> The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.
I don't think it's true (why would it be), and even it is true, it is stupid to assume that it is true. It only can cause harm, but no benefits at all.
What do you not believe is true? That print space in newspapers is limited so you have to report selectively and your news organisation may just find one category of articles more relevant or interesting or important than another?
It's right in that they don't often feed you with provably false stuff --at least not at the time of publication (such as Hunter's Laptop being Russian misinfo but now owned up to by Hunter himself) but yes, they lie by omission, innuendo/leading and half truths. Similar to how quite a few social programs are based on small unreplicated studies that sound good on paper --the intent matters more than the results or reality.
Bad take. For one, any time you try to evaluate "the media" as a single entity, you've already failed. Secondly, the first example of "not really lying" is most definitely a deliberate lie.
The entire point of the article is to damn with faint praise. The NYT is no worse than infowars. Both may mislead and omit extremely relevant information but actual lies, no. It’s a knock on the NYT and by extension the entire news media journalism complex.
Which is stupid. Infowars is an absolute sham from top to bottom and the leader of Infowars is an absolute monster who will spend the rest of his life paying restitution for well-proven slanders. And has never produced a single "scoop" of verifiable value in it's history.
Meanwhile, the NY Times has made a few mistakes or let some bias slip through by the human beings who work there and produce thousands of relevant and accurate stories per year. Many of which are of vital national interest.
Because the data was completely misrepresented. VAERS is unvetted raw data from the public. Anyone who has experience or imagined a malady after self-reporting that they received a vaccine dose can make a report to VAERS. Portraying VAERS reports as conclusive causation is most definitely lying.
The headline presents the conclusions as unambiguous: "New Vaccine Data Shows Alarming Number Of Stillbirths And Miscarriages Caused By Covid Shot". Aside from referring to "covid shot" as a single thing and the 8 different vaccines available.
With all due respect, you either don't live in the US or are living under a rock if you feel like you need citation. Denying the US's propaganda machine is like denying climate change at this point. The news corps don't tell flat lies, they cherry-pick facts and events, often reporting them out of proportion to paint a narrative; which is almost as bad as telling flat lies.
Because, to first approximation, this is true. Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda. I'm not sure why Americans believe that objectivity in news reporting is even possible. Other countries don't seem to have as much of an issue with this, since you typically have news sources that are either owned directly by the government or are published by political parties.
This is still very much an issue in many countries with government owned "nonprofit" media. Even in countries with low amount of corruption and high freedom of press.
The first approximation is: a typical journalist working at a serious news organization has some amount of bias but at the same time tries to be objective.
So it is approximately false, they don't deliberately mislead.
My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't.
I would point to the general way that in the USA the balance of rights is tipped away from people and towards corporations, e.g. very little sick pay, very little paid leave, very little parental leave, very few rights for employees, Healthcare provided at the whims of employers and insurance companies. etc
It's hard to take this comment at face value when the content on CNN and Fox News is so different. I wouldn't really argue against CNN being interested in maintaining the status quo, but Fox News is reactionary.
Fox news is reactionary against progressivism, leftism, etc... but the status quo in the US is pro military, pro oligarchy, pro gun, pro life, conservative, white and Christian. The "leftist" party in the US, the Democrats, can at best be described as center-right, there is no true left with any real political power.
The Democrats are pro-war, pro-capitalism, only nominally anti-gun, pander to the Christians as much as Republicans, and don't even side with labor anymore, as we saw with Biden crushing the railroad workers' strike, which was even supported by supposed progressive firebrand AOC.
> My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't.
I don't put those 2 channels in different categories at all. And certainly they don't divide from each other along lines of objectivity. They are both in the News Entertainment industry. Neither cares in the least about objectivity.
The only split I see between them is their mutually exclusive audiences.
Fox News is actually in a better place because they don't seem to be hiding the fact that they are there for entertainment and audience-building. They both care about their ratings first and foremost, but CNN is still trying to keep some veneer of serious journalism.
As a test: I haven't watched it recently, but how has CNN mea culpa'd over the news that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? A "serious news organization" should have had a real period of soul-searching over that. I bet it was barely a blip on their radar.
I stopped reading CNN due to their terrible headlines, but I just went at the top headline is "Animals are reportedly dying after toxic train wreck. What it means". Well CNN has reporters, why is there hearsay in the title? Could you just look through some records or conduct a quick survey to figure out the truth of those reports.
>> Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda
Yes, but not really the issue... thats why there is an editing process. If an org has a proper editing process then a lot of that gets accounted for.
Most of the skewed stories come from organizations that don't employ trained editors, don't have a clear editorial workflow, don't have a corrections policy, and don't have fact-checkers.
I would argue that medium to large orgs like CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, Bloomberg, WSJ, FT, Guardian, USA Today, Texas Tribune, LA Times, SF Chronicle, New Yorker, Vox, NPR, Houston Chronicle all have these processes in play and are reliable.
(Yes, there are always stories with issues that get though out of thousands and thousands of otherwise solidly reported pieces. No system is perfect.)
> Yes, but not really the issue... thats why there is an editing process. If an org has a proper editing process then a lot of that gets accounted for.
Because... Editors couldn't possibly have motives that similarly contain bias, corruption, out other such common frailties of the human condition?
My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow works. You may not even be aware there is one. There is. It usually accounts for a lot of this. Not perfect, most systems are not - but it goes a long way to providing better reporting.
Think of it from a coding point of view.
Many people think that some developers write code directly on production, to their personal style, and thats it. That certainly happens.
Other teams have coding standards, style standards. Tabs versus Spaces. CamelCase for Class names but something different for variables?
The commit their code, and do a pull request and someone else reviews it. Edits are proposed or demanded. Code is reviewed again, then maybe it goes to production. Its been known for production code to have issues, but generally after going through a process most are prevented then if the developer was able to merge in code without review.
The larger orgs I mentioned have a involved editorial process for editing stories.
> My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow works.
I think you have it the other way around. The bias is institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias point of view out of the organization.
Look at how tightly political leanings are tied to news outlets.
If it were as easy and objective as you say we would get a lot more random pieces out of outlets instead of the rather rigid ideological publications we see in existence today.
Even Reddit subs and hacker news, which are much more random than news outlets, have pretty clear political leanings. With sufficient samples you can even break down the subgroups within the community.
News orgs don't have nearly the internal diversity required to possibly remove such bias. They are homogenous.
>> I think you have it the other way around. The bias is institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias point of view out of the organization.
That appears to be your opinion, likely that of many here. However thats not how it works.
I have worked in media for 20 years and have had the opportunity to see how many editors, newsrooms, and publications in general work. I have sat in editorial meetings where coverage and stories are discussed. I have been present when editors and writers go back and fourth on stories.
The problem is that for any given news org, you and most people do not know what it takes to publish a story at some of these places. Thats NOT a criticism of you - I think we'd all be better off if folks knew how it worked.
So, does the representation of said news room consist of a group that votes in line with the same distribution as the general population or does it lean significantly to a single side?
Money is on, it was homogeneous. Which means, You can't even see your own biases as other points of view were culled in creating and nurturing the org structure.
> Its been known for production code to have issues, but generally after going through a process most are prevented then if the developer was able to merge in code without review
One more point.
Companies never ever have evil anti user dark patterns enter production because of code reviews, do they?
Nobody believes in perfectly objectively reporting.
This is more about the rising belief that there is a massive conspiracy by them (the liberals, the Jews, the military industrial complex, the star chamber, take your pick) to systematically distort news in a coordinated way so as to realize their plans for world domination / genocide / fascism / destroying the family (circle one).
I don't think those conspiracies are what are driving this kind of distrust. In my experience, the most common belief on that end is simply that the reporting is meant to keep people too busy bickering over meaningless issues (in the sense that the bickering itself won't accomplish anything of substance) to prevent them from actually organizing and acting against real problems which would be inconvenient for those who benefit from those problems.
Eg keeping people bickering about racial issues instead of agreeing on the aspects of policing which need reform, or from focusing on class issues.
The tens of thousands of reporters, mostly young liberal arts majors?
It’s the “meant to” that makes it a conspiracy theory. Tell me that news is unhealthy, or that each individual actor has self interest in promoting some agenda, and I think it’s an interesting topic.
But as soon as there is a person or group out there secretly “meaning for” some result from the actions of tens of thousands of people, that’s by definition a conspiracy.
I think it’s just human nature. We are wired to believe that “there must be some explanation”, and it’s easy to lean into a sentient God or an evil cabal.
IMO the truth, that it’s a runaway uncoordinated emergent behavior with thousands of actors pushing and pulling in different directions for their own reasons, is a lot scarier.
'meant to' by incentive structures and culture in how these companies work, which are set by the 'higher ups' who benefit most from them. For example, a popular anchor (say, Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow) will naturally also be popular and influential within their associated organization. They benefit from pushing a certain perspective, and so they will of course influence the organization to further move in that direction.
While there isn't some hidden moustache twirling mastermind carefully directing all of the media about what to report and how to report it. Practically, I don't think the distinction matters too much because they all share the same incentives and they are individually deliberate in applying those same incentives.
As a broad example, Tucker and Rachel both benefit from appealing to their respective base's political views. They also benefit greatly from the bickering between their bases, thus it suits them to further push that divide (if they actually get issues addressed they have to constantly figure out what people want next to stay relevant). Similar incentives apply to politicians, so they do the same. Both Tucker and Rachel also benefit from being close with the associated politicians, so they tow that line too. The result being that they act in concert without explicitly conspiring with each other to do so.
