the world, namely the US government, view Assange negatively. How do you report on that without either repeating or refuting that bias in the world?
Maybe a less controversial figure is a better example of this. The FBI monitored MLK Jr. That is just a fact. How do you remark on that fact neutrally? The FBI as an institution has some inherent level of trust. Reporting simply that they monitored MLK implies to a certain extent that he was implicated in some wrongdoing. Do you therefore try to qualify that? Do you say the monitoring was "inappropriate"? Is that too strong? Doesn't that imply that the FBI is racist or corrupt? Do you say it was "potentially inappropriate"? But doesn't that imply you think it might be appropriate?
I don't think the objective reporting of facts is nearly as easy as people seem to imply in conversations about media and in many cases it is impossible.
MLK is actually not a bad choice for comparison ( sufficient time has passed, some records were unsealed and so on ). I think that 'FBI monitored MLK' is perfectly sufficient and captures everything without adding negative or positive sentiment to it. Now, had the article try to add 'inappropriate', the right move would be substantiate that claim with some sort of proof that it was indeed inappropriate ( at least in the eye of the writer ). That does not appear to happen in the article on HN today. We have an assertion without any way to determine whether or not writer is just making stuff up.
Maybe, Pratchett's work was onto something when he indicated that in Discworld universe poetic license was somewhat limited[1]:
“Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.”
So in the case of Assange, the writer should have added a short narrative indicating his particular perception of the issue ("Assange is possibly a criminal") absent a completely generic and neutral in tone ( Assange did something US governemnt did not like ).
I also think a flipped version of this is also valid:
Assange clearly was selective about release of information and timed his releases to affect political outcomes, which discredited him in my eyes and many others.
But that just adds to the pile doesn't it? It shows that trustworthy agenda-free journalism is exceedingly rare even in the "alternative" media and activist journalism world.
If you have an audience that trusts you, you have power. Power corrupts.
I don't think there ever was an age in which journalism was significantly more trustworthy than today. I think we just had fewer options and less opportunity to look behind the curtain.
> Assange clearly was selective about release of information
So did the rest of the American media, starting with the Biden laptop fiasco. I don't see anyone from news orgs being under arrest and not charged for the past 10 years.
>Assange clearly was selective about release of information and timed his releases to affect political outcomes, which discredited him in my eyes
The Guardian also timed the release of the Snowden leaks, what do you think about that? They were very careful about how they did it, and dripped it out to keep it in the headlines because they, as a newspaper, knew how the headlines worked. They were also selective.
Also, what are you challenging when you say he is "discredited" in your eyes? Surely not the veracity of the information, which isn't impacted by the timing of its release.
This is an essay [1] and the paragraphs you’ve quoted are exploring the question set up in the preceeding paragraph:
> The classic statement of the problem [that objectivity journalism is a problematic concept] is Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” published a hundred and one years ago. Lippmann’s critique remains relevant today—the Columbia Journalism School mounted a four-day conference on “Public Opinion” last fall, and people found that there was still plenty to talk about. Lippmann’s argument was that journalism is not a profession. You don’t need a license or an academic credential to practice the trade. All sorts of people call themselves journalists. Are all of them providing the public with reliable and disinterested news goods?
I think listeners or news consumers need to work harder. Every day somebody comes to me outraged with some news that they've inadvertently filled in the gaps on.
On some other post about misinformation someone claimed to combat it people needed even more information.
Most people have limited amounts of time and with their free time I'm sure they want to spend the least amount getting to the bottom of a story on the news.
I don't think we necessarily need more information or time. People need to read more slowly. Think about the words that are being used. What is actually being said?
People skim, fill in the blanks, and fulminate on twitter.
If you're presented with a view from a bias source it doesn't mean it's invalid. That's a big problem today on forums where someone thinks "Pfizer benefits from vaccine therefore they ..."
Any article on loss of faith in the news that does not mention Dan Rather using forged documents in a 60 Minutes episode about Bush is really missing a lot.
Yes, Dan was a sucker for some crudely-forged documents from a really dodgy source. But journalists skimping on fact-checking when they liked the story was SOP a century or few earlier. For instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Check
Another big one was The New York Times and Judith Miller uncritically parroting Bush administration lies about Saddam Hussein making nuclear weapons. It became so flagrantly bullshit that the New York Times actually apologized for it a year or two later, but by then it was too late.
I still read The New York Times, but I do so knowing they have an American establishment bias and will make themselves uncritical puppets of the government whenever they feel so inclined. Probably most of what they publish is usually more true than false, but you've always got to read it with a grain of salt. The newspaper is best as a bellwether for what the American establishment wants the American public to believe. Having "faith" is precisely the wrong way to read a newspaper.
So many events missing. This story itself is an example of why people have lost faith.
No WMDs in Iraq for me was the one that turned me. A Republican administration seeding the New York Times that lie and they published it with basically no research. The former CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, who oversaw the acquisition of KBR for fuck sake (the largest private contractor in the Iraq war with $10s? of billions of contract dollars per year)[1]) was the de-facto president of the US at the time.
The Hunter Biden laptop story being suppressed as Russian misinformation right before the election when it was legitimate is another big one.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBR_(company)
"In the 2000s, KBR employed more American private contractors and had a larger contract with the U.S. government than any other firm in Iraq. The company's roughly 14,000 U.S. employees in Iraq provide logistical support to the U.S. military.[38] Some U.S. Marines revived the Vietnam-era nickname 'Burn & Loot' as a name for the company during the Iraq War.[39]"
> Half a century ago, most of the public said they trusted the news media.
That was the aberration. 120 years ago when newspapers owned by the likes of William Hearst were doing their best to start unnecessary wars for shits and giggles, would you have trusted the news media? I hope not.
The news industry was crooked then, and I don't think there's any reason to believe the American media briefly became trustworthy in the mid 20th century when public trust in the media was at all-time highs. I think Americans got caught up in a post-war optimistic fervor that blinded them to the faults of American media, and American society in general. Now the news media feel entitled to that level of trust which they never deserved in the first place.
Reminder that one of America's most beloved "founding fathers" was a newspaperman propagandist. A man called Benjamin Franklin, who founded numerous newspapers specifically to push the revolutionary narrative in colonial America. Say what you like about the man, but impartial reporting was not his priority. The supposed age of impartial trustworthiness in news media is myth, not history. Newspapers have always been the tools of those who own them.
>Benjamin Franklin, who founded numerous newspapers specifically to push the revolutionary narrative in colonial America.
He was a printer with a franchise of other printers already, and he did value-added stuff like print the news long before the first stirrings of revolution; are you sure he wouldn't have founded them anyway?
It's not that much of an exaggeration to say that the default role of newspapers is to provoke political, ethnic, and religious pogroms and to advance various hackneyed agendas.
The brief time in the US that coincided with a relatively trusted news establishment coincided with a lot of painstaking efforts at professionalization and projecting an aura of critical neutrality. Customers stopped wanting that, and the professionals were too expensive anyway. Now, we're back to pogrom-of-the-month club journalism, sometimes mostly digital but sometimes also in reality.
That's not true. Reagan's Republicans stopped wanting that, and then non-fairness was forced onto the masses until people didn't know the difference anymore.
In 1949 the FCC introduced the "Fairness Doctrine" that "required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints". It was repealed in 1987. People in the mid-20th century actually had regulatory restraint on incendiary click-bait. It wasn't just optimism that produced trust.
This is a great example of an executive regulation that should have just been a law before they tried to repeal it. By the time Congress tried to make it a law, it was already a political issue and of course Reagan vetoed it, because the whole thing was orchestrated by his FCC appointees in the first place.
See also: same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, net neutrality, right to repair, et alia.
The funny thing is that made news very profitable. Local and national newspeople were widely admired figures in the community. Local news in particular is a cesspit of pretty people talking about weather calamity, PR placements and whomever got shot today.
Eliminating the fairness doctrine opened the door for garbage content. That’s why Rush Limbaugh building off the fringe last night trucker talk show schtick became a force on hundreds of radio stations with millions of listeners in a time slot once dedicated to a half hour news segment and old ladies talking about knitting.
Rush created the mold for editorial that sounded like news. He had a real talent for entertaining commentary and good production value. His copycats had less talent and went more extreme, once they hit the bottom for broadcast, guys like Alex Jones took to the internet.
Rush Limbaugh once said that the whole point of his show was to "make the listener feel good." And doing so was the real reason for its success. He elaborated, saying his show wasn't meant to challenge the listener, but rather to support what the listener is already feeling. As much as I disagreed with him on just about everything, I gotta respect the honesty. And I think it describes where we are are with the news in America.
Yeah a lot of mass media discourse reduces to reinforcing cognitive bias. Its why everyone thinks their side is actually fighting the good fight, and just by being on said side, they too, are very good.
I worked in a farm in my early teens and listened to Rush all summer in the early 90s.
He was legit funny and entertaining then, as long as you weren’t the punchline. When he was past his prime, divorced and hooked on drugs in the 2000s it was different and really awful.
A lot of people I talk to about this seem to dislike the idea.
As a centrist, I love it, I think it would go a long way towards building more trust in news institutions, if they made a strong commitment to trying their best to present multiple viewpoints on an event and doing their best to not introduce bias into it.
The Fairness doctrine had the benefit of a) time, and b) very little competition. Taking TV alone as an example, TV news was limited to a distinct hourly slot and a handful of channels. News was much more polished and prerecorded as segments. The closest modern example is probably PBS Newshour. Once you introduce much more competition and the addictive allure of 24hr news, you get into a situation where an enormous amount of news is prioritized around bread crumbing stories because it's always "in the present, as it happens", and way more reactionary. Breaking News! now happens everyday. CNN even have a regularly scheduled timeblock called...."Breaking News!" Most modern news today is rather more like commentary for a sports game, fairness or usefulness to the public is secondary.
Modern news with a fairness doctrine would probably be profoundly boring, which is good in its own way (I'm sure you would agree), but not something that makes a company like CNN a lot of money. Good journalism is expensive and laborious; cheap commentary on a 24hr stream is relatively cheap and easy.
There’s also the little matter of this thing called the first amendment. The reason the government could get away with having a Fairness Doctrine on broadcast TV was that there were only a few airwaves to be had, and only a few providers in certain markets. Today you can watch tons of channels on cable or satellite, and no end of content on the Internet. Such regulation could never be legally applied.
And the fairness doctrine never really applied to newspapers — which instead sought centrism to broaden their distribution in a geographical-based market and attract more ad dollars. This is another trend towards centrism which has been rendered moot by the Internet, where firms compete for attention using partisanship — which has long been preferred by paying audiences (and was the norm in the 19th century newspaper).
The First Amendment had nothing to do with ending the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine had First Amendment carve outs, even: a station could air whatever opinion it wanted so long as it correctly labeled it an editorial opinion. (As opposed to just treating all opinions as facts and blurring all the lines between news, editorial content including opinions, and entertainment.)