> But as soon as there is a person or group out there secretly “meaning for” some result from the actions of tens of thousands of people, that’s by definition a conspiracy.
There are many interest groups pushing to influence mass behavior in many kinds of ways. Some do so transparently, others less so.
We've overloaded "conspiracy" to mean at least two different things: the traditional definition of secret plotting to do bad things and a more modern derogatory connotation involving far-fetched conspiracies like politicians being lizard people.
Something can be a conspiracy and also be true and it is reasonable to investigate the extent to which reporting is influenced by different interests.
These kind of broad questions about "the media" seem to be almost useless. It's like asking a Philadelphia Eagles fans if they have a positive opinion of most football teams.
I personally am quite certain that some news orgs are deliberately misleading and pushing agendas. Some are doing absolutely heroic work investigating and reporting. And there's a huge spectrum in between. Are "most" being dishonest? Idk how to even measure what "most" means.
There's news podcast I listen to ("Raport about state of the world" - Polish only sadly), and host always tries to advocate for both sides when asking questions and often there are guests from the both sides, that present their point in calm, collected manner.
Then there's our state TV, which will tell you that EU is devil, opposition is devil, basically everyone is devil apart from ruling party, which is presented as (quote) "National Champions".
We must expect and educate next generation to expect truth-seeking in journalism, because otherwise we have no future.
I don't speak Polish so I may be making unwarranted assumptions here, but "showing both sides" isn't always so great either. It's better than the opinionated state news you describe, but "both sides" doing their little talk is the exact reason climate change deniers have so much fuel.
Sometimes, something just isn't true and the other side doesn't get equal attention to defend their points. You can calmy explain how lizard people inside hollow earth run Hollywood to turn our children into gay frogs, but these people shouldn't get any air time, not even to be made fun of.
Thing is the lizard-people theory is ridiculous at its face and it could be argued that giving someone like that airtime would harm the lizard-people conspiracy. It's the more mainstream (but still niche) beliefs that are vulnerable in this one-on-one environment, like a debate on man's effect on climate change. There's a pretty general consensus that we are contributing to the change of our planet's climate, but hosting a "both sides" debate on something like this makes it seem like it's an open question. And a motivated bad actor who wanted to shift the needle has many tools at their disposal that an honest person doesn't - lying, misleading, misrepresenting research, or simply pulling the "just asking questions, do your own research!" line.
Sorry to be clear we're both in agreement, I just could see a both-sides-er chiming in that actually a debate on lizard-people would be a bloodbath and therefore everything actually should be presented this way, and wanted to added another issue.
Additionally for another real-world example with more immediate consequences we can look at the whole "vaccines causing autism" issue - something that was completely fabricated by a now-disgraced ex-doctor called Andrew Wakefield, but which gained traction due to being presented to the public as if we just don't know for sure (when we did, and his "research" was utterly eviscerated). Wakefield was basically laughed out of the medical profession, but due to the legwork the media did he's managed to establish himself over in the USA and his work effectively kick-started the modern-day anti-vaxx movement.
> and it could be argued that giving someone like that airtime would harm the lizard-people conspiracy. It's the more mainstream (but still niche) be
Not necessarily. The thing about arguments is that it’s like businesses. What determines your success isn’t if you have the best product. It’s that you have the best business. Marketing , connections , etc. The best product , and likewise the best argument, doesn’t necessarily win on merit alone. You just have to make it look good enough for it to be viable , even if the idea isn’t viable at all.
I’m not saying that I could get on TV and argue about lizard-people. But there certainly is someone who could and that’s enough.
Yeah it's a good point, if you have someone totally inexperienced up against someone who knows the tricks (some of which I mentioned) you could see some odd results. I feel like there are a few issues which are gonna be a really tough sell, and the whole "the royal family are lizards" is one of them. David Icke has spent much of the last couple of decades on that and is still regarded as a kook.
That's right and you need some sort of boundary of what are you willing to discuss. Eg. for the guy I mentioned it's very clearly justifying Russian invasion, but then he's open about it.
Of course it sometimes creates other problems. In the end I think root problem is almost complete lack of responsibility for lying to wide public(not even legal responsibility, but just social). As climate change denier you're free to repeat the same disproven BS over and over, without no evidence and nothing happens.
Interpreting "objective" to mean "fairly representing both sides" is a large part of what got american media so fucked in the first place.
If one side says cook at home as much as possible for your family to be healthy, and the other side says go down to the ditch and drink the pond scum, what are you doing by representing both sides there? One of the important duties of journalism is making editorial decisions that drinking pond scum isn't a balanced opposition to cooking dinner.
Journalist practice for decades has been going incredibly far out of its way to find an alternative "side" for any perspective that's presented. They then do a lot of work for them making it seem as reasonable and mainstream as possible.
This is exactly how you get fringe reactionary political views elevated to the level of national concern.
Beware "people on the ground". They are a terrible source of fact checked verifiable info.
Personal opinion is not news. It's merely one person's unfiltered view of the world. And because it's uncurated by a trustworthy filter, it's impossible to know whether it's worth your attention, much less serious consideration.
The same strategy holds: one never looks at a single data point as "truth".
Once again, even in a Reddit thread, the goal is to triangulate. This may include, for example, seeking out info in other sub-Reddits (moderator bias), seeking more niche sub-Reddits, etc.
I like google news because I can see both right and left takes on stories, and which stories are only covered by one side. It also has international coverage, which is nice for instance where Israeli media had by far the most accurate reporting on the nature of Covid-19.
I use media to find out what America believes, and where it is headed. Your list of sources is going to leave you surprised fairly often. My goal is to not be surprised.
Where two liars are speaking, you cannot split the difference and synthesize truth. I also like to check with various sources with differing agendas. However, I view this as a way to stay abreast of the the various agendas.
Just because it's impossible to be 100% objective all the time doesn't mean it's impossible to be somewhat objective with the goal of being as objective as possible. The alternative is just go full ideological, and then you no longer care about the truth, only pushing a narrative to confirm the biases of your paying customers. Or sensationalist just to drive clicks and views.
I mean, talk about delusions --believing your lies so much you don't believe you're lying or believing it's necessary because people are too stupid to figure things out for themselves.
They want to be able to set agendas but also want to be known as authoritative and uhhh unbiased. Both cannot be true simultaneously. Cry me a river!
Optimistic news - elevated degree of skepticism of any 'produced information' is fully justified, seeing as news organisations are driven certainly by commercial agenda, and frequently also by political agenda which they are - as a rule - far from being transparent with. We need citizen and independent journalism, and better yet, trust in our own direct lived experience, to balance out of 'information diet'
My lived experience is I sit safely in my suburban home with my children, comfortably collecting a salary to argue points of planning for software development. I work from home and very rarely leave the house. I am unwilling to go down to the local protests or whatever to “see what’s up” because I’m essentially willing to accept zero risk to my person while my children are growing up.
I need accurate news to know what’s going on in the wider world because my day to day is so insular, and I’d hazard I’m not an anomaly here. It’s annoying because I feel like half of my friends are crazy but I’m not sure which half it is. My wife is glitching out and believes all sorts of crazy stuff but heck, maybe it’s true. Maybe the world has always been like this, and I’m just old enough to realize that the news media is bullshit. But it just felt like the older journalists that have retired now were less desperately and smugly trying to convince me that they’re correct than the ones working now. I wish I felt like I could trust literally anyone beyond my immediate family.
I am not weighing in on the article or any commentary with this statement…You don’t sound healthy and might want to do a little self evaluation. Never leaving the house, not trusting anyone, thinking your wife is glitching, all sound outside the norm, even if what you are observing is true. You should still be able to do basic risk analysis and leave the house.
Maybe I was being a little dramatic and hyperbolic for effect.
I don’t mean I never leave the house. I go to concerts and the zoo with my kids and whatever. I went on vacation across the country the other day. None of those things are helping me discern what’s going on in the world, unless “Disneyworld is a fun place” and “the ocean is a nice place to laze around” count as my lived experience.
This is pretty much the end result of capitalism - the atomization of the individual and alienation of workers from one another. All interactions and interpersonal relations are now mediated through our relations to the means of production and the capital markets.
There at least used to be a remaining vestigial substructure to society in things like churches and civic organizations. As we've slowly grown into a society of unbelievers, the churches have splintered into myriad heterodox sects, and we've supplanted much civic engagement with work and internet use, this substructure is failing.
Chapo Trap House touches on this frequently, but their recent episode called Arrival (ep 706) had a pretty poignant example. It was commentary on a series of NY Post and Times articles about the supposed drastic increase in crime, and how people, especially those who live in the burbs, are starkly disconnected from the reality of the world. And specifically because of some of these factors I outlined above.
I have slowly formed a trusted circle of programmers on Discord of various political stripes that are able to keep each other somewhat in check and connected to reality WRT the happenings in the world over the past 7 years or so. It has definitely helped keep me grounded in the past few years of covid and suburbia driven isolation and a drastic increase in media consumption.
Yes, there are no liars in socialism. And there certainly isn't any state boots on your neck. Everyone gets a nice car, good friends, and honest state propaganda, comrade.
Capitalism and socialism are extremely broad descriptors of essentially who owns the means of production and to whom does surplus value flow. Neither necessitates a state nor do they prescribe anarchy.
The problem is that people look at some (relatively rare) media lie, decide mainstream media aren't trustworthy and go to "alternative" media that lie all the time.
I realized that a lot of MSM was grox turds when they spent two full weeks of nonstop coverage on covefe and whether it was some sort of secret Nazi dog whistle. If anyone can defend why we needed to spend 2 weeks on covefe though I'm all ears.
A lot of people who come to the conclusion that news is 'fake' have a gateway moment. Mine is from 25 years ago and something rather silly. In this particular case a typo. What we see out of the email dumps on twitter should scare many this is the case. They were having twitter 'take care of it'. To pretend they are not doing this to our media and other web sources would be a bit of a stretch to say the least. Our media is manipulated. Seeing good sources amongst the sea of bad ones is a tough ask.
I'm not sure anyone has ever suggested that Twitter (in general) is a reliable source of information, so I'm not sure why you bring it up. Apart form that, perhaps I am misunderstanding, but you seem to be saying that you decided not to trust the news because you saw a typo in a news story 25 years ago. I'm doing my best to be charitable here, but how can that possibly make any sense?
It is the 'fake item' that leads you to other fake items. You find the patterns and see the uncharitable takes. You see the mockingbird style reporting. It is the gateway moment I was pointing out. You start with something small and it grows. You can not un-see it. A gateway moment for them was a typo. Mine was a repeated story over and over as I traveled between cities and timezones but presented as if that particular news org had wrote it all up by themselves. When it was just mad-lib style fill in the blank.
I bring up twitter and did not claim it was 'authoritative' but to show that behind the scenes our political machine is shaping the narrative. Spiking stories and promoting others. The people who run those orgs are doing it gladly. To pretend the same thing that happened at twitter is not happening at NBC/CNN/FOX/NYT/etc would be a bold claim. Like you point out twitter is not that valuable but they made a point of it to do it. Proper suppression of people and censorship and narrative shaping. The very same people who used to say 'the internet see censorship as damage and routes around it' are the very ones building a censorship news controlling apparatus. Then gaslighting us with 'how dare you question them they are doing it for our safety!'
News is very unreliable in most forms. You can push particular opinions very easily. It is not that hard to do. Our news is basically gossip and talk shows. With news as the thin premise that they are doing.
You cannot have politicians and media telling people day in and day out that people who don't look like you or believe like you are the enemy and not have people try and hurt their "enemy". You can't.
IDK I've watched this video looking for a "lunge" a hand full of times and it seems like a deliberate lie. An honest headline would probably center around a man getting his face grabbed, but that's not at all how it was reported.
Rare to be able to factcheck an article without leaving the page and disprove it from its own content, but the lies are not rare.
Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.
I’ve worked in a newsroom. The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity.
Yes, Rupert Murdoch, etc. But it’s all emergent behavior. There is no master plan. These organizations are not well run enough to deliberately get stories out in time, let alone conspire to mislead.
This is mostly due to local news stations being lazy and regurgitating copy without doing any work on their own. The way news works involves stories and information being piped from party to party. Much of it comes from the AP or major national news bodies. Having seen how the sausage is made for these small local outfits, they are often run on a low budget with limited staff, old equipment and little bandwidth for their own editorial work outside of specific local news. Anything larger is likely going to be a copy paste job. The same is true for the weatherman. He's mostly just reading what the weather service puts out.
Plus aren't a ton of local news stations owned by Sinclair? MBA Bean Counting 101 would suggest that if you owned 200 news channels across the country that the first thing you'd do is look for stories that are relevant across all (or multiple) channels then pay 1 person to write it once. Rather than paying 200 people to write the story 200 times.
You'd also likely want to implement standards around language use that would create a consistent product with broad appeal, limit an editor's ability to go off the rails and do something that would harm the brand image, and that limits legal liability.
The problem there is consolidated ownership of local television. Sinclair and Nexstar own the majority of TV stations in this country that aren't owned and operated (O&O) by the networks themselves. Actual local television ownership is dwindling, and those stations lose network affiliation, because the networks would rather work with large station groups to get more money in retransmission fees (as stations getting paid more money by operators means that the networks can demand more money from all affiliates).
No it’s not due to laziness. Most local news is now owned by conglomerates or hedge funds that are “streamlining” them, removing their journalists and circulating non-local stories from other sources they own. The vast majority of “local” news - print or television, has been bought up. Sinclair, digital first media, Gannett, Tribune, etc. all own vast swaths of the “local” news media landscape.
The scary part is that they don't conspire to mislead. They actually believe their own bullshit. It's enforced ideological conformity in hiring and groupthink. If they were organized Machiavellian propagandists, I could at least respect the skills.
It doesn’t require coordination any more than a flock of birds requires some “master bird” to tell it which way to turn. When all your friends are journalists, and all your Twitter friends are journalists, and you have to think about what your journalist friends will think about what you’ve written if you want to stay gainfully employed, or when you’re looking for a job in a few years, no dictatorial Illuminati is required.
Complete red herring. The question as asked does not require a conspiracy. It doesn't even require all news organizations to be pulling in the same direction.
Conspire, no, but the emergent behavior is like stochastic terrorism; if everyone in the chain of production places their finger slightly on the same side of the scale, you can very easily end up with a very misleading result. You can produce misleading news by who you don't cover as much as who you do.
A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.
> A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.
That is a demand from a trans advocacy group. They don't want criticism of the movement they are promoting because it brings up uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's rights, and the medical abuse of children. Rather than addressing these questions, they attempt to shut down any coverage. Much of social media has been censored this way already, and they are attempting complete ideological capture of traditional media too.
> uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's rights
The only right alleged is a right to exclude trans women, and consequentially a right to screen all women suspected of being trans.
> and the medical abuse of children
The children in question want to transition, and their parents or the state want to prevent them; defining this as "abuse" without actually listening to the allegedly abused is the problem.
That is of course just your opinion, and reflects only one side of the issue. It would be a very biased journalism if only this and closely similar viewpoints were to be promoted.
Which is basically what the NYT said in their response:
"We received the letter from GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD sees our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and The Times's journalistic mission are different.
"As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
"The very news stories criticized by GLAAD in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society - to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we're proud of it."
Children also want to only eat chocolate coco puffs, so it gets complicated (parenting is hard) how to care for them when clearly their strongly held beliefs should be questioned.
Oh, I agree it's all (or at least mostly) emergent behavior. I also believe that a lot of reporters are misleading me, either because they have their own agenda (which often but not always lines up with the overall bias of the organization they work for) or because they're just overworked and it's easier to parrot someone's simplified narrative then do the real research.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy, its just natural for big news corporations to promote news that benefits big news corporations, and to stay quiet about the news that doesn't benefit them
That’s the old Chomsky quote from Manufacturing Consent: "[the mass communication media of the U.S.] are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion".
There is no need for a conspiracy for the media to be misleading.
I feel like newsrooms mislead, but more of in a Manufacturing Consent/Hate Inc sense. It feels obvious after reading articles about stuff I know about, and has lead me over time to generally not trust the media as an institution. Organized conspiracies make no sense, but perverse institutional incentives at scale has a lot of explaining power.
Sure, it's emergent behaviour, and it emerges from having an intuitive feel for how to avoid upsetting the wrong people. If you lack finely tuned antennas on such matters, you don't get ahead.
Most of all, you understand the risk of breaking rank. If you look at a story, and think "hey, why aren't others covering this story? Why aren't more people upset at this? Shouldn't this be a big deal?", you either learn to think "No. Everything is all right in the media world." or you have a bad, bad time.
I was in 2 tv interviews so far and both of them have released footage that totally and entirelly distorted the message to an infuriating degree. This was in a top tier European country, once state tv , once a major private station.
I have problem organizing 2 intelligent people to place dirty laundry in the laundry box or to do their homework on time or to place dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
But there's a mastermind somewhere who can organize something so complex, with so many variables where each depends on a human being of varying intellect and skillset and the plan is so intricate that out of 100,000 possibilities - all of them play in the hand of the mastermind. And the plan includes the two from above, who can barely get a cup of water when they're thirsty!
If such mastermind existed, I wouldn't even be angry for being manipulated - in fact, I would like to continue to be manipulated because if such a person (or group) existed - please, continue! Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.
Why wouldn't I imagine first that there exists a mastermind capable of weaving order out of chaos using divine ability granted to them by the Excalibur Fairy after praying at the Stonehenge?
The story you're portraying doesn't need any kind of imagination, Hanlon's razor works perfectly well there and doesn't require any kind of special ability granted by smoking weed while doing nothing besides looking for conspiracies.
> Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.
Religion shaping culture, and thus the decisions of countless people to go out and actually kill each other is a thing. Divine? I think so.
Culture is programming for the masses. Is culture a conspiracy? Our intel agencies have caught onto this, color revolutions are a conspiracies, but the victims of such revolutions would hardly consider their own deeply held beliefs and subsequent actions to be conspiratorial.
Culture shaping happens now at an insane speed with everything from the search engines we use, to the radio, tv, music, advertisements, and so on. If you can pull those levers, people will act accordingly. Pfizer has advertising dollars everywhere. Is it a conspiracy that people will literally stake their professions on defending Pfizer vaccines?
There’s misleading snd there’s misleading. I’ve never worked in a newsroom. However it seem natural to me that changed incentivises (i.e. clicks / engagement) would change how content is written.