Such regulation could be legally applied to the internet. It may need a different agency to enforce it as the FCC only ever had the most control over broadcast airwaves (though the FCC still has some control over cellular bandwidth and broadband cabling and could use those as leverage), but basic regulations like "ads need to properly labeled; news needs to be properly labeled; editorial opinions need to be properly labeled" could absolutely still exist within the rights of the First Amendment. (The first Amendment is a nuanced thing and primarily designed between you a citizen and your government, every other kind of relationship is mostly just assumed beyond that, and some of it depends on whether you agree with the Citizens United decision that corporations are citizens and money is speech, which is a massive rabbit hole.)
If there was a US Congress that wanted to regulate it, they absolutely could. The difference between 1949 and today has nothing to do with the First Amendment or technology changes and almost everything to do with a lack of will to properly govern with good regulations (and capitalism with no guiding hand regulation sinking to lowest common denominators for clickbait and attention seeking).
You are either talking about something unrelated to the original fairness doctrine (somewhat misleading) or you are flat out wrong about extant jurisprudence regarding the highest law of the land… or both. In either case you seem oblivious to the fact that the Supreme Court has already explicitly said that there are First Amendment concerns with the first amendment. In Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC for instance, they said that the doctrine “has the net effect of reducing rather than enhancing speech” and would be illegal save for the limited spectrum, as “a license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a radio frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens.” Contrast Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo where a roughly equivalent newspaper regulation was found unconstitutional because competition is free to deliver their views via their own newspaper and it is not a special monopoly power to be licensed.
If a “will to properly govern” is involved then it will take far more than “good regulations,” it will take major substantive changes to the nation’s Constitution, with all that entails. It will not happen because the citizens of the nation still like that amendment and fear they will be exposed to abuse without it.
This is a key point that I worry is hard for modern users of the Internet to wrap their heads around:
In that era, TV channels were a tightly-regulated, very-rare resource, and as a result the information carried upon them rapidly diffused to everyone because there simply weren't that many alternatives to turn to for information. In terms of the attention economy, attention was relatively cheap if you could get onto the channel; you had a completely captive audience with few distractions if they were using television at all.
LeVar Burton once opined in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air that the most special thing about the miniseries Roots was that because of its timing, it's one of the last dramatizations on racism that more-or-less an entire generation of Americans experienced. Once cable brought the number of channels from dozens to hundreds (and HDTV later pushed it into the thousands), the cost to fixate a message in front of every household skyrocketed. There's more content than ever to experience, but the odds of any two people having experienced similar content have commensurately gone way down.
It's entirely possible that the era of the cultural touchstone is nearly over (though firms like Disney certainly make a go of it with 300-million-plus dollar movie investments).
How do you define a controversial issue and even media for that matter? Does your tweet about the pizza you enjoyed last night need to include an asterisk about the children crazy people think are imprisoned in its imaginary basement? How do you define equal time? If you are trying to read about motorcycles do we need to inject enough pro/anti abortion articles to balance out the converse in your feed last night? So much of our media consumption isn't the evening news such a proposal has nearly no meaning and there is I think a larger issue.
Many even most controversies aren't complex takes on deep issues. They are to be frank malicious bullshit. Taking pills to not continue a pregnancy isn't murder. There isn't a basement let alone kids under that pizza place. The election wasn't stolen. Societies without pervasive individual guns don't have people blowing away children meaning the issues with gun control are 99% logistical/legal. We could solve them we just willing and able to trade dead children for more freedom. There is zero moral implications to allowing gay marriage or gay adoption. Evolution is real as is systemic racism.
Shall we designate a ministry of truth to decide what controversies we ought to teach or force our media to carry malicious lies?
Well you seem to have your own, very strongly held, beliefs about all of these topics. The pizza thing is obviously wrong, the vast majority of people know it's wrong. Censoring those kinds of crazy ideas in public discourse just emboldens its believers further because they see your censorship as an attempt to stop them from getting their "truth" out. I think it would be better to let them talk openly about their crazy pizza conspiracies, eventually they will encounter better arguments and lose.
If you are saying that there is no nuance, no gray areas at all, to the topics of abortion, election integrity, gun ownership, etc then you are no better than the ideologues on Fox news, just in the opposite direction.
More dialogue actually doesn't help conspiracy theorists learn better it just helps them spread their crazy to a broader audience which is why one in five Americans believe in some aspect of Qanon. It's not censorship to not spread the crazy. Let them spread it on their own platforms.
There really is little nuance regarding election integrity. Trump definitively lost. The only disputes with a shred of substance were themselves procedural quibbles like arguing that a given legislature overstepped its authority by offering mail in balloting and attempting to use this to argue that the proper resolution to overreach would be to throw out the legitimately cast ballots of those following government instruction in order to reach claimants preferred outcome.
Lets do abortion next. Almost all the meaningful brain development that produces a human like being rather than a human looking being happens in the third trimester whereas almost all abortions happen in the first and overwhelmingly consist of mom to be swallowing pills terminate something as intelligent as mold. The nuance was covered 50 years ago and then again and again with redundant laws designed to protect the fetus from fictional partial birth abortions that were already illegal twice or three times over. Having already achieved the goal of keeping human like beings from being killed decades prior there is little nuance left to deal with.
If you have an hour we could do gun control too. I noticed you didn't mention the other controversies presumably because you don't regard them as meaningful controversies. Kudos.
Why does it matter? in the first trimester the fetus is as intelligent as mold, in the second its less than a mouse, virtually all of what we think of as humanity grows in the third. The only way you can be against popping pills in the first trimester is if you either haven't realized maximizing utility + maybe people is a logical trap, want to use the law to oppress women, or believe a that a soul is instilled in the egg upon conception.
An egg has the potential to be human but isn't afforded legal right to fertilization so it can reach its potential. A newborn babe on the other hand has a rights. That I hope we can agree on. Therefore there must be some point in time in which the babe acquires rights it didn't possess. To me the strongest contender for the crossover point is brain development in the third trimester. Do you have a different time in mind? Why?
I could go with brain development (maybe - see the next paragraph). I'll even give you an additional argument for it. I'm an organ donor. If something happens to me, a bunch of doctors have to decide whether I'm alive or dead. If I'm dead, feel free to donate my organs. But if I'm alive, then taking my heart out is murder. How do they decide? If I understand correctly, it's by brain activity. If my brain has stopped, and isn't going to start again, then whatever I am, I'm gone, and feel free to take the spare parts.
But you said "brain development", not brain activity. Do you have some developmental milestone in mind? If so, what? My standard hinges on electrical activity in the brain, which is there by the 24th week - that is, the second trimester. (And maybe earlier - detecting brain activity isn't as simple as slapping EEG electrodes on the skull, when the skull is inside the womb.) I would argue for that, rather than for a particular developmental milestone.
Other possible milestones: The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.) If at that stage of development it has full human rights because it had the misfortune to be born prematurely, why shouldn't it have those rights if it wasn't born prematurely?
Or, first heartbeat. (The heartbeat used to be the deciding line on the death side, before the brain was.)
Or, fertilization or implantation. (I agree with you about the egg.) It will become possible to build an artificial womb that will take a fertilized egg and produce a baby in nine months. Does that change the boundaries for you at all? (Via my "premature birth" argument, does it change the boundaries if we can take an earlier, non-viable premature birth, stick it in the artificial womb, and have it survive?)
This last position loops back to my argument about the organ donor. The question was whether the brain had stopped, and wasn't going to start up again. Well, in the case of the fetus, it will start up if you just don't kill it. (Whereas the egg, by itself, will just die in 7 or 8 days.) The fetus is "default alive"; the egg is "default dead". To me, that makes abortion different from birth control.
The twist here is that a fetus is "default alive" provided resources are expended to keep it that way.
Consider:
> The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.)
as a point at which a host might say "I don't wish to support this parasite that I have no interest in any longer" and transfers a fetus to an artifical womb.
Murder? That seems unlikely.
But is the fetus truly "default alive"?
If the power goes out will it survive? Surely it requires external support much as various patients require life support but are otherwise not viable.
Things are rarely clearcut and this point at least is still within the grey of a Sorites paradox.
Fair points. On the other hand, a full-term newborn isn't fully "default alive" either - if the parents don't expend resources on it, it dies. (And then we arrest the parents for neglect.)
So... yeah. "Things are rarely clearcut", as someone said recently :-)
Viability is a ridiculous standard. It makes no difference when an artificial womb nobody is offering might in theory be able to support a fetus if we are actually asking if one ought to make a woman offer her body. It's a worthless counterfactual related in no meaningful way to reality. Life is equally worthless mold is alive, the egg is alive, sperm is alive. The term "default alive" literally means less than nothing. It's just gluing words together in a way that has no meaning.
The baby's brain will triple in size during the third trimester including almost all of the development of the cerebral cortex features that are essential to being human or even being a mouse. It goes from something that as is is functionality incapable of being considered asleep or awake that doesn't posses the ability to drive even a mouse's experience to something that could aptly be said to be a sleeping human brain during this time. This is definitively when potential becomes reality.
The standard established by roe of between 24-28 weeks being set before this actuality is safe standard to balance rights of baby and mom to ensure we don't enslave actual humans to the needs of potential ones.
How could you trust something like the fairness doctrine in practice? The Kennedy administration for example created Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban to specifically file FCC complaints against broadcasters that aired criticism of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Nixon used it as a whip against anti Vietnam War activists[1]. And one could go on, but it was intended to and used to suppress speech the government didn't like. Calling it the "Fairness Doctrine" is a great case of giving a malicious law a name that makes it sound unobjectionable, like the Patriot Act.
No. Not multiple viewpoints. Merely an opposing view. Of the station's choosing. So if your station's views are correct, and why wouldn't they be, then the best choice of opposing view is some crackpot, ideally not too offensive for the middle of the night.
The Fairness Doctrine was an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech and was used to silence debate on the Vietnam War[1]. Moreover it was ridiculous, the idea of having a singular "public interest" makes no sense. Who could possibly have enough information and insight to define a singular "public interest" across all possible news topics? It was a relic of the age of central planning and followed from a history of the FCC denying licenses to radio stations that "editorialized" which meant broadcasting political speech that the FCC didn't like. The "pervasiveness argument" for the Fairness Doctrine is utterly nonsense[2], boiling down to the government having an overriding interest if speech is persuasive, which would limit freedom of speech only to private or unpersuasive speech which renders it no right at all.
Regulation isn't necessary to silence debates on unpopular wars (the past 20 yrs provides ample examples). "Freedom of speech" like the "public interest" isn't easily definable. Companies like Meta and Twitter are "free" to censure at will, but regardless of whatever claims they may make of their rights to this freedom, it negatively effects the freedom of others. In practice a loss of government regulation just yields the regulatory power to private interests. The choice unfortunately becomes not whether we choose regulation or "freedom" but who is granted regulatory rights: public or private interests.
Freedom of speech is pretty well defined in a century of US case law and in nearly 3 centuries of western political philosophy, the core is government restrain of speech. When you shift focus to moderation on social media you're in the territory of a "culture of free speech" which I agree is a mushier and harder to define thing.
The key difference is that the government can put you in jail, or confiscate your property whereas Facebook and only harass you within the confines of Facebook.
A backlog of case law doesn't lead to a subject being well defined. The government retains powers over speech with some speech being "free-er" than others.
On the contrary, three centuries of intellectual discourse with a common thread does lead to a solid definition. Carve outs for incitement and defamation/libel are the very exceptions that prove the expansiveness of the concept.
Reading "American Midnight" about Wilson & industrialists promoting/propogandizing WWI & the whole US using that movement as a cudgel to beat down labor, progressives, minorities, basically everyone with anything to say that wasnt ra-ra-ism.
The Postmaster General Albert Burleson makes up a solid part of chapter 3 of this march through a tragic & vicious time. Burleson told post offices to send any suspicious/un-American/not-war-supporting publications to him for review, which he then used either deny mailing to or used to attack directly the institutions. The web of publications not just suppressed but attacked here seemingly extended to basically anyone with a dissenting voice on labor, race, or seemingly most any topic where the governmemt wasnt portrayed in favorable rights.
We did (thanks to the courts) come to limit government power to censor & abuse eventually, and to your defense not that much longer after. We have only just gotten to ~100 years of there being some clarity, but after an enormous cliff where these ideas seemingly meant nothing, and from which we emerged only because of a very very few sensible & reasonable high placed people who reversed an animal & base anti-speech anger that government had been systemizing actively.
I still broadly agree with your distinction, but noting the dark shitty times & bring aware how bad things were not that long ago- at a governmental level- is also important. This book has been eye opening.
Yeah, that's on my reading list, but I'm aware of that history. I think the definition was clear even before the Supreme COurt came around. You're of course right that realizing how precarious the 1a right is should give us pause.
At that time, the media was not united in support of one of the political parties.
The problem with the linked article is it insinuates political bias is the only acceptable public opinion, propaganda in support of that one party is good, anyone in opposition to its aggressive propaganda is bad, and then weirdly implies lack of trust in that propaganda is somehow bad for democracy.
The main problem with trust in media is a diversity of ownership implies a diversity of opinions, and we had that in the past. There is no diversity in ownership nor opinion now. There is the one party which must always be supported at all times by the good people, and the evil ones who do not obey.
My son thinks MSNBC is worse than Fox but I’d say Fox was commercially successful from the very beginning and that liberals were ‘too smart for that shit’ until the Trump administration where MSNBC really had grist for that mill and got much better ratings.
CNN has the bias of ‘if it bleeds it leads’ and loved to promote antagonism with Trump because it was great for ratings. I would say though that even non-partisan business news on cable is awful. We will probably still be hearing the non-sensical FAANG acronym for years thanks to the ignorance of Jim Cramer. At least his stock picks are it much worse than a dart, not as bad as Jimmy the Greek’s football picks.
What's weird about the narrative conservatives put out is.. that the mainstream media is pro democrat, and pro establishment - but if you listen to NPR, or any of the big three, or read NYT, WaPo, or any other large newspaper, the criticism of whatever administration happens to be in power is often blistering.
The absolutely breathless coverage about classified documents found in Biden's home, about whatever immigration problem happens to be going on (which often implies on both ideological sides of it that the immigration problem is the presidents fault), the economy, etc - the coverage is all about the same, critical, often overly so.
The only real difference is, there isnt some violation of norms or scandal every three weeks with Biden. One of the nice things I can say about Trump, is he had so many scandals, we stopped using the -gate suffix to them.
I have been trying hard to abstain from closely following news lately, but I would not classify any of the coverage of POTUS or their administration as blistering by NPR, NYT or WaPo. For better or worse, if you are looking for blistering, you go to the other extremes which include likes of Breibart, Fox and OAN and so on. Then at least you will get a healthy dose of very differing perspective and biases, which may help you break out of the news bubble.
I shy away from telling people how to live, but I would consider looking at other sources if only for one reason: 'being able to detect bias and correct for it'.
Oh no, I do read some conservative places, National Review, Washington Times, Fox (web, not TV).
I'm moderately good about detecting bias, but I see more 'gotcha' questions from the media interviewing administration officials, there is no answer, nothing that can be done, but they're still expected to answer the questions.
I can detect bias in both 'mainstream media', and and right wing sources.
I am only aware of the different bubbles, because I seem to belong to several social circles with very much opposed views and I don't know how common it is today ( I am not really joking ) since the weird trend I have been seeing is cutting off 'toxic family members', which effectively means people actively work to maintain their particular bubbles making already bad problem even worse. And since I tend to listen to everyone, everyone seems to think I am in full agreement.
The only place I did not see it hit hard is work, but that seems to be the case only because there is still some expectation of 'leaving non-work related stuff outside', but even that seems to be changing.
As I am re-reading your posts, I do not think we are disagreeing.
I also am not a big believer in cutting people off, or avoiding opinions that make you uncomfortable, it leads to a certain kind of intellectual stunting - the inability to try to understand the perspective of the other side - and like, in politics specifically, you must understand what the other side believes and why they believe it to effectively argue against it.
To circle around (and be clearer), the media consistently promotes the idea of the imperial presidency - the idea (mostly on a subconscious level) that the president can solve all problems.
In reality, 80% of the problems (which can be solved) facing America must be fixed legislatively - but because of dysfunction in the legislative branch.
Which, I should explain that - the causes of this are manifold:
* From special interest groups dominating the law writing process (which isn't always bad, but its not transparent)
* Congress being non-majoritarian (i.e. not well reflecting the actual views of the voters) because we've failed to expand the number of congresscritters since the 20's, leading to widely unequal district sizes)
* To issues with primary elections which result in the most extreme views being on the general election ticket, rather than the most moderate ones (which actually reflect the median voter).
* Bicameralism and the Filibuster also makes it harder to pass laws, laws that might have a good agreement of 59% of both houses, but if it cant meet the threshold in the senate it fails.
So instead the administration and the courts have stood in the legislatures place to do the business of the people.... with mixed results.
The media however, doesn't talk about that, they instead gig administrations for issues that are just plain outside of the remit of the presidency and thats just for the solvable problems - some are not (lots of reporting on the pandemic was like this) but by asking "well what are you going to do about X?" and the poor secretary of whatever has no answer, because its not a solvable problem by government, it just makes our government look incompetent.
"Government cannot be there to solve every problem, cure every illness, and redress every grievance. The progressive left often mistakes things the government can do for the things the government ought to do. The regressive right often demands the clock be turned back to a time where the government did very little--ignoring the changes wrought on American society by advances in science and technology since then."
Put another way - The lefties I know broadly assume government to be more competent that it is and private industry either greedy or incompitent than reality shows, and the conservatives I know broadly assume private industry to be more competent than it is, and government to be more incompetent than reality shows.
The reality I know is America has a nice spread of competency and its not regional, and government is no more, or less competent than private industry, it does move slower however, for a variety of very good reasons (regulated utilities are often the same way, for the same reasons. Our media does a poor job of reflecting that, and does a poor job explaining to Americans why things are broken - and I have little love for either party at this point, both seem (on a spectrum anyhow, republicans seem worse about this, they keep ending up as the dog who catches the fire trunk, then fail to implement their ideas, because of either - how profoundly unpopular they are, or because they dont have any implementable ideas int he first place - dems - at worst - mostly just seem to have trouble organizing a one car motorcade) more interested in political power than doing the peoples business.
I want a media that holds the rich and powerful to account, keeps the pe...
People cite this all the time as evidence that conservatives dominate the news in some way, but I don't think it means that.
I look at these statistics and it tells me conservatives have one place they go to to watch the news, while liberals either don't watch cable news and/or they split their viewership amongst several outlets.
That could be true but I wasn't claiming they dominate the news only that their "underdog" "we're standing up to the giant mainstream media" isn't justified.
> There is no diversity in ownership nor opinion now. There is the one party...
Is this referring to the "Republicans and Democrats are the same party" trope, or is there a different intended meaning here?
You're comment indicates you think there are multiple parties. I'd assume you mean the Republicans and Democrats, but both of those parties are supported by various news outlets. So yeah, I don't think I understand what is trying to be conveyed here.
My take circa 2000 was the the Democrats and the Republicans had rather converged in their pursuit of "swing voters". I remember editing together a tape from a debate where Bush and Gore tried to outdo each other in bellicosity (support for the military) and then Gore says "IF IT'S A FAILING SCHOOL SHUT IT DOWN!" and I covered the jump cut with a smart bomb hitting a bunker in Iraq.
I think people perceived Reagan was successful at solving the problems of the 1970s and I think Clinton basically picked up most of Reagan's approach to governing the same way that Tony Blair followed in the steps of Margaret Thatcher in the UK. The polarization was different back then. I remember George HW Bush getting on TV when Rodney King was beat by the LAPD and saying that he'd watched it on TV with his wife and he was shocked, whereas you'd expect Republicans today to say something like "it served him right". For that matter his son signed into law the expansion of Medicare benefits to include prescription drugs which was a huge new social program.
It seemed in the Bush years the public was still not getting a clear choice on many issues, one of the things that alienated people from "the establishment" is how voices opposed to the 2nd Iraq War were excluded from respectable opinion. I would tell anyone who listened that the war would likely turn out the way that it did but nobody in power listened, despite very large protests against the war. With Kerry in 2004 the Democrats did not clearly distinguish themselves from Bush and his policies as Kerry had this strange ambiguous position between being a war hero and an anti-war organizer who would not come to a clear position on Iraq.
I think though the next trend started w/ Newt Gingrich in the 1990s who tried to block Clinton at every turn (who maybe helped Clinton paradoxically because he could pursue a basically conservative agenda but have groups like the National Organization of Women support him in his philandering and have environmental groups not complain about him doing nothing because he was under attack from the other side)
That kind of negative politics went into high gear in the Obama years and today it seems there is little sign of the swing voter. You certainly couldn't say that Donald Trump didn't clearly distinguish himself from Biden, which was not so clear in the 1992-2004 time frame.
The lack of diversity in opinion and ownership dates back to the Reagan era, when FCC dropped rules about how many TV stations could be owned, rules about oligopoly ownership in a given market and rules about cross media ownership (papers and TV or radio back then). The slogan then was to let the market decide.
If you don't agree, can you define what "one party" means and "the media"? I think the only way you can say this is to claim that both parties are the same and/or all the media is the same. Contrary to this claim of sameness is that one party has top leaders supporting clearly untrue views about insurrections, vote totals, etc. Yes, both parties want to increase taxes and spend money and blame the other party for any problems - but one party tried to overturn an election. Similar things for the media, yes they both share some things about "being mainstream" but that's most focused on object reality - OAN is the other media?