I’m fairly distrusting in even my preferred primary news source, not because I suspect that there’s some grand conspiracy, but because the system under which modern journalists (seem to) operate encourages very subtly but very consistently stretching the truth. The KPIs are the puppet master.
This line assumes that each person exists in the world as an ideal individual, subject only to their own independent logic, biases, and whims. In reality, we all have concrete material interests which are determined by concrete economic relations. Our logic, biases, and whims—the very nature of our consciousness—all flow from our material and social reality.
These material interests are not entirely individual and distinct; they fall within broad strata based on the overall structure of the economy (e.g., the class of people with the capacity to own a major media organization and the class of people who make a living by serving them). Thus, there is no need for a conscious conspiracy coordinating every aspect of the media machine since the basic character of the consciousness of those involved flows from a more fundamental material reality. At the same time, there’s no reason one can’t become consciously aware of the stratum of shared material interests that one exists within, and I think it would be foolish to assume that the people at the highest levels of power and wealth in the world have failed to do so.
It doesn't require central coordination, a distributed norm enforcement network causing self-censorship is fine. In this case, it's done by Twitter: all journalists are on Twitter, all journalists are petrified of saying something that will upset the other journalists on Twitter, and so they all self-censor to not do that. No master plan needed.
America believes in in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities because they've done those themselves multiple times.
- nuclear bombs
- the man on the moon
- darpa's internet
Superhuman coordination and execution abilities along with extreme secrecy as needed.
> Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.
But they are not well co-ordinated or executed, that is the reason many people are catching on to the manufactured narratives.
This isn't done by some Matrix-type entity or does it need to be run by something as perfect as an AGI. All it takes is to have the top editors deciding which stories to run and with what narrative.
Of course this break down as the rank and file journalist are the ones in charge of writing the stories and presenting them.
And the people at the top of this aren't by any matter a cohesive group or a big brother type entity rather just people with money and power doing what they think will help them keep money and power.
I think the main argument here is not that they're conspiring to mislead. It's that they wouldn't be mainstream media if they weren't willing to publish propaganda.
Not directly related, but I've come to really appreciate the idea that a drug cartel is the ultimate example of a conspiracy, because not does it fit the definition really well, but it demonstrates what one actually looks like. There's no shadowy boardroom of hooded figures meeting in some underground bunker, but rather playboys loudly broadcasting their wealth & power with only the barest minimum of deniability maintained at the legal perspective, with the general populace fully aware but powerless to really do anything about it. And yet, it still is a multi-national network of coordinated logistics and execution for multiple tons of product that both the official powers & general public would really prefer to not to be there.
Not in the US, but I usually see a lot of people saying don't trust the news but it's also not as if they are doing any rational thinking about it. And a lot of the times is just because news are not validating their own beliefs so I think it's even worse than just having bad news.
I don't think it takes much rational thought to realize that the news are incompetent at worst and intentionally misleading at best.
Even without validating beliefs, there are so many cases of news organizations publishing incorrect or misleading information in a rush to cover a story, only to then issue a silent correction weeks later when the damage has been done.
This weakens trust in two ways, first is just people who pay enough attention to notice the correction and gradually lose trust as they see how often that happens. The other is the more damaging, more common way, where someone has read the incorrect/misleading article and internalized the information only to find out much later that the information they internalized was incorrect (without ever seeing the original correction).
One example that comes to mind is regarding the supposed sudden Starlink outages in Ukraine back in October around when Musk was tweeting dumb stuff about appeasing Russia. CNN was quick to report the outage implying that it was unexpected by Ukraine and they were shutdown to blackmail the West into paying. This article was all over the news.
Then weeks later they put out an article stating that it was just 1300 terminals which were being provided by the UK which were shut-off due to the UK deciding not to pay for the subscription anymore, with Ukraine having been fully aware and having swapped them out beforehand with the other ~18000 still operating terminals. But this one got nowhere near the same traction and was still misleadingly headlined.
Data set of one, but the people I met claiming they don't trust the news, all take their news from youtube and random taxi drivers. This doesn't say anything about the news outlets, just about those people and their peculiar ways to "think for themselves".
It might be accurate, but that's not the priority.
Think about it: broadcasting information costs something. Nobody is going to pay that cost unless they're getting a return for it. Nobody is going out of their way to provide you with information out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it so that you buy what they're selling (e.g. pharmaceuticals, gold) or vote for their party, etc.
A lot of times that information will be technically not wrong, but that's not the goal.
I think there's a difference between not trusting the news, as in, thinking what they're saying is lies and there's actually a great conspiracy that we can work out, and not trusting the news, as in, thinking that the information that gets conveyed via news outlets is selected and presented to push public opinion in a certain self-interested direction.
I think for the most part, people who take their news from youtube and random taxi drivers fall into the former category, whereas people who vote against the party/candidate recommended (overtly or covertly) by their local paper fall into the latter category. It's quite possible that a lot of people in the latter category would say they don't trust the news as part of a national opinion survey, but they wouldn't ever outright say to a stranger "oh, don't read the stuff printed in the City Courier, it's all lies". Particularly as the news is more and more national, but the political parties continue to attract around 50% of the vote each, I'd generally expect about 50% of the population to have at least this much distrust for at least some of the news.
Probably a selection bias at play. The people you meet who don't trust the news for reasonable reasons aren't going to come out and state it that simply because they don't want to be associated with the people who claim they don't trust the news because the have preconceived notions which they trust any source for (even if random taxi driver) and distrust any source against (even in peer reviewed research). They likely even purposefully consume the news, realizing that even as an imperfect information source it is still an information source worth the trade off between extent of imperfect and ease to consume.
You’ll quickly learn not to trust the news. Not because it’s wrong – it’s pretty factual for the most part – but because it keeps trying to make you care about the wrong things. Whipping up an emotional reaction to matters that don’t affect you. Ignoring large elephants in small rooms. Talking juuuust slightly past the core issue hoping you won’t notice.
Much of news, especially daily news, is like discussing the color of a bike shed instead of the core design problems of the reactor it sits behind. Because talking about the big stuff isn’t sexy and doesn’t get the clicks.
And even when you do find a source of boring news, you’ll find that most of it affects your life not one bit. It’s just entertainment to keep you busy. In the words of a quote I once heard and can never find again: ”The news doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about”.
The quote is from the book Pre-suasion by Robert Caldini, he points out that what we focus on will elevate the importance of whatever is focused on.
This is part of the reason I don't trust the news, because they all are focusing on the same things for a few weeks and then it drops never to be heard from again. Some examples
When Trump met with Kim Jong Un everything in the news media was about North Korea for weeks, it was painted as the vital question of our times that was a clear and present danger to democracy. 3 years into Biden I have barely heard anything about NK.
Another exmaple is oil prices, does anyone else remember during the Bush years how the oil prices dominated everything in the news and the Middle East was the most important region in the world, to the point that we supposedly went to war in Iraq over oil? Yet when it was hitting $5-6 a barrel I wasn't hearing anything about it. Or how many of us have heard anything on Iraq or Syria since ISIS?
You can look for countless examples but even if it isn't outright lying by choosing what to focus on the media already sets an agenda.
I would say its hard to do any rational thinking about come to the conclusion that the 24/h news orgs are meant to inform you.
The easy angle is product placement [1]. Literally fork over a small sum of money and you get the news org to rave about your product without doing any verification.
There's also how a headline is not written by the author so it won't always reflect the contents of the article.
> And a lot of the times is just because news are not validating their own beliefs
IMO, the news orgs have a symbiotic relation with their viewers. The viewers want their viewpoint reinforced and the news org wants views. So the news org put out a biased product so that their viewers will selectively watch that news org. However, this still means that news org aren't actually trying to inform.
My biggest gripe is how often they'll refuse to link to actual legal documents when talking about filed lawsuits and the like and in general I don't find some of their claims in the article to be as supported by the actual filings.
I've had the same experience where it seems people who "don't trust the media" get all their news from some random facebook page or a website along the lines of realtruth-nolies-chronicle.blogspot.com.
In the US we used to feel like the news was more trustworthy even if it didn’t support our views because it maintained some pretense of neutrality and objectivity; however, that broke down as the media became increasingly politicized and sensationalized—a lot of people felt that if the media isn’t going to tell THE truth, they would find a media that would tell THEIR truth (hence your bit about “validating their own beliefs”). So we get fragmented and relative epistemology, in large part because the traditional media decided to be activist even if it meant overtly and obviously lying about things that were trivially verifiable. This is why we need to roll back to a media that aspired toward neutrality and objectivity rather than an a la carte model.
Truth be told, it's high time we (everyone not only Americans at this point) have a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to media -all media including or especially the ones you "trust" or are on "your" side.
This is a good thing. For too long the media was trusted as a believable source of acceptable impartiality and truth.
The audience has matured and no longer believe in the fairy truth teller.
Do you have an example from the last year how CNN deliberately misled? How often does that happen?
My view is that serious news organizations clearly don't deliberately mislead but they have some amount of bias and contain inaccuracies as a result of low-quality reporting.
And I think the perception of "MSM" which is common among the group of people which includes Elon / libertarians / MAGA fanatics / alt-right is obviously wrong and stupid.
There wasn't non-stop coverage: a couple of stories when it came out, and months later some separate coverage of a bill introduced in Congress to require official social media accounts to be archived which was given that nickname.
The official white house spokesperson said it was a secret message:
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated, "I think the President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."[4]
Because admitting to a typo in an unfinished, now deleted tweet was apparently impossible for the man in charge of nuclear weapons. That's worth a bit of coverage.
Best headline: half of Americans don't know that (many) news organizations deliberately mislead them and all of them are watching cable news.
Aka cable news (one site specifically with the largest reach) is constantly engaging in deception and the viewership doesn't know. Other orgs are also engaged in deception but not with the same level of flagrant abuse.
I believe Fox has the biggest viewership, and are in a huge lawsuit right now about how much they misled people about the last presidential election. Is that who you meant?
Can you link to where anybody has redefined vaccine, and also evidence that the vaccinated become more likely to catch it than the unvaccinated? All that sounds like complete baloney.
Here you go - maybe you can reconsider your priors for classifying things as baloney now? Gov and media put a lot of effort into breaking our intuitions about their trustworthiness. Your gut reaction is the one we're trained to have.
CDC changed their definition of vaccine and vaccination:
> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.”
> The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
> Merriam-Webster revised its "vaccine" definition to replace "immunity" with "immune response."
This was done when it became clear that COVID vaccines didn't actually create any kind of immunity and thus weren't technically vaccines. Like always in public health they fixed this problem by manipulating language - now it only has to provoke some sort of response from the body. If that response turns out to be useless or actively harmful, no big deal, it's still a vaccine.
Observe that this change totally alters the meaning of being anti-vaxx. Take a substance that provokes an immune response but it's the wrong sort of response and doesn't work, diverting the immune system into wasting time whilst the virus replicates. It is 100% rational to oppose such a useless product, but by subtly manipulating the definition of vaccine they have now trained people to consider such opposition anti-vaxx and therefore automatically irrational.
Unfortunately this problem is not theoretical, bringing us to negative efficacy. It exists and is visible in many studies, but hidden by governments which use a variety of invalid statistical methodologies to alter the raw data, which is kept secret. Nonetheless, they aren't the only ones that can count cases. It's a big topic but some studies and explanations of what's going on can be found here:
The root biological cause seems to be related to the definitional game playing. The vaccines targeted the 2019 Wuhan spike and the antibodies vaccinated people produce are meant to dock with those specific proteins. But by the time vaccination is rolling out big time we are already at Delta, the virus spike has evolved quite significantly and the antibodies aren't so effective anymore. The body doesn't seem to recognize this quickly enough and spends a lot of time producing the wrong sort of antibodies, thinking it's successfully fighting the invader. Unvaccinated people have immune systems that haven't been trained in any way, so their first real SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the antibody learning process immediately and they develop immunity to the latest version of the virus quicker.
This problem is called imprinting and is visible in the booster and bivalent trials. They didn't help reduce COVID cases and even made them higher - actually 100% of test subjects got COVID when exposed in the bivalent trials, but the vaccin...
You are right, and I did not intend to imply otherwise. I just mean that he bases this particular opinion on unfounded claims, as an example that even he can be led astray.
My biggest gripe with the news, and the journalist class, is they don't report on themselves enough or really at all.
All media critique comes form comedians these days. Which is kind of grim because sometimes things actually matter and aren't just jokes. Yet Journalist A gets to carry water for criminal X, and Journalist B doesn't say anything about it. Then some comedian makes a joke and everyone moves on. The journalists still get to be journalists. The comedian's are making jokes and were all out here seeing no consequences for anything.
The post truth world of journalism isn't fun.
There's checks and balances in government, but the 4th estate just seems to be a wild lands of bullshit and can't check itself. And those same Journalists seem to think this is a good system.
Anyway rant over. I use patreon to support indie media and news I like. But even that has downsides, filter bubbles etc.
Edward Snowden was not, nor as far as I know did he ever claim to be, a journalist. He was at best a whistleblower, although given where he now lives and the citizenship he holds, it's clear that nothing he says or does can be trusted.
Edward Snowden has not been exiled in any non-misleading use of the term. He had many opportunities to return to the United States, and could do so today if his current hosts allowed it.
I would have used legal avenues afforded to whistleblowers.
> Contrary to his public claims that he notified numerous NSA officials about what he believed to be illegal intelligence collection, the Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities - legal, moral, or otherwise - to any oversight officials within the U.S. government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so. Snowden was aware of these avenues. His only attempt to contact an NSA attorney revolved around a question about the legal precedence of executive orders, and his only contact to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Inspector General (IG) revolved around his disagreements with his managers about training and retention of information technology specialists.
> Despite Snowden's later public claim that he would have faced retribution for voicing concerns about intelligence activities, the Committee found that laws and regulations in effect at the time of Snowden's actions afforded him protection. The Committee routinely receives disclosures from IC contractors pursuant to the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (IC WPA). If Snowden had been worried about possible retaliation for voicing concerns about NSA activities, he could have made a disclosure to the Committee. He did not.
Are you kidding me? One of most powerful organizations in the world specialized on handling secrets and you want evidence?
They violate the US constitution and you expect them to hand out evidence?
There has been previous episodes of people (proved and documented) of people attempting to speak up and being silenced, imprisoned etc. Any person threatening to go to the press can be arrested for treason.
And if you look at similar organizations starting from 100 years ago you'll see the same patterns again and again: people who try to speak up are silenced in a way or another.
Right, but that’s not definitionally distinct from an accused murderer who skips the country. No one would use the term “exiled” in that case, even if they believe the accusation unjust.
The only reason to use “exiled” is to imply that Snowden is in Russia (or at least outside of the US) by someone’s choice other than his own. That’s what’s misleading about it.
Being forced to seek asylum in Russia after multiple attempts to go elsewhere that were thwarted by the US (at the risk of major diplomatic incidents) makes you suspicious actually.
I mean it's like people completely forgot that the plane of a head of state was grounded by US allies in Europe because they suspected he might be smuggling Edward Snowden on board.
There are likely a lot of social-media agents in the comments. This, like any hot button political issue brings out lots of shills. Check this comment thread, the amount of downvoted comments speaks volumes about the quality of the community voting and the apparent importance of this site for political agents.
The Internet is full of bots and paid commenters but if you look at statistics on americans being interview regarding Snowden you'll find that a whole lot are buying into the propaganda. It's just an easy thing to do and it's socially acceptable, especially in very nationalistic country.
Compare Seymour Hersh's codswallop on the Skripal affair with the excellent work done by Bellingcat. It's clear that in this case the mainstream media got it mostly right and Hersh made a dog's breakfast of it.
This colours my attitude to his Nordstream "revelations".
> Compare Seymour Hersh's codswallop on the Skripal affair with the excellent work done by Bellingcat.
Done. Bellingcat exists as a parallel construction for US and British intelligence agencies and its only other purpose is to smear non-state controlled journalistic outlets. There was a leaked email from another source that indicates that even internally, US intelligence agencies don't think that Bellingcat is still a good way to spread information because normal people don't believe it any more.
On the other side, Hersh is a journalist with a long track record who wrote a story that is likely true, although we won't know until if and until comes out. Won't stop nationalists from pretending that they know something that they don't. They love a traitor.
You didn't engage with the truth of their respective Skripal affair output at all.
I could have mentioned Hersh's account of the killing of Bin Laden too. At this point his track record is a lot longer than it is good. I can't keep giving him free passes based on good work done almost 50 years ago
It's not unthinkable that they'd move the transponders for a secret mission, no?
Also Hersh's point about the NATO head being an asset in his late teens is definitely feasible, as that was exactly what the Norwegian government did at the time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lund_Report
According to Hersh the bombs were planted during joint naval exercises. That's a time when lots of people would be surprised to see a ship sailing around with its transponders off.
Your link is about illegal electronic surveillance and contains nothing related to recruiting random Norwegian teenagers as agents in the hope that they would become General Secretaries of NATO 40 years later, and thus somehow (?) able to direct clandestine missions of the Norwegian Navy.
Let's turn it around: Is there something Hersh's source told him that was surprising and could be verified independently?
Hersh was extolled for speaking against the establishment. He was smeared for promoting outlandish claims with extremely thin sourcing.
And neither Snowden nor Assange are journalists at all. Snowden stole some docs and Assange runs a wiki. Assange also collaborated with Russian intelligence.
He had a TV show on RT which meant that he was literally on the Kremlin's payroll.
Its sort of interesting to me that in this thread there are a lot of people trying very hard to make indirect connections between Western journalists and Western governments. Here we have a direct connection between a "journalist" and a government and its dismissed as "misinformation".
He has to come from the Journal region of France, otherwise he's just a sparkling whistleblower. /s
From the tone of the article it seems like the author simply detests Julian Assange and Weiss puts forward no standard for who can rightly be called 'a journalist'.
I remember being in an after school philosophy club and we were discussing truth. My teacher popped out of his office, blurted out then returned to his office: “all objectivity moves through subjectivity”.
We never discussed it in the context of new media but it feels quite relevant.
Differing definitions of "mislead" are going to make these comments useless.
> Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.
The headline defines "mislead" as including "leading via truthful reporting" aka "present opinion".
That is a pretty garbage question phrasing. The idea that journalism shouldn't persuade is a bizarre affectation meant to make journalists appear as special professional class, like doctors. When your kid tells you what happened at school, they're a journalist.