‘Media Bias’ has been a talking point of the right since the John Birch Society in the 1950s. Certainly there are left wing groups like FAIR who have talked about it for years but right-wing groups like AIM are more tropey.
I’d say the secret in politics can be found in the work of Mancur Olson who would say a large group like ‘women’ or ‘white people’ cannot really organize on its own behalf because of the free-rider problem. A union has to have a ‘closed shop’ otherwise one could get the benefits of the union without paying dues. A membership organization might get small donations from 1% of that group but those members do not have any say or representation in what the group does. It is like a turbocharged engine which has a huge amount of energy cycling in the shaft, in this case 95% of donations go to overhead and getting more donations and there is no change and little advocacy but it is a great job if you can get it.
A special interest like ‘the 100 biggest farmers in California’ can organize much more effectively and the people involved see a much more straight line of getting influence. For a group like that, politics is a business expense and spending $X on greasing politician’s palms makes $20X for the interest it is a great business. (One answer to the problem could be to try to make political spending and bribery more expensive. If it cost $10 to get a $5 tax cut all but the most cantankerous rich people would shut up and pay their taxes)
The democrats and republicans pretend to represent great warring general interests and it is a lot of fury signifying nothing. Spamming the agenda with that stuff prevents any real changes but leaves space for special interests to pursue ‘politics as usual’. It’s a bit like pro wrestling.
This is basically the argument that Margaret Sullivan makes at the end of the article in question:
Sullivan’s conclusion that the press should take sides put her in conflict with the Washington Post’s editor during the Trump years, Martin Baron. She quotes from an e-mail he sent her: “When we’ve done our work with requisite rigor and thoroughness (also known as solid, objective reporting) we should tell people what we’ve learned and what remains unknown—directly, straightforwardly, unflinchingly—just as people in lots of other professions do when they’re doing their jobs correctly. That’s what ‘objectivity’ was intended to mean when the term was developed for journalism more than a century ago”—that is, when Lippmann wrote “Public Opinion.”
Sullivan’s position is an appeal to the original rationale of the First Amendment. We have a free press in order to protect democracy. When democracy is threatened, reporters and editors and publishers should have an agenda. They should be pro-democracy. Reporters should “stop asking who the winners and losers are,” Sullivan says; they should “start asking who is serving democracy and who is undermining it.” The press is in the game. It has a stake.
Also according to the article she has a "memoir slash manifesto" called “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” (St. Martin’s)
> 120 years ago when newspapers owned by the likes of William Hearst were doing their best to start unnecessary wars for shits and giggles, would you have trusted the news media? I hope not.
And 150 years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle editorial staff founded Bohemian Club to “facilitate the arts” and throw parties up in the Sonoma redwoods every summer. Some pretty high-profile guests over the years too. Move along, move along — nothing to see here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee
> Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
One of the main things Assange revealed, which has not been disputed, is how Clinton intervened in the 2016 Democratic primary election, to damage the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, using any means possible to stop the grassroots pressure from below felt in both major parties. Strange how the revelation of the inside truth of this election intervention is itself called election intervention.
It was also called election intervention to post about Hunter Biden's laptop. Twitter banned any links to the New York Post article about it. When I first saw the article, I was thinking "Republicans trying to make a big deal out of nothing" which was probably right, but really the reaction on the other side made it a big deal.
As a downvoted comment below hints, Bernie Sanders had only briefly declared himself a Democrat by 2016. He had caucused with the Democrats since his election to the Senate, but did not belong to the party.
The internet happened. Now we have access to not just what the elites think (via the mainstream press), but also also what they miss or misrepresent. The exposure to many other plausible narratives mean that the mainstream media will never be the same again - most people now understand the news is not concerned with just objectivity or truth, but with narrative (even if journalists conflate the two). I don’t think you can ever rewind back on the internet and information explosion. The animal has tasted blood, and it wants more.
Trump shouldn’t be given so much credit for the present moment. It should instead go to the iPhone, twitter, Reddit, Facebook, 4chan, blogs - the internet fire hose. And it’s not just the United States, it’s happening all over the world.
I've started paying attention to how many news articles are essentially collections of Twitter screenshots. Which is still valuable, given how annoying Twitter is to navigate and how some may be deleted.
> Now we have access to not just what the elites think (via the mainstream press), but also also what they miss or misrepresent.
... Sprinkled with a lot of bs on top.
Let's be frank here: the Internet, as we currently use it, gives voice to _everyone_, regardless of the accuracy of the information, and while I agree that the upside is that we do have access to more information, it has not significantly changed the quality of it.
It used to be that you knew, and cared, what was news reporting and what was opinion.
I wonder whether this is cyclical though. It's not as if partisanship is new in newspapers. They used to be very blatant about it, having "Republican" and "Democrat" in their actual names.
For me personally, I began to lose trust in the news after I started learning about persuasion and cognitive science. After that, I started seeing manipulative rhetoric and propaganda techniques in articles and news segments that didn’t seem like obvious hit pieces. A skilled communicator has a considerable amount of leeway when reporting “facts”.
Journalists like to depict themselves as objective and rational guardians of democracy. But they’re just regular people, and their profession has adopted a mentality of righteousness. I roll my eyes every time I see “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on WaPo’s website.
> I roll my eyes every time I see “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on WaPo’s website
Was it The Guardian that used to have a banner on the bottom listing scary things like "erosion of democracy" and asking for you to pay? Generally if something is trying to stir up fear while asking for money, I don't trust it.
Has there ever really been independent fact-based journalism? I think not. We're all human with inherent bias, and while it seems like journalists tried harder in older times - they still had bias. We can yell and scream at eachother about who started what, and who was worse; but for what?
It seems that as years go by that editorial boards (leaning in both directions) are having much more impact on what you and I read. Those editorial boards are influenced by owners and investors. Those people have bias as well.
There still does not seem to be a journalism source that is bias-free. I read yesterday that "Chat GPT is a panacea for bias in reporting". I nearly gagged!
In 2001 when the twin towers fell, I was encouraged by how suddenly everyone put down their party ties and went to talk about how we would rebuild and retaliate. In present day, the war in Ukraine has done nothing but further split our nation. So what changed? We didn't act like this during Bosnia.
Is it the effect of journalism bias, or is it our nature as humans still working through the shock of Covid that we can't let things go. Are we now looking to argue just one more time to make sure "the other side" knows we think they're wrong?
We are sick as the human race, and nobody is admitting that. We've gone from intent to divide instead of intent to unite.
> In 2001 when the twin towers fell, I was encouraged by how suddenly everyone put down their party ties and went to talk about how we would rebuild and retaliate. In present day, the war in Ukraine has done nothing but further split our nation. So what changed?
For one, we now have the hindsight of knowing how the post 9/11 mentality you speak of turned out. 20 years of fruitless wars based on lies.
Social media commoditized facts (how monetizable is having the breaking investigative story if the upshot is on twitter moments after the fact?), so out of necessity, news organizations shifted their differentiation to their editorial narrative. And if the alpha is in interpretation of the facts, people are right to prefer subject matter experts or domain practitioners -- the opinions of whom are now abundantly available on substacks, sites like aeon, or even in twitter threads -- over journalism majors that over-index toward one set of views and one social class, and haven't always done the requisite research to draw informed conclusions. Gell-Mann Amnesia applies now more than ever.
I hoped to find a more conciliatory tone in this piece, for some greater level of introspection on their field, but immediately it invokes Trump and how victimized major media companies have been. There are plenty of non-traditional, but non-'Trumpified' news sources that are beating the incumbents on merit. It doesn't need to mean it's the end of democracy.
Here is James Fenimore Cooper talking about the American press in The American Democrat (1838):
>As the press of this country now exists, it would seem to be expressly devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and destroy all that is good, and to elevate and advance all that is evil in the nation. The little truth that is urged, is usually urged coarsely, weakened and rendered vicious, by personalities; while those who live by falsehoods, fallacies, enmities, partialities and the schemes of the designing, find the press the very instrument that the devils would invent to effect their designs.
> The characteristics of the American journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace; and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors.
There are several cases of Trump using the term without reference to "fake news". For example, just look at an archive of his tweets.
April 5th 2019:
"The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"
Or how how about singling out individual news organisations he doesn't like as "enemies of the people"?
Feb 20th 2019:
"The New York Times reporting is false. They are a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"
The difference between calling all the media "enemies of the people" or just the ones he dislikes doesn't seem to be that big a distinction for the purposes of the argument.
> "The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"
Yeah, I thought he said something like this, thanks for confirming. They should have just quoted him.
In the tweet that got a lot of attention, what he said was "It is the FAKE NEWS, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people!"[1].
That "a large percentage" bit, along with how he fairly-commonly used "fake news media" to mean all non-explicitly-conservative news sources explains why people felt he was attacking the press in general, I think...
I feel it important to write the full tweet you're quoting in context.
> They asked my daughter Ivanka whether or not the media is the enemy of the people. She correctly said no. It is the FAKE NEWS, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people!
> along with how he fairly-commonly used "fake news media" to mean all non-explicitly-conservative news sources
I think he left things like this generally vague, so that his fans could fill in whatever details they personally found the most compelling. The very "make America great again" catchphrase is a perfect example of this; what exactly constitutes "great" and what era is he talking about when he says "again"? Discontent millennials could think he was talking about the 90s while boomers who thought the 90s were shit could conclude he was talking about the 50s.
He said it several times, sometimes with "fake" and sometimes without.
The first few times he explicitly listed news organizations he said were fake, including NYT, WP, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN.
By mid 2018 it had grown to mainstream media is fake [1].
In the last year or so he'd also been slamming Fox. It's pretty clear that his definition of "fake news" is functionally equivalent to "anything that isn't positive about me, no matter how true".
It is a myth that Americans ever had faith in the News (any more than they have had faith in Politics).
For about 250 years (in the US), newspapers have been mostly political rags. They rose to popularity as a way for a single person or group to spread propaganda. Around 1900 they shifted from political rags to scandal-themed yellow journalism, and later turned more "professional", but never lost their slant towards ideologies, social/economic classes, trades, etc. The powerful have always controlled, influenced, and suppressed them. They've never been objective.
We've thought about the news as entertainment for the last 50 years. The movie Network came out in 1976, and predicted the abandonment of "balanced" journalism and information in favor of entertainment and profit. We've also known that the news may be staged, selectively covered, biased, and have a leading agenda in the stories they cover and how they cover them. And I mean, come on: Editorials? Literally just a biased person shouting their biased opinions, as if they have the right to speak for every reader?
The news has always been bullshit. Useful bullshit, but still bullshit. Anyone who thinks what they read is "true" doesn't understand the concept of truth.
Great deal/Quite a lot Confidence in Newspapers went from about 35-40% in the 80s to about 22% today (COVID likely a major influence on 2022's 16% number). Very Little number also notable.
Before Trump was elected, the polls predicted Hillary would win. Before Biden was elected, the polls predicted Trump would win.