I never watch or read any news, I'm just sick of them reporting on things that have full unedited videos without posting the full unedited video. One example is the Floyd case. The full bodycam video was available for almost half of a year before it was pushed in the media during the trial. My extended family exclusively saw it through the professional news filter, which means that those who watch bluer news organizations came to the conclusion that he was murdered, and those who watch redder news organizations came to the conclusion that he overdosed. I'm not saying that everyone should "draw their own conclusions" or "do their own research" whenever there's a new video, but it helps to keep a clearer head when you've seen the evidence and are now waiting for expert analysis, rather than seeing the evidence pushed by a relatable authority figure who's already been instructed to be in a certain mood and is only showing short clips at a time.
I sometimes daydream about a "grey news" organization. No hosts, just text articles with confidence intervals next to claims, all sources listed, no editorials, and all interviews and videos reported on have full transcripts next to the full unedited video.
'grey news' not a bad idea but can still be manipulated by editorial.
Org A is the one you want to promote. Only show clips that make org A look good. Org B is the one you want to demote. Only show clips that make org B look bad. If org A does something bad pad it with 'org B' doing the same thing or never show it. If org B does something good never show it.
What is shown to you, and order matters. The talking heads bits most orgs go for along with it just adds color to it. But it is the same editorial process. You only have X amount of time and Y amount to show X < Y. Something has to go. You can pick sides even with that method.
I've also thought of a structure where there's a news organization that's just openly biased, the prime directive is listed on the front page, and each news article is explicitly edited to explain how the article is presented to support the main mission of the organization. Maybe could link to refutations to keep the appearance of honesty.
This of course falls into a funny counterfactual scenario that I don't have a clever term for. "In the world where this solution is possible to deploy, the problem doesn't exist". If you could staff an entire news organization that was so dedicated to exposing its own bias, it would mean you had a critical mass of adults in society that were actually concerned about the truth, and you could just do news the regular way.
Except that the purpose of the phrase “fake news” was, in fact, to create propaganda itself. It is certainly not better for the president of the country to be the gatekeeper of truth based on what aligns with their political motivations. It is the very definition of propaganda.
It was journos who started the "fake news" meme. I believe they were complaining about completely fabricated clickbait like "Pope endorses Trump". The journos were seemingly unaware that their own perceived fakeness would be much more salient.
He said this (I believe) in the context of the French Revolution. Possibly also as a dig to Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson was most likely advocating for a rounded education that did not rely solely on topical information. He was an ardent supporter of free press and even considered it more important that functioning government.
Lot of people think that all the media are lying to them but some random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or globalists is the one true news source.
> random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or globalists is the one true news source.
Seymour Hersh, Jeff Gerth and the CJR, Wemple at the WaPo, Chris Hedges (ex-NYT Middle East bureau chief, ex-NYT Balkans bureau chief during the Yugoslav wars.)
Not to mention recent nonpersons like Taibbi or Greenwald.
You were required to read and believe what these people wrote in order to get your liberal card in the very recent past, but for having the wrong opinions on rising nationalism they get demoted to "random guys."
I don't see a conspiracy at all. Sentiment analysis of the news shows a strong shift to fear and anger. Those emotions drive engagement. People here didn't like when the Facebook news feed was surfacing these things to the top to drive engagement, but seem to be more OK with human editors doing it.
News organizations write articles and headlines to deliberately mislead people if it means those people will click on those headlines, open up an article, and engage with some ads. Is this so controversial that nearly half of people disagree?
This doesn’t come from a partisanship bias, as nearly all well known media outlets, large and small, engage in that behavior. Their content often still has some value, and we need both hard and soft reporting to make sense of this world. That doesn’t mean all this content is motivated or framed by some selfless desire to shine the brightest light on the darkest places at any cost.
I don’t think automatically equating skepticism with conspiracy theory adoption is fair. I can’t really think of any conspiracy theory I buy into.
I don’t disagree, but the impressive syntactical gymnastics you did to obfuscate the motivation (“get clicks”) and the guilty act (“intentionally mislead”) is telling.
Untangling that sentence gets us the much clearer, and I think more accurate, “new organizations chase clicks without any interest in whether their headlines are true or false”.
Skepticism is not conspiratorial thinking, of course. I meant it in the most narrow way — many people in this thread believe, without evidence, that some group of people is consciously coordinating massive distortions of news to further specific ends.
If you’re interested in media criticism the podcast Citations Needed[0] is very well researched and covers media issues both in modern day and with a historical lens that shows how media has operated and does operate with relevant source quotes.
There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for decades, and how exactly this works. With a mountain of examples. So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through."
Though of course this is the wrong reaction; it has always trickled through. Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols.
Every piece of information is produced with interests for audiences; objectivity is a pink unicorn Santa Claus, something you really shouldn't believe exists after you're, like, 8. But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims, and who are not organizations whose literal existence depends on state licensing as a corporation. Not to say that there is no structural pressure in the independent realm; ideology still exists, years of socialization in the country of origin with their (often folly) "self-evidence" myths exist, the need to eat and make money somehow still exists. But the pressures are much, MUCH fewer than in the case of corporate and state news.
"But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims"
I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.
There's quite a few independent UK journalists who are refugees from editors that started spiking their stories. Jonathan Cook and John Pilger both had to leave The Guardian.
Audience capture is probably the biggest driving point behind media bias, whether the media is commercial or independent. Walter Lippmann put it wall 100 years ago [1]:
> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
I'm not trying to dispute or detract from this point, but I'd also like to add that there is also a simple motivation behind media bias that can't be ignored: people wanting to shape public opinion to their own worldview - be they journalists or people who own the presses.
I'd go even further and say the the motivation isn't specifically to shape public opinion to your view, but simply to present the content in a way that doesn't create cognitive dissonance with your personal view. If you personally don't believe that a piece of information is relevant, then you leave it out. That piece might not be relevant to your own view of the subject, but could be crucial to an opposing view.
> There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways. There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's. His version of the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street. And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which stains the white radiance of eternity.
I recommend giving the book a read at some point if you have the chance (there's also a free audio book up on YouTube). It's a very thought provoking journey through how public opinion gets formed, and the myriad of different elements at play shaping them.
I wonder how much of the advertising market is what drove the strong, pre-WWII, anti-communist push. Prior to the holodomor even authoritarian statist communism hadn't been responsible for anything on the order of what capitalism had done.
Some support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare#Seattle_Genera... "Even before the strike began, the press begged the unions to reconsider. In part they were frightened by some of labor's rhetoric, like the labor newspaper editorial that proclaimed: "We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country ... We are starting on a road that leads – NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!"[6] Daily newspapers saw the general strike as a foreign import: "This is America – not Russia," one said when denouncing the general strike.[7] The non-striking part of Seattle's population imagined the worst and stocked up on food. Hardware stores sold their stock of guns.[8] "
He actually has a fairly interesting segment on the reporting of strikes:
> The underlying trouble appears in the news through certain easily recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike, disorder. From the point of view of the worker, or of the disinterested seeker of justice, the demand, the strike, and the disorder, are merely incidents in a process that for them is richly complicated. But since all the immediate realities lie outside the direct experience both of the reporter, and of the special public by which most newspapers are supported, they have normally to wait for a signal in the shape of an overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter. Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these feelings. But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings. Their feelings may be that their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping goods they need in their work, that there will be shortage and higher prices, that it is all devilishly inconvenient. These, too, are realities. And when they give color to the abstract news that a strike has been called, it is in the nature of things that the workers are at a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to say, of the existing system of industrial relations that news arising from grievances or hopes by workers should almost invariably be uncovered by an overt attack on production.
It brings in contrast the public response to workplace shootings, or even the rarer instances when the entire staff of a workplace quit at once.
We quickly found out about a bunch of the nuance of the Half Moon Bay shootings, and appear to be doing things to make those workplaces and living places better (though of course this doesn't help the larger problem of agricultural labor practices). And I think most readers get a vicarious sense of justice out of mass quitings. But yeah strikes, and unionization in general, make bystanders nervous.
> But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists
If Matt Taibi get Keshloggied it would not amaze me if his former colleagues bury the story or even spin it as a good thing. I don't predict he will actually get killed but ask yourself, would you be surprised if he was or does a part of you half expect it at this point?
He certainly won't be working a corporate gig anytime soon. Where will his income come from in the future? Nevermind what is he going to do to make ends meet, how will he afford going places to interview people and perform research? You can't realistically be a journalist sitting around at home in your underwear (unless you work for the NYT writing provoking social criticisms about something you just watched on Netflix).
And this is a very famous award winning guy with published books to his name from a time when people still used to read and pay for books. What is going to enable more people like this going forward? Seems like a pretty stressful life actually.
The culture war is also a media project of the powerful and journalists who are dedicated to fighting it are serving their interests as much as anyone is. He'll be fine.
Taibbi is making a great living by being a reactionary on podcasts and fringe outlets. Journalists are suckers. He hasn't done "journalism" in forever. Editorialism is where it's at.
Taibbi is publishing a ton on the links between government agencies and Twitter right now, by doing the work of poring through thousands of emails. He's been doing it for months.
His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.
Kinda seems like he’s more doing PR for musk than journalism. He’s posting stories aligning with musk’s interests on musk’s platform using data supplied by musk.
I watched a debate panel with several journalists who were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had full access to everything because an engineer sat in the room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to believe that the database couldn’t have possibly been pre filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the journalist literally claimed that they couldn’t have possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase myocarditis that quickly.
I know we’re in tech and have a closer understanding of technology than experts in other fields but it was kind of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the data they were being shown could be manipulated and I feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their credibility.