Polls can be manipulated, misconstrued, and simply poorly executed. Leading questions, doublebarreled questions, double negatives, question order, margin of error, misread data, "random" sampling, focus groups saying what you want to hear, flukes like a surge due to novelty, and more, all skew polls in ways that don't reflect reality. Polls are more shamanism than science.
So why did the numbers change? The media has been telling us we shouldn't trust them for years, and people are reporting back what they've been told. It's also possible that when people say they "don't trust the news", what they really mean is they don't trust what's being reported - as in, if they're reading about politics, they don't trust the politics. You might suspect the newspaper is lying, or you might suspect Trump is lying - but either way, it's "the news" you don't trust, so you start to doubt the institution that's bringing you the lies.
The problem with polls is they only show, assuming they are accurate, what percentage of people will vote a certain way. They don't indicate who will win. Due to the electoral college, many votes are effectively thrown out. This is the reason for the discrepancy. It would increase democracy in the US if the electoral college was eliminated.
FiveThirtyEight.com uses polling data, but also looks at the electoral college, and accurately predicted that Trump could beat Hillary and that Biden could beat Trump, although the odds that Trump would beat Hillary were low, they did predict it was possible.
At the beginning, the audience was evenly split on the motion (48/52). 82% said they were open to changing their minds over the course of the debate.
At the end, audience was 67/33 (!!) in favor of the motion, apparently one of the largest swings in Munk debate history.
The heart of it is a cabal who think they are "right", feeling no compunction about using whatever means necessary to make everyone else submit to their obviously correct worldview. The Twitter Files came out after this debate, but oh boy the rout would have been even sweeter had that been out at the time.
Murray and Taibbi were talking straight. Gladwell and Goldberg were dissembling and side-stepping and strawmanning. I think it was that intellectual dishonesty that the audience ultimately picked up on.
I can't say I've met many humans who ever think they are "wrong". A few will claim that they are open to changing their minds about their beliefs, but I suspect they are mostly deluding themselves. I am no different.
I actually found it inarticulate. There's really only one thing to consider: can you trust what the media says? The fact is you have no idea if what they're reporting is true or false, as they freely admit they make mistakes and sometimes report false stories, and their viewership has a 95% partisan slant. So you have no idea if what you're reading next is true or not. Therefore, you can't trust it. Putting trust in the media is akin to blind belief. Without a rigidly documented process and chain of evidence in full view of the public (like, you know, a science) it's all just "claims".
No wonder it's devolved into partisanship. Politics is a 21st century religion, and the media its gospel choir.
Is this some kind of elaborate parody because this article is a prime example of why people don’t trust the press. And here I thought they were going to say that it’s because the press sold out to power and now just prints lies or convenient half-truths.
The author uses the Clinton email scandal as an example of how the media over-covered certain stories.
"That Clinton was somehow a criminal for doing what her predecessor Colin Powell had also done—conduct government business using a private server—was a staple of the Trump campaign"
How does an educated person, journalist or not, not know the difference between using a private email account, which is what Colin Powell confessed to, and having a private email server set up in your home? (rumored to be quite insecure in the first few months)
There are several such "mistakes" in this article. It indeed read like a parody.
I always have been curious about how many journalists and news personalities are either useful idiots or are in on the grift. It seems like a healthy mix of both.
In the Chomsky model of media propaganda, most of the participants are true believers, hired because they truly believe and are therefore the most qualified for their jobs. Even when they know they're lying, they're doing it because they think the ends justify the means and believe the ends are just.
Spot check the Post's database of 30,573 lies. It's a joke.
*This very sentence, if uttered by Trump, would be entered in their database: a joke is an amusing action or story with a punchline; our database is an objective list of lies.
Trump: "We just got seventy five million votes. And that's a record in the history of in the history of sitting presidents."
WaPo: "When the counting was finished, Trump had received 74 million votes, not 75 million as he often claims" and then a bunch of irrelevant crap about how Biden got more, and how a record number of people voted in 2020.
Discounting 75 vs 74 million, Trump did get more votes than any sitting President in history. That is a fact, not a lie.
Most of the entries in the database are things like "we have the greatest economy in history" and other such vague puffery. And if Trump repeats it 100 times, it counts as 100 lies.
Can you share a few examples out of the 30,000 entries that you consider actual lies? (not mere puffery, not trivial errors, not simple difference of opinion)
Something substantive and fairly verifiable as false, along the lines of Biden's claim that he earned three degrees, or that he got arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela, or that he marched in the civil rights movement, or that his son died in Iraq, or that he finished the top half of his law school class.
Just say what happened (Ray Lyle, Kansas City Star)
Marginalize pseudo-events, don't make a story where there isn't any, don't re-report same stories (Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image)
"always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty" (Joseph Pulitzer, Retirement letter)
Lessons from last century, when people trusted the news
Contrary to what seems to be common wisdom, increasing belief in misinformation is likely untrue [1]. I wonder if distrust in media stems from the fact that the democratization brought about by the internet has made people more aware of inaccuracies and bias than before. Not that the media is making more mistakes, but that people are more aware of them. Plenty of outlets half a century ago made glaring mistakes, but people probably didn't know. But now, when the media references a primary source it's often possible for people to immediately view the primary source themselves and see how it matches up with how the outlet described it. I suspect there's a significant segment of news producers and writers that don't understand this dynamic. They think they can get away with the same kind of slant as they could back in the days of print, they don't realize that I'm reading their article on one manner and googling their sources on the other.
I'll tell you when I lost faith in The New Yorker. I was a subscriber for many years. I get that the people over at The New Yorker could not stand Donald Trump. But during the four years he was president (and even before, during the months of the campaign), it seemed like every other cover of their magazine was a grotesque and febrile caricature of the man. It made the magazine seem a bit unbalanced—and by that I don't mean "politically."
The "free press" in the First Amendment refers to the right of any individual to freely operate the machinery of publication, not any grant of special rights to "the press" as the collective of journalists and related trades.
211 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadBut sure, look up things such as "the Armenian Question". Religious genocides existed before the Shoah. Heck, read some of the bible to see some more examples. Human sacrifice also has a long, long tradition in various religions. While the toll for any particular human sacrifice will be few in number, iterated over centuries it adds up.
Anytime I hear people generically blaming "The Media" for everything I just roll my eyes.
This is a /r/selfawarewolves-tier post. Bravo.
>Anytime I hear people generically blaming "The Media" for everything I just roll my eyes.
My post outlined multiple specific instances where the media dropped the ball. It by definition is not "generically blaming."
Market forces have gutted the workforce, disincentivized long-form content, encouraged partisanship, and most importantly of all, consolidated most media under a handful of large companies.
“The Media” is not a monolith, but a substantial amount of press is owned and operated by a select few institutions.
This is a very different experience from watching cable news for example. Yet both are considered "The Media"
>Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information, as long as it’s genuine, by whatever means and with whatever motives. Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him.
So basically, "we're saying something that will turn our audience against him, but as an aside we mentioned that a couple organizations you've probably never heard of spoke out against something we're not going to explain, and that on balance means we're defending him."
Unfortunately, it has only grown.
This weird variation of navel gazing is very weird though. Is the author seriously suggest they should stop doing that? At that point, even the remnants of their current credibility will perish with the first source they burn since no one sensible will be stupid enough to disclose anything of value.
If it is not sincere, then I am in full agreement with you. It is a poster child why Americans lost faith in news.
You have an easier time arguing that it's not a crime. Certainly the Podesta hack itself was a crime, but it's plausible that Assange merely got the emails after the fact and published them because they were newsworthy. That's... pretty arguable, but it's at least an argument.
Broadly... I just don't see the bias here. Assange is credibly accused of political crimes. Stating so isn't "bias", it's just describing a reasonably held opinion. That it isn't your opinion isn't the point.
Maybe pick an incident that he's charged with?
> You have an easier time arguing that it's not a crime.
Especially since nobody has claimed that this is a crime, and he's never been charged with it. You're spreading misinformation in order to justify the prosecution of a journalist.
I'm confused what you mean here and whether you are saying I used biased or unbiased phrasing. If you are saying it was biased, why was my comment neutral when the original "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal." was not? If what I said was biased, how would you describe the fact that he has been accused of crimes?
I'm not asking rhetorical questions here. I'm challenging people to write an unbiased version of that original paragraph. I don't think it can be done. We can't address "Americans Lost Faith in the News" without being honest that this ideal of a universally agreed upon unbiased reporting of facts isn't truly possible.
What I meant is that the sentence you wrote was sufficiently neutral in tone along the lines of 'this guy accused of a political crime.'
<< why was my comment neutral when the original "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal." was not?
I think the issue is with the context. Would you be willing to rewrite the paragraph written by article's author, because you may be right in a sense that it is hard to judge it based on that one sentence fragment alone? My initial response is that the article pushes a clear agenda vis-a-vis Assange even though it seems to have a tenuous connection to the point author seems to be trying to make. So initial difference is there ( possibly criminal vs guy accused of crime reads very differently ) and it is hard to argue in good faith for an entity with a lot of editors no one thought that may read a tad biased.
All that said, my own personal bias may be showing here, but then I am not sure Assange was obligated to keep that information secret -- whatever else you may think about qualitative goodness/badness of that action. Naturally that leaves 'hacking' angle, but I will admit I did not follow story closely enough to offer a useful analysis.
edit: "Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information"
I am starting to think you may be right in general. This paragraph cannot be rewritten in an impartial manner, because it is at its core very partial. It is arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind.
No, because I don't think I can do better than the original author.
>I am starting to think you may be right in general. This paragraph cannot be rewritten in an impartial manner, because it is at its core very partial. It is arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind.
I don't think the paragraph is necessarily "arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind". It is remarking on a world which has an anti-Assange bias because many powerful people in the world, namely the US government, view Assange negatively. How do you report on that without either repeating or refuting that bias in the world?
Maybe a less controversial figure is a better example of this. The FBI monitored MLK Jr. That is just a fact. How do you remark on that fact neutrally? The FBI as an institution has some inherent level of trust. Reporting simply that they monitored MLK implies to a certain extent that he was implicated in some wrongdoing. Do you therefore try to qualify that? Do you say the monitoring was "inappropriate"? Is that too strong? Doesn't that imply that the FBI is racist or corrupt? Do you say it was "potentially inappropriate"? But doesn't that imply you think it might be appropriate?
I don't think the objective reporting of facts is nearly as easy as people seem to imply in conversations about media and in many cases it is impossible.
Maybe, Pratchett's work was onto something when he indicated that in Discworld universe poetic license was somewhat limited[1]:
“Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.”
So in the case of Assange, the writer should have added a short narrative indicating his particular perception of the issue ("Assange is possibly a criminal") absent a completely generic and neutral in tone ( Assange did something US governemnt did not like ).
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/586782-poetic-simile-was-st...
In short, I don't think it is impossible. There is no willingness to agree on some basic standards.
Assange clearly was selective about release of information and timed his releases to affect political outcomes, which discredited him in my eyes and many others.
But that just adds to the pile doesn't it? It shows that trustworthy agenda-free journalism is exceedingly rare even in the "alternative" media and activist journalism world.
If you have an audience that trusts you, you have power. Power corrupts.
I don't think there ever was an age in which journalism was significantly more trustworthy than today. I think we just had fewer options and less opportunity to look behind the curtain.
So did the rest of the American media, starting with the Biden laptop fiasco. I don't see anyone from news orgs being under arrest and not charged for the past 10 years.
The Guardian also timed the release of the Snowden leaks, what do you think about that? They were very careful about how they did it, and dripped it out to keep it in the headlines because they, as a newspaper, knew how the headlines worked. They were also selective.
Also, what are you challenging when you say he is "discredited" in your eyes? Surely not the veracity of the information, which isn't impacted by the timing of its release.
> The classic statement of the problem [that objectivity journalism is a problematic concept] is Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” published a hundred and one years ago. Lippmann’s critique remains relevant today—the Columbia Journalism School mounted a four-day conference on “Public Opinion” last fall, and people found that there was still plenty to talk about. Lippmann’s argument was that journalism is not a profession. You don’t need a license or an academic credential to practice the trade. All sorts of people call themselves journalists. Are all of them providing the public with reliable and disinterested news goods?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay
Most people have limited amounts of time and with their free time I'm sure they want to spend the least amount getting to the bottom of a story on the news.
People skim, fill in the blanks, and fulminate on twitter.
I think that was the big turning point.
Yes, Dan was a sucker for some crudely-forged documents from a really dodgy source. But journalists skimping on fact-checking when they liked the story was SOP a century or few earlier. For instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Check
I still read The New York Times, but I do so knowing they have an American establishment bias and will make themselves uncritical puppets of the government whenever they feel so inclined. Probably most of what they publish is usually more true than false, but you've always got to read it with a grain of salt. The newspaper is best as a bellwether for what the American establishment wants the American public to believe. Having "faith" is precisely the wrong way to read a newspaper.
No WMDs in Iraq for me was the one that turned me. A Republican administration seeding the New York Times that lie and they published it with basically no research. The former CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, who oversaw the acquisition of KBR for fuck sake (the largest private contractor in the Iraq war with $10s? of billions of contract dollars per year)[1]) was the de-facto president of the US at the time.
The Hunter Biden laptop story being suppressed as Russian misinformation right before the election when it was legitimate is another big one.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBR_(company) "In the 2000s, KBR employed more American private contractors and had a larger contract with the U.S. government than any other firm in Iraq. The company's roughly 14,000 U.S. employees in Iraq provide logistical support to the U.S. military.[38] Some U.S. Marines revived the Vietnam-era nickname 'Burn & Loot' as a name for the company during the Iraq War.[39]"
That was the aberration. 120 years ago when newspapers owned by the likes of William Hearst were doing their best to start unnecessary wars for shits and giggles, would you have trusted the news media? I hope not.
The news industry was crooked then, and I don't think there's any reason to believe the American media briefly became trustworthy in the mid 20th century when public trust in the media was at all-time highs. I think Americans got caught up in a post-war optimistic fervor that blinded them to the faults of American media, and American society in general. Now the news media feel entitled to that level of trust which they never deserved in the first place.
Reminder that one of America's most beloved "founding fathers" was a newspaperman propagandist. A man called Benjamin Franklin, who founded numerous newspapers specifically to push the revolutionary narrative in colonial America. Say what you like about the man, but impartial reporting was not his priority. The supposed age of impartial trustworthiness in news media is myth, not history. Newspapers have always been the tools of those who own them.
He was a printer with a franchise of other printers already, and he did value-added stuff like print the news long before the first stirrings of revolution; are you sure he wouldn't have founded them anyway?
The brief time in the US that coincided with a relatively trusted news establishment coincided with a lot of painstaking efforts at professionalization and projecting an aura of critical neutrality. Customers stopped wanting that, and the professionals were too expensive anyway. Now, we're back to pogrom-of-the-month club journalism, sometimes mostly digital but sometimes also in reality.
That's not true. Reagan's Republicans stopped wanting that, and then non-fairness was forced onto the masses until people didn't know the difference anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
See also: same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, net neutrality, right to repair, et alia.
Eliminating the fairness doctrine opened the door for garbage content. That’s why Rush Limbaugh building off the fringe last night trucker talk show schtick became a force on hundreds of radio stations with millions of listeners in a time slot once dedicated to a half hour news segment and old ladies talking about knitting.
Rush created the mold for editorial that sounded like news. He had a real talent for entertaining commentary and good production value. His copycats had less talent and went more extreme, once they hit the bottom for broadcast, guys like Alex Jones took to the internet.
He was legit funny and entertaining then, as long as you weren’t the punchline. When he was past his prime, divorced and hooked on drugs in the 2000s it was different and really awful.
As a centrist, I love it, I think it would go a long way towards building more trust in news institutions, if they made a strong commitment to trying their best to present multiple viewpoints on an event and doing their best to not introduce bias into it.
Modern news with a fairness doctrine would probably be profoundly boring, which is good in its own way (I'm sure you would agree), but not something that makes a company like CNN a lot of money. Good journalism is expensive and laborious; cheap commentary on a 24hr stream is relatively cheap and easy.
And the fairness doctrine never really applied to newspapers — which instead sought centrism to broaden their distribution in a geographical-based market and attract more ad dollars. This is another trend towards centrism which has been rendered moot by the Internet, where firms compete for attention using partisanship — which has long been preferred by paying audiences (and was the norm in the 19th century newspaper).
Such regulation could be legally applied to the internet. It may need a different agency to enforce it as the FCC only ever had the most control over broadcast airwaves (though the FCC still has some control over cellular bandwidth and broadband cabling and could use those as leverage), but basic regulations like "ads need to properly labeled; news needs to be properly labeled; editorial opinions need to be properly labeled" could absolutely still exist within the rights of the First Amendment. (The first Amendment is a nuanced thing and primarily designed between you a citizen and your government, every other kind of relationship is mostly just assumed beyond that, and some of it depends on whether you agree with the Citizens United decision that corporations are citizens and money is speech, which is a massive rabbit hole.)
If there was a US Congress that wanted to regulate it, they absolutely could. The difference between 1949 and today has nothing to do with the First Amendment or technology changes and almost everything to do with a lack of will to properly govern with good regulations (and capitalism with no guiding hand regulation sinking to lowest common denominators for clickbait and attention seeking).
If a “will to properly govern” is involved then it will take far more than “good regulations,” it will take major substantive changes to the nation’s Constitution, with all that entails. It will not happen because the citizens of the nation still like that amendment and fear they will be exposed to abuse without it.
In that era, TV channels were a tightly-regulated, very-rare resource, and as a result the information carried upon them rapidly diffused to everyone because there simply weren't that many alternatives to turn to for information. In terms of the attention economy, attention was relatively cheap if you could get onto the channel; you had a completely captive audience with few distractions if they were using television at all.
LeVar Burton once opined in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air that the most special thing about the miniseries Roots was that because of its timing, it's one of the last dramatizations on racism that more-or-less an entire generation of Americans experienced. Once cable brought the number of channels from dozens to hundreds (and HDTV later pushed it into the thousands), the cost to fixate a message in front of every household skyrocketed. There's more content than ever to experience, but the odds of any two people having experienced similar content have commensurately gone way down.
It's entirely possible that the era of the cultural touchstone is nearly over (though firms like Disney certainly make a go of it with 300-million-plus dollar movie investments).
Many even most controversies aren't complex takes on deep issues. They are to be frank malicious bullshit. Taking pills to not continue a pregnancy isn't murder. There isn't a basement let alone kids under that pizza place. The election wasn't stolen. Societies without pervasive individual guns don't have people blowing away children meaning the issues with gun control are 99% logistical/legal. We could solve them we just willing and able to trade dead children for more freedom. There is zero moral implications to allowing gay marriage or gay adoption. Evolution is real as is systemic racism.
Shall we designate a ministry of truth to decide what controversies we ought to teach or force our media to carry malicious lies?
If you are saying that there is no nuance, no gray areas at all, to the topics of abortion, election integrity, gun ownership, etc then you are no better than the ideologues on Fox news, just in the opposite direction.
There really is little nuance regarding election integrity. Trump definitively lost. The only disputes with a shred of substance were themselves procedural quibbles like arguing that a given legislature overstepped its authority by offering mail in balloting and attempting to use this to argue that the proper resolution to overreach would be to throw out the legitimately cast ballots of those following government instruction in order to reach claimants preferred outcome.
Lets do abortion next. Almost all the meaningful brain development that produces a human like being rather than a human looking being happens in the third trimester whereas almost all abortions happen in the first and overwhelmingly consist of mom to be swallowing pills terminate something as intelligent as mold. The nuance was covered 50 years ago and then again and again with redundant laws designed to protect the fetus from fictional partial birth abortions that were already illegal twice or three times over. Having already achieved the goal of keeping human like beings from being killed decades prior there is little nuance left to deal with.
If you have an hour we could do gun control too. I noticed you didn't mention the other controversies presumably because you don't regard them as meaningful controversies. Kudos.
> The only way you can be against popping pills in the first trimester is...
You're being awfully free there with the strawmen...
But you said "brain development", not brain activity. Do you have some developmental milestone in mind? If so, what? My standard hinges on electrical activity in the brain, which is there by the 24th week - that is, the second trimester. (And maybe earlier - detecting brain activity isn't as simple as slapping EEG electrodes on the skull, when the skull is inside the womb.) I would argue for that, rather than for a particular developmental milestone.
Other possible milestones: The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.) If at that stage of development it has full human rights because it had the misfortune to be born prematurely, why shouldn't it have those rights if it wasn't born prematurely?
Or, first heartbeat. (The heartbeat used to be the deciding line on the death side, before the brain was.)
Or, fertilization or implantation. (I agree with you about the egg.) It will become possible to build an artificial womb that will take a fertilized egg and produce a baby in nine months. Does that change the boundaries for you at all? (Via my "premature birth" argument, does it change the boundaries if we can take an earlier, non-viable premature birth, stick it in the artificial womb, and have it survive?)
This last position loops back to my argument about the organ donor. The question was whether the brain had stopped, and wasn't going to start up again. Well, in the case of the fetus, it will start up if you just don't kill it. (Whereas the egg, by itself, will just die in 7 or 8 days.) The fetus is "default alive"; the egg is "default dead". To me, that makes abortion different from birth control.
This is an interesting line of argument.
The twist here is that a fetus is "default alive" provided resources are expended to keep it that way.
Consider:
> The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.)
as a point at which a host might say "I don't wish to support this parasite that I have no interest in any longer" and transfers a fetus to an artifical womb.
Murder? That seems unlikely.