He is posting emails and communications that have literally nothing to do with Musk. They are comms between people who used to work at Twitter and politicians. How is that doing PR for Musk? I don't understand.
Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.
You are right though that there is a certain level of trust here in Taibbi's reporting and fact checking.
Musk wants to paint himself as the savior of free speech and pet of that is by casting Twitter 1.0 as some sort of nefarious agents of the government who were trying to control all communication. The Twitter files are trying to reach the same narrative conclusion.
I’ve also read the Twitter files and the stated summaries on the tweets routinely didn’t match the linked evidence, or stretched it to the weakest but still technically possible conclusion.
> Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.
While calling this out as a conspiracy is kinda laughable given the content of the Twitter files, I want to make it more clear that I was appalled by the journalists being certain that the data couldn’t have been manipulated and then giving examples of how it would be impossible that were actually relatively trivial to implement. They also claimed they had access to “all” the data when that was patently not true. They had access to a gate kept version of the data which they could not verify, and I think that’s an important point given that one of the major critiques they have about Twitter 1.0 and the government is a lack of transparency. I also found this suspect when Musk and the journalists involved like Taibbi claimed they were going to show “everything” and instead of a database dump they keep linking excerpts of documents. Maybe they’ve finally done a database dump but after the first 5 or 6 Twitter threads where it was all cherry-picked I stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt
He's publishing it because it is more of the same reactionary crap that he's getting rich off of. The difference between him and an actual journalist is that a journalist would wait until they were done with the investigation to write a story. He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his existence.
I guarantee, if he wasn't getting fluffed by Elon sycophants on Twitter he would back to Covid conspiracy theories or whatever else get the attention of rubes these days.
Reactionary is a term commonly used by communists to described enemies of a revolution, interesting choice of language.
I understand that you feel he is getting rich but do you have knowledge of his personal finances to make this assertion? Or even some sort of a basis for this intuition you can point people towards? Please enlighten me with some napkin math.
Meanwhile, the slacks and emails he posted are certainly real.
> He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his existence.
As opposed to journalists who don't need eyeballs to justify their existence?
Ah, going with the attack on character of the commenter angle and the 'words they choose to use'. Wow, this discussion is definitely not HK worthy. And this is coming from me a low quality kinda shit poster.
How does one make a great living by being a guest on free podcasts? And which fringe outlets are we talking about? Joe Rogan? He has more viewers than CNN.
There is no payoff, except for the duty of the profession.
This is unfortunately the one thing that society seems to be lacking dramatically these days. From policemen that don't rush in to rescue children in danger of being murdered by psychos, to administrators that feel that doctors should get time off to "reflect" on X person getting killed by a cop (cancer doesn't take days off... grandma's back pain doesn't take the day off). Duty is severely lacking across all layers of society.
The tone from the top seems to be encouraging this. Now, "its ok to be soft" instead of "power through, people depend on you"
We need more Taibbis and Intercepts, willing to do their duty.
> it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge
So that makes me wonder how this is getting out. Is it a news organization such as an opposing organization, or outspoken journalists? Is it democratized news reporting via forums and social media?
In news there's journalism and there's reporting. This story is reporting, it doesn't use many adjectives and doesn't have much of a point beyond the statistics represented. It allows people to form their own opinions based on their own experiences around the details of this story.
Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.
Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"
Well let's steelman journalism a bit; journalism provides context.
Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this morning."
Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government is looking to roll back more regulations, which are expected to increase fatality rates by 6%."
>Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%.
See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your premise which proves with any certainty that the increased speed limits are the cause of the change in accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it as part of the basic record of events we call "news", rather than as part of the opinion discourse.
This was even a good faith example. If you were trying to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.
I think you're wrong here. The idea that a news article should be a "basic record of events" is ridiculous. In this toy example, the most we could quibble with is the words "Due to" and those may be appropriate if there is a reasonable amount of evidence referred to somewhere in the article which suggests an association. In fact, I believe in the case of traffic accidents such a link is sufficiently well documented that the casually refer to it isn't a great sin.
I think this idea that we need to somehow strip all news of even the vaguest hint of a perspective is actually pretty condescending to the average news reader, imagining that they are so stupid and credulous that merely seeing a bit of bias is going to immediately warp their brains.
For this to work properly, the journalists would have to be experts in the respective field, or would at the very least have to possess enough of an understanding to make these judgements. But reality has become far too complex for that, plus these articles are being written under severe time constraints. Ultimately, what will happen is the journalist using their personal or the editorial biases of the publication to create a narrative consistent with their world view. Whether or not that narrative has any basis in reality is not really their concern.
The question when becomes whether there is any value in publishing these most likely faulty narratives compared to simply reporting the facts. I would argue that there is actually negative value in the former, because the audience ends up less informed than if they had never consumed that piece of media.
> the journalists would have to be experts in the respective field, or would at the very least have to possess enough of an understanding to make these judgements.
This is why journalists will often attribute cause and effect interpretation of facts to expert sources.
Hmm, I like the thrust of your point, here, and I do think that when people think critically about the news, they aren't "stupid and credulous".
But Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that educated, informed readers readily fall victim to, so it's clear that the media seems to have some kind of privilege of credulity.
I wonder if it's really an effect of people reading media primarily for entertainment - isn't there some old saying about "people who read the Times are less I formed than people who read nothing at all?"
"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents are up 12% since last year when city council rejected the proposed budget increase for more snowplows and ice control to meet the city's growing transportation needs."
"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents overall have jumped 12% since AG John Smith added driving-without-a-license to the city's informal do-not-prosecute list."
In our toy example, all of these could be simultaneously true, and the data given does not support one cause over the other. Note that the "due not" need not be present, the intended implication is still clear. (For bonus points, read these examples again, imagining that overall driving increased by about 12% due to people working from home less.)
Sure, there are a million consistent imaginary stories. My point is that _if_ a journalist has a reasonable sense that the speed limit regulations are related to the article in question or that the reader may want to know about them, then they should mention them. Indeed, all these other imaginary scenarios should also be mentioned if there is a reasonable case they may be involved in the increased rate of accidents.
The idea that the journalist should present only the directly related "bare facts" is so silly that I can't even take the suggestion as coming from a place of good faith.
If, in your own words, there's a million consistent imaginary stories, which one gets the special designation of "reasonable"? If there are multiple possible stories that are all plausible explanations of the same data, then how is picking just your favorite one and reporting it adding value?
That isn't what a reporter should do, though. They should report on the news and related information, not just their favorite narrative. I'm not defending shitty reporting, just pointing out that the "bare facts" approach is ridiculous.
Knowing stuff is hard, reporting on stuff is hard, understanding what is read is hard. The solution to these problems is not, nor could it be, restricting one's attention to the "bare facts." Indeed, these are often quite hard to identify and agree upon. We should expect and cultivate a little sophistication in ourselves and our fellow citizens.
If you were going to take this in bad faith, I'm surprised that you considered "3 people died in car accident this morning" to be reporting. If you wanted to be pedantic about it, stick only to the facts, and avoid speculation/opinion, it'd have to be written like so:
"A person who our reporter spoke with who went by the name of Bob Dylan and claimed to be the coroner of James County, said that three individuals passed away recently, and he said he believes that they died due injuries similar to those involved in car accidents. Our reporter also asked the James County Sherriff's Department to corroborate, and a person who claimed to be the spokesperson for the James County Sherriff's department said that there were three individuals in a car accident last night, and they were taken to the hospital."
Anyways, I wasn't trying to write a rigorous example for each, I assumed that the reader could fill in the detailed. I just aimed to give the gist of what it should look like. You'd talk to experts, cite papers, etc.
In your steelmanned journalist example I think the discerning reader would be saying, "Is the agency themselves saying more fatalities are expected, is it the opposition, etc" The choice to omit is part of the narrative, because if people pick up that you're casually and selectively quoting opposition but making it sound pre-determined and official then they start viewing you as a folk singer.
> Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.
Even your definition of 'reporting' can be (and is) easily abused to play to narratives, by the simple and necessary act of determining what is "newsworthy". Reporters will go by their biases and beliefs on deciding e.g. which homicides are "random" and not worth reporting, vs. which are indicative of systemic issues in society, and so require national attention.
Actually, he did call Fox News fake news at one point, although yes it was due to them running a story about polls that were unflattering to him.
However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.
He was his own anonymous source to news media. Though I don't know whether the Enquirer should count as news media, per se. Given news was not its focus.
> However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.
That doesn't make him, or any other source of information, more trustworthy than the corporate news media.
Nowadays "fake news" is just a derogatory term against the news media in general, but the term used to mean something. If you remember, back to the 2016 election, there were literal fake online newspapers that sprang up and published essentially election clickbait. These sites had news-y sounding names, real-looking content, and were designed to look surface-level like legitimate news sites, until you dug a little deeper and looked around. People started calling these sites out as "fake news" but Trump quickly adopted the term, and nullified it by using it as a simple insult against actual mainstream news sites. But it originally meant "actual phony news sites".
> The term “fake news” became mainstream during the US election campaign, when hundreds of websites that published falsified or heavily biased stories sprung up to capitalise on Facebook advertising revenue.[1]
> Mr Trump and his supporters then adopted the term to describe media coverage critical of the President, especially that of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.