But is the fetus truly "default alive"?
If the power goes out will it survive? Surely it requires external support much as various patients require life support but are otherwise not viable.
Things are rarely clearcut and this point at least is still within the grey of a Sorites paradox.
So... yeah. "Things are rarely clearcut", as someone said recently :-)
The baby's brain will triple in size during the third trimester including almost all of the development of the cerebral cortex features that are essential to being human or even being a mouse. It goes from something that as is is functionality incapable of being considered asleep or awake that doesn't posses the ability to drive even a mouse's experience to something that could aptly be said to be a sleeping human brain during this time. This is definitively when potential becomes reality.
The standard established by roe of between 24-28 weeks being set before this actuality is safe standard to balance rights of baby and mom to ensure we don't enslave actual humans to the needs of potential ones.
[1] http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped...
No. Not multiple viewpoints. Merely an opposing view. Of the station's choosing. So if your station's views are correct, and why wouldn't they be, then the best choice of opposing view is some crackpot, ideally not too offensive for the middle of the night.
"9/10 establishment approved policy experts think we should be balls deep in Vietnam. The 10th says just the tip"
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/412/94/
[2] https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
The key difference is that the government can put you in jail, or confiscate your property whereas Facebook and only harass you within the confines of Facebook.
The Postmaster General Albert Burleson makes up a solid part of chapter 3 of this march through a tragic & vicious time. Burleson told post offices to send any suspicious/un-American/not-war-supporting publications to him for review, which he then used either deny mailing to or used to attack directly the institutions. The web of publications not just suppressed but attacked here seemingly extended to basically anyone with a dissenting voice on labor, race, or seemingly most any topic where the governmemt wasnt portrayed in favorable rights.
We did (thanks to the courts) come to limit government power to censor & abuse eventually, and to your defense not that much longer after. We have only just gotten to ~100 years of there being some clarity, but after an enormous cliff where these ideas seemingly meant nothing, and from which we emerged only because of a very very few sensible & reasonable high placed people who reversed an animal & base anti-speech anger that government had been systemizing actively.
I still broadly agree with your distinction, but noting the dark shitty times & bring aware how bad things were not that long ago- at a governmental level- is also important. This book has been eye opening.
The problem with the linked article is it insinuates political bias is the only acceptable public opinion, propaganda in support of that one party is good, anyone in opposition to its aggressive propaganda is bad, and then weirdly implies lack of trust in that propaganda is somehow bad for democracy.
The main problem with trust in media is a diversity of ownership implies a diversity of opinions, and we had that in the past. There is no diversity in ownership nor opinion now. There is the one party which must always be supported at all times by the good people, and the evil ones who do not obey.
Top 10 Cable News Shows in 2022
RANK NETWORK PROGRAM NAME P2+AA (000) #Tlc
1 FOXN THE FIVE 3419 246
2 FOXN TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT 3031 228
3 FOXN JESSE WATTERS PRIMETIME 2857 200
4 FOXN HANNITY 2811 214
5 FOXN SPECIAL REPORT BRET BAIER 2511 244
6 FOXN THE INGRAHAM ANGLE 2269 215
7 FOXN GUTFELD! 2040 222
8 FOXN OUTNUMBERED 1858 245
9 FOXN AMERICA’S NEWSROOM 1761 496
10 MSNBC ALEX WAGNER/ MADDOW
https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/these-are-the-top-rated-cabl...
My son thinks MSNBC is worse than Fox but I’d say Fox was commercially successful from the very beginning and that liberals were ‘too smart for that shit’ until the Trump administration where MSNBC really had grist for that mill and got much better ratings.
CNN has the bias of ‘if it bleeds it leads’ and loved to promote antagonism with Trump because it was great for ratings. I would say though that even non-partisan business news on cable is awful. We will probably still be hearing the non-sensical FAANG acronym for years thanks to the ignorance of Jim Cramer. At least his stock picks are it much worse than a dart, not as bad as Jimmy the Greek’s football picks.
The absolutely breathless coverage about classified documents found in Biden's home, about whatever immigration problem happens to be going on (which often implies on both ideological sides of it that the immigration problem is the presidents fault), the economy, etc - the coverage is all about the same, critical, often overly so.
The only real difference is, there isnt some violation of norms or scandal every three weeks with Biden. One of the nice things I can say about Trump, is he had so many scandals, we stopped using the -gate suffix to them.
I shy away from telling people how to live, but I would consider looking at other sources if only for one reason: 'being able to detect bias and correct for it'.
I'm moderately good about detecting bias, but I see more 'gotcha' questions from the media interviewing administration officials, there is no answer, nothing that can be done, but they're still expected to answer the questions.
I can detect bias in both 'mainstream media', and and right wing sources.
I am only aware of the different bubbles, because I seem to belong to several social circles with very much opposed views and I don't know how common it is today ( I am not really joking ) since the weird trend I have been seeing is cutting off 'toxic family members', which effectively means people actively work to maintain their particular bubbles making already bad problem even worse. And since I tend to listen to everyone, everyone seems to think I am in full agreement.
The only place I did not see it hit hard is work, but that seems to be the case only because there is still some expectation of 'leaving non-work related stuff outside', but even that seems to be changing.
As I am re-reading your posts, I do not think we are disagreeing.
I also am not a big believer in cutting people off, or avoiding opinions that make you uncomfortable, it leads to a certain kind of intellectual stunting - the inability to try to understand the perspective of the other side - and like, in politics specifically, you must understand what the other side believes and why they believe it to effectively argue against it.
To circle around (and be clearer), the media consistently promotes the idea of the imperial presidency - the idea (mostly on a subconscious level) that the president can solve all problems.
In reality, 80% of the problems (which can be solved) facing America must be fixed legislatively - but because of dysfunction in the legislative branch.
Which, I should explain that - the causes of this are manifold:
* From special interest groups dominating the law writing process (which isn't always bad, but its not transparent)
* Congress being non-majoritarian (i.e. not well reflecting the actual views of the voters) because we've failed to expand the number of congresscritters since the 20's, leading to widely unequal district sizes)
* To issues with primary elections which result in the most extreme views being on the general election ticket, rather than the most moderate ones (which actually reflect the median voter).
* Bicameralism and the Filibuster also makes it harder to pass laws, laws that might have a good agreement of 59% of both houses, but if it cant meet the threshold in the senate it fails.
So instead the administration and the courts have stood in the legislatures place to do the business of the people.... with mixed results.
The media however, doesn't talk about that, they instead gig administrations for issues that are just plain outside of the remit of the presidency and thats just for the solvable problems - some are not (lots of reporting on the pandemic was like this) but by asking "well what are you going to do about X?" and the poor secretary of whatever has no answer, because its not a solvable problem by government, it just makes our government look incompetent.
This is from a larger piece (https://alohawolf.substack.com/p/an-evergreen-america) a friend of mine and I wrote -
"Government cannot be there to solve every problem, cure every illness, and redress every grievance. The progressive left often mistakes things the government can do for the things the government ought to do. The regressive right often demands the clock be turned back to a time where the government did very little--ignoring the changes wrought on American society by advances in science and technology since then."
Put another way - The lefties I know broadly assume government to be more competent that it is and private industry either greedy or incompitent than reality shows, and the conservatives I know broadly assume private industry to be more competent than it is, and government to be more incompetent than reality shows.
The reality I know is America has a nice spread of competency and its not regional, and government is no more, or less competent than private industry, it does move slower however, for a variety of very good reasons (regulated utilities are often the same way, for the same reasons. Our media does a poor job of reflecting that, and does a poor job explaining to Americans why things are broken - and I have little love for either party at this point, both seem (on a spectrum anyhow, republicans seem worse about this, they keep ending up as the dog who catches the fire trunk, then fail to implement their ideas, because of either - how profoundly unpopular they are, or because they dont have any implementable ideas int he first place - dems - at worst - mostly just seem to have trouble organizing a one car motorcade) more interested in political power than doing the peoples business.
I want a media that holds the rich and powerful to account, keeps the pe...
I look at these statistics and it tells me conservatives have one place they go to to watch the news, while liberals either don't watch cable news and/or they split their viewership amongst several outlets.
Cable news ratings are meaningless in trying to reflect media bias.
Is this referring to the "Republicans and Democrats are the same party" trope, or is there a different intended meaning here?
You're comment indicates you think there are multiple parties. I'd assume you mean the Republicans and Democrats, but both of those parties are supported by various news outlets. So yeah, I don't think I understand what is trying to be conveyed here.
I think people perceived Reagan was successful at solving the problems of the 1970s and I think Clinton basically picked up most of Reagan's approach to governing the same way that Tony Blair followed in the steps of Margaret Thatcher in the UK. The polarization was different back then. I remember George HW Bush getting on TV when Rodney King was beat by the LAPD and saying that he'd watched it on TV with his wife and he was shocked, whereas you'd expect Republicans today to say something like "it served him right". For that matter his son signed into law the expansion of Medicare benefits to include prescription drugs which was a huge new social program.
It seemed in the Bush years the public was still not getting a clear choice on many issues, one of the things that alienated people from "the establishment" is how voices opposed to the 2nd Iraq War were excluded from respectable opinion. I would tell anyone who listened that the war would likely turn out the way that it did but nobody in power listened, despite very large protests against the war. With Kerry in 2004 the Democrats did not clearly distinguish themselves from Bush and his policies as Kerry had this strange ambiguous position between being a war hero and an anti-war organizer who would not come to a clear position on Iraq.
I think though the next trend started w/ Newt Gingrich in the 1990s who tried to block Clinton at every turn (who maybe helped Clinton paradoxically because he could pursue a basically conservative agenda but have groups like the National Organization of Women support him in his philandering and have environmental groups not complain about him doing nothing because he was under attack from the other side)
That kind of negative politics went into high gear in the Obama years and today it seems there is little sign of the swing voter. You certainly couldn't say that Donald Trump didn't clearly distinguish himself from Biden, which was not so clear in the 1992-2004 time frame.
I’d say the secret in politics can be found in the work of Mancur Olson who would say a large group like ‘women’ or ‘white people’ cannot really organize on its own behalf because of the free-rider problem. A union has to have a ‘closed shop’ otherwise one could get the benefits of the union without paying dues. A membership organization might get small donations from 1% of that group but those members do not have any say or representation in what the group does. It is like a turbocharged engine which has a huge amount of energy cycling in the shaft, in this case 95% of donations go to overhead and getting more donations and there is no change and little advocacy but it is a great job if you can get it.
A special interest like ‘the 100 biggest farmers in California’ can organize much more effectively and the people involved see a much more straight line of getting influence. For a group like that, politics is a business expense and spending $X on greasing politician’s palms makes $20X for the interest it is a great business. (One answer to the problem could be to try to make political spending and bribery more expensive. If it cost $10 to get a $5 tax cut all but the most cantankerous rich people would shut up and pay their taxes)
The democrats and republicans pretend to represent great warring general interests and it is a lot of fury signifying nothing. Spamming the agenda with that stuff prevents any real changes but leaves space for special interests to pursue ‘politics as usual’. It’s a bit like pro wrestling.
Sullivan’s conclusion that the press should take sides put her in conflict with the Washington Post’s editor during the Trump years, Martin Baron. She quotes from an e-mail he sent her: “When we’ve done our work with requisite rigor and thoroughness (also known as solid, objective reporting) we should tell people what we’ve learned and what remains unknown—directly, straightforwardly, unflinchingly—just as people in lots of other professions do when they’re doing their jobs correctly. That’s what ‘objectivity’ was intended to mean when the term was developed for journalism more than a century ago”—that is, when Lippmann wrote “Public Opinion.”
Sullivan’s position is an appeal to the original rationale of the First Amendment. We have a free press in order to protect democracy. When democracy is threatened, reporters and editors and publishers should have an agenda. They should be pro-democracy. Reporters should “stop asking who the winners and losers are,” Sullivan says; they should “start asking who is serving democracy and who is undermining it.” The press is in the game. It has a stake.
Also according to the article she has a "memoir slash manifesto" called “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” (St. Martin’s)
https://www.amazon.com/Newsroom-Confidential-Lessons-Worries...
And 150 years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle editorial staff founded Bohemian Club to “facilitate the arts” and throw parties up in the Sonoma redwoods every summer. Some pretty high-profile guests over the years too. Move along, move along — nothing to see here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee
One of the main things Assange revealed, which has not been disputed, is how Clinton intervened in the 2016 Democratic primary election, to damage the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, using any means possible to stop the grassroots pressure from below felt in both major parties. Strange how the revelation of the inside truth of this election intervention is itself called election intervention.
Trump shouldn’t be given so much credit for the present moment. It should instead go to the iPhone, twitter, Reddit, Facebook, 4chan, blogs - the internet fire hose. And it’s not just the United States, it’s happening all over the world.
E.g: "X heavily criticized for Y action"
Supporting Tweet screenshots : 1 like, 4 likes ....
... Sprinkled with a lot of bs on top.
Let's be frank here: the Internet, as we currently use it, gives voice to _everyone_, regardless of the accuracy of the information, and while I agree that the upside is that we do have access to more information, it has not significantly changed the quality of it.
It used to be that you knew, and cared, what was news reporting and what was opinion.
I wonder whether this is cyclical though. It's not as if partisanship is new in newspapers. They used to be very blatant about it, having "Republican" and "Democrat" in their actual names.
Journalists like to depict themselves as objective and rational guardians of democracy. But they’re just regular people, and their profession has adopted a mentality of righteousness. I roll my eyes every time I see “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on WaPo’s website.
Was it The Guardian that used to have a banner on the bottom listing scary things like "erosion of democracy" and asking for you to pay? Generally if something is trying to stir up fear while asking for money, I don't trust it.
It seems that as years go by that editorial boards (leaning in both directions) are having much more impact on what you and I read. Those editorial boards are influenced by owners and investors. Those people have bias as well.
There still does not seem to be a journalism source that is bias-free. I read yesterday that "Chat GPT is a panacea for bias in reporting". I nearly gagged!
In 2001 when the twin towers fell, I was encouraged by how suddenly everyone put down their party ties and went to talk about how we would rebuild and retaliate. In present day, the war in Ukraine has done nothing but further split our nation. So what changed? We didn't act like this during Bosnia.
Is it the effect of journalism bias, or is it our nature as humans still working through the shock of Covid that we can't let things go. Are we now looking to argue just one more time to make sure "the other side" knows we think they're wrong?
We are sick as the human race, and nobody is admitting that. We've gone from intent to divide instead of intent to unite.
For one, we now have the hindsight of knowing how the post 9/11 mentality you speak of turned out. 20 years of fruitless wars based on lies.
I hoped to find a more conciliatory tone in this piece, for some greater level of introspection on their field, but immediately it invokes Trump and how victimized major media companies have been. There are plenty of non-traditional, but non-'Trumpified' news sources that are beating the incumbents on merit. It doesn't need to mean it's the end of democracy.
Who wants to see 5 adults discuss someone shitposting on Twitter as "breaking news".
"Britney Spears slams Alyssa Milano for old tweet that questioned her well-being: 'This definitely feels like a form of bullying!'"
>As the press of this country now exists, it would seem to be expressly devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and destroy all that is good, and to elevate and advance all that is evil in the nation. The little truth that is urged, is usually urged coarsely, weakened and rendered vicious, by personalities; while those who live by falsehoods, fallacies, enmities, partialities and the schemes of the designing, find the press the very instrument that the devils would invent to effect their designs.
> The characteristics of the American journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace; and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors.
Donald Trump did not say that the news media is the enemy of the people. He said that the fake news is the enemy of the people.
Those are almost identical phrases, but that slight difference has a completely different meaning: media is good, but lying media is bad.
Can you wonder why Americans have lost trust in the news? Even an article purporting to clear things up for us starts out being misleading.
April 5th 2019:
"The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"
Or how how about singling out individual news organisations he doesn't like as "enemies of the people"?
Feb 20th 2019:
"The New York Times reporting is false. They are a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"
The difference between calling all the media "enemies of the people" or just the ones he dislikes doesn't seem to be that big a distinction for the purposes of the argument.
EDIT: removed unnecessary emotion
Yeah, I thought he said something like this, thanks for confirming. They should have just quoted him.
That "a large percentage" bit, along with how he fairly-commonly used "fake news media" to mean all non-explicitly-conservative news sources explains why people felt he was attacking the press in general, I think...
[1]: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/10251151556324556...
> They asked my daughter Ivanka whether or not the media is the enemy of the people. She correctly said no. It is the FAKE NEWS, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people!
I think he left things like this generally vague, so that his fans could fill in whatever details they personally found the most compelling. The very "make America great again" catchphrase is a perfect example of this; what exactly constitutes "great" and what era is he talking about when he says "again"? Discontent millennials could think he was talking about the 90s while boomers who thought the 90s were shit could conclude he was talking about the 50s.
tl;dr classic demagoguery
The first few times he explicitly listed news organizations he said were fake, including NYT, WP, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN.
By mid 2018 it had grown to mainstream media is fake [1].
In the last year or so he'd also been slamming Fox. It's pretty clear that his definition of "fake news" is functionally equivalent to "anything that isn't positive about me, no matter how true".
[1] https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/10414416769491845...
For about 250 years (in the US), newspapers have been mostly political rags. They rose to popularity as a way for a single person or group to spread propaganda. Around 1900 they shifted from political rags to scandal-themed yellow journalism, and later turned more "professional", but never lost their slant towards ideologies, social/economic classes, trades, etc. The powerful have always controlled, influenced, and suppressed them. They've never been objective.
We've thought about the news as entertainment for the last 50 years. The movie Network came out in 1976, and predicted the abandonment of "balanced" journalism and information in favor of entertainment and profit. We've also known that the news may be staged, selectively covered, biased, and have a leading agenda in the stories they cover and how they cover them. And I mean, come on: Editorials? Literally just a biased person shouting their biased opinions, as if they have the right to speak for every reader?
The news has always been bullshit. Useful bullshit, but still bullshit. Anyone who thinks what they read is "true" doesn't understand the concept of truth.
Great deal/Quite a lot Confidence in Newspapers went from about 35-40% in the 80s to about 22% today (COVID likely a major influence on 2022's 16% number). Very Little number also notable.
Polls can be manipulated, misconstrued, and simply poorly executed. Leading questions, doublebarreled questions, double negatives, question order, margin of error, misread data, "random" sampling, focus groups saying what you want to hear, flukes like a surge due to novelty, and more, all skew polls in ways that don't reflect reality. Polls are more shamanism than science.
So why did the numbers change? The media has been telling us we shouldn't trust them for years, and people are reporting back what they've been told. It's also possible that when people say they "don't trust the news", what they really mean is they don't trust what's being reported - as in, if they're reading about politics, they don't trust the politics. You might suspect the newspaper is lying, or you might suspect Trump is lying - but either way, it's "the news" you don't trust, so you start to doubt the institution that's bringing you the lies.
FiveThirtyEight.com uses polling data, but also looks at the electoral college, and accurately predicted that Trump could beat Hillary and that Biden could beat Trump, although the odds that Trump would beat Hillary were low, they did predict it was possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vkgROIINEs
At the beginning, the audience was evenly split on the motion (48/52). 82% said they were open to changing their minds over the course of the debate.
At the end, audience was 67/33 (!!) in favor of the motion, apparently one of the largest swings in Munk debate history.
The heart of it is a cabal who think they are "right", feeling no compunction about using whatever means necessary to make everyone else submit to their obviously correct worldview. The Twitter Files came out after this debate, but oh boy the rout would have been even sweeter had that been out at the time.
Murray and Taibbi were talking straight. Gladwell and Goldberg were dissembling and side-stepping and strawmanning. I think it was that intellectual dishonesty that the audience ultimately picked up on.
No wonder it's devolved into partisanship. Politics is a 21st century religion, and the media its gospel choir.
"That Clinton was somehow a criminal for doing what her predecessor Colin Powell had also done—conduct government business using a private server—was a staple of the Trump campaign"
How does an educated person, journalist or not, not know the difference between using a private email account, which is what Colin Powell confessed to, and having a private email server set up in your home? (rumored to be quite insecure in the first few months)
There are several such "mistakes" in this article. It indeed read like a parody.
There it is right in the first paragraph. Does The Post keep the number of Biden's lies?
At least CNN listed them: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/20/politics/fact-check-biden-fal...
*This very sentence, if uttered by Trump, would be entered in their database: a joke is an amusing action or story with a punchline; our database is an objective list of lies.
Trump: "We just got seventy five million votes. And that's a record in the history of in the history of sitting presidents."
WaPo: "When the counting was finished, Trump had received 74 million votes, not 75 million as he often claims" and then a bunch of irrelevant crap about how Biden got more, and how a record number of people voted in 2020.
Discounting 75 vs 74 million, Trump did get more votes than any sitting President in history. That is a fact, not a lie.
Trump claim: “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90% of which floods across from our southern border.”
WaPo's own "factcheck", ironically, confirms what he said was true.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/live-updates/tr...
Most of the entries in the database are things like "we have the greatest economy in history" and other such vague puffery. And if Trump repeats it 100 times, it counts as 100 lies.
Something substantive and fairly verifiable as false, along the lines of Biden's claim that he earned three degrees, or that he got arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela, or that he marched in the civil rights movement, or that his son died in Iraq, or that he finished the top half of his law school class.
Marginalize pseudo-events, don't make a story where there isn't any, don't re-report same stories (Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image)
"always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty" (Joseph Pulitzer, Retirement letter)
Lessons from last century, when people trusted the news
1. https://www.slowboring.com/p/misinformation-myth
Don't let them trick you!