The actual news on Fox News, i.e. not Tucker and the rest of the talk shows, is not fake news, even remotely. Absolutely has a conservative bias, but not to the extent it would qualify as fake news. It's even listed on Wikipedia a reliable source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
There's no way to distinguish between the fake news Fox broadcasts and the non-fake news. It's not like Fox puts a disclaimer up on the screen saying which stories are for entertainment purposes only.
When the shows that draw the most eyeballs and are aired at the times most people are watching news at all, the morning shows and prime time, are almost entirely made up of half-truths and outright lies, I think it's fair to say Fox is an unreliable source.
Fox and Friends and Tucker Carlson are lying to viewers every day.
Fox News is the clearest example of mainstream propaganda that I've ever seen. I take a pass through there periodically just to see what the aren't covering. Which isn't to say places like CNN don't sometimes pull that same stunt, but it's much more prevalent on Fox News -- they'll completely omit even really big stories that aren't what they think their audience wants to see.
Ground News is a great site to help you understand which networks are covering which stories and ignoring others. It's honestly eye opening the number of big stories omitted by the other large non-Fox networks.
Wikipedia reliable sources list is basically implicit whitelist, and there is implicit blacklist, news sources from countries with hundreds of millions of people banned from Wikipedia. All this is contradicting its core content policies. Reliable sources based solely on being Western, such as being located in the Western world, having a Western worldview, being owned by Western entities, or aligning with Western national interests or security policies.
It's not so much that as 'everything he says is a confession'...He's pointing out fake news, because he's one of the biggest sources. He can't be wrong if he's to blame.
Ah, yes. I remember getting the annual morning news paper every April 1st.
Seriously though, within a city, they had morning and evening editions (12 hour lag) hundreds of years ago. For national stories, the lag was more like a week, then dropped to 12 hours when the telegraph was invented. Also, back then, there were orders of magnitude more newspapers (multiple in each big city, and at least one in small towns), so most modern censorship techniques simply would not work. Yeah, Elon Musk would have owned a paper, but (by law) only one, and multiple other wealthy tech people would own papers in the same market.
"Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"
I don't know where you heard that. The media keeps reporting that Russia is losing the war, or may be losing it,* but that it is likely to drag on for a long time. No one that I have heard from since the first weeks of the war has ever said or implied that it was about to end.
* As Russia changes its aims, the definition of "winning" changes. This is a separate way Russia can win: declare victory with whatever territory you have seized and call for peace negotiations.
This is hilarious because all reputable media won't even report on most of the progress because they can't independently verify the information given out by the parties at war. Thus we get this big lack of actual news about the war which can't be filled by people on Twitter and Reddit translating from Telegram and random videos.
Whoa now, remember we’re not just talking a mountain of examples, but “literal” mountains of sociological studies. You should try asking for longitude, latitude and elevation!
How most of the mainstream media, in the US at least, nauseatingly wrote about the WMD theory which was the main stated reason for the US to go to 2003 Iraq war. That region is still reeling with consequences of that war and not to speak about trillions of $$ spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and nuclear contamination and so on and on.
It was the media's fault but not Bush and Cheney's? I don't remember where I got the information that led me to join the largest antiwar protests in history in 2003 but a lot of us knew Bush was lying because of the media.
I didn't say it was media's fault alone, but their share of responsibility is a large one. How else would the Bush administration have gained the support of the public? By transmitting their falsehoods through popular private media corporations such as CNN. And the media were all too happy to lap up the narrative fed by the administration without bothering to investigate deeper.
Not investigating deeper is different than outright lying for propaganda. "The President Said X" is newsworthy though maybe lazy reporting. If X is a lie it's on the president.
It's really hard to blame the media for the Iraq war, the Bush II administration wanted to go to war, particularly in Iraq and were happy to beat the drums as loud as necessary to get the public's backing. Who can ever forget Powell lying in front of Congress, but that what was necessary to seal the deal and the media was more than happy to report what they learned.
> There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for __millennia__, and how exactly this works.
Fixed it. There are historical evidence that this has gone on in some form or fashion in ancient empires (e.g., Roman, Egyptian, Chinese), be it written or the town crier.
There have always been people who knew this was going on, spoke up, but were considered crackpot, conspiracy theorist, or simply beheaded.
Saying "this has always happened" loses what's interesting and relevant about the mass media tranformations that began around the early 20th century and now dominant our media culture (see Manufacturing Consent).
I think it's interesting that this is a highly upvoted comment considering it leans on sociology as an academic study as a source of truth for its claim. The social sciences have long been harangued by HN for not being "real science", but I've seen exceptionally little pushback to the claim above. Why is this?
[To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of what forces influence media that influence people. I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.]
At least to me, it seems people push back on sociology claims that focus on individuals or member groups, not so much on organizations like companies. Part of this I believe is due to the personal nature. Part is because it can be seen as stereotyping, or has poor study design.
This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.
> I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.
HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either.
The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.
Here's the thing though, the top level comment isn't citing any sources, isn't giving studies that can be criticized on its merits to determine if it's a correct conclusion, particularly if you yourself have explicitly said "Most conclusions may be wrong". There's no reason for you to upvote this if you believe the above poster is most likely relying on a false authority.
Nothing he says relies on sociology. It's just a random interesting anecdote from his background. He's not appealing to the studies or any authority, but simply rejoicing in the fact that society at large is coming around to a conclusion that's been somewhat evident for him to years. And society's not coming around because of some study or whatever, but because of lived experience.
First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements.
Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."
This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors might be way off, but I think those two things are quite different. Lying is making statements that the speaker knows are false.
An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court.
To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.
Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.
I think your "quite different" distinction is incorrect. The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one. There's a gradation from plain lying your face off, through mixing in a few truths with your lies, through lying by omission, through presenting true facts in such a way as to make the reader believe falsehoods.
The tactic most-used by newspapers is lying by omission. Newspapers routinely "spike" stories that aren't aligned with the paper's political agenda. You can search the paper's output, and you won't find a direct lie; but a parallel search for truth will also fail. Truth is to be found in the gaps.
"The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one."
There is if you look up definitions. Lying involves falsehoods. You can mislead someone using selective truths without using falsehoods. That's why the article etc was about misleading, persuading, etc and not mentioning lying (aside from the commentor I originally responded to).
Yep. Lies are not the same thing as being dishonest.
You can use lies to be misleading, or manipulative, or dishonest but you don't need to, and it's usually more effective if you don't (or at least don't entirely).
If someone can't see how a person could be misleading without lying they're going to fall for a lot of bullshit.
Then what distinction was being made? Knowingly providing an incomplete picture, focusing on one side, or selective editing are intended to misled. They are not "outright lies" nor "counter-factual".
The way I classify them is lying is "outright lies". "intend to mislead" is manipulation. The nuance between manipulation and lies is that manipulation usually distorts a collection of facts through rearrangement, omission or massaging those things to create a view that is not factual, which I think may also relate it as implicit lies. Lying is stating explicitly counter-factual things. I prefer the distinction of using manipulation over implicit lies as I think it communicates the narrower focused maliciousness of it, where lies don't always have that same level of "premeditation", for lack of a better term.
I am interacting in good faith. A lie requires a falsehood. There is a difference between a lie and deception - they aren't perfect synonymous. The example from your cited definition is really a poor one since it relies on a saying more than a factual use of the word, and the example itself does imply an actual falsehood in that someone lied during the marriage vows or during the marriage.
But wait, let's look at the instant replay. You claim that lying and deception at the same. So why would you get involved in this conversation to say that? According to you, their use is interchangeable and makes no difference.
If you have something to add to the actual conversation and not about definitions, then please do.
There is concept called a "lie of omission". I did not invent that term - it's older than you and i combined. Intentionally witholding information to deceive a person has long been considered a lie.
There is a difference between telling a lie and being mistaken, no? If you are learning something and give the wrong answer on a quiz, are you lying? Both of those are falsehoods that aren't intending to deceive, and most people wouldn't count those as lies.
There's a couple other concepts I suggest you look into: adjective and category. "Bird of prey" is still a bird no? "Person of interest" is still a person, no? "Box of chocolates", "bag of food", "bottle of whiskey", and "bowl of soup" are all containers no?
Again, anything to add to the actual discussion? Aren't you the one that was complaining about semantics?
Lie of omission is an atypical use and is inconsistent with the definition that I posted earlier. You can cherry pick your definition while ignoring the one I posted and use typical examples that don't correleate to this atypical use that changes the very definition.
If I withhold information from you it may be misleading, but it quite simply is not a lie. Now please stop trolling and actually contribute to the conversation about distrust of the media instead of focusing on the very thing you complained about - semantics.
It turns out this is a very old discussion. There is a concept called a "lie of omission". Here's a wikipedia page about the entire concept of lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
A question for you: if you make a mistake or misunderstand something then share it, are you a liar?
I don't mean like your current actions - the part where you are pretending that you have never encountered the notion of lying like this is clearly itself some sort of lie. I mean like say you apply some math rule incorrectly on a test. Should you be kicked out for lying to the teacher?
To lie is to tell a deliberate falsehood - to say something you know to be untrue. Sometimes this is taken to be acceptable - to tell a "white lie", e.g. in response to, "Does this dress make me look fat?"
Saying something incorrect, but which you believe to be true, is no lie.
This comment is well intended, I'm sure. I always respect anyone trying to 'stick to the facts.' Unfortunately, it's just not history. Easy to google history. You are simply not familiar with how this all works.
The most valuable asset of a new organization is trust, and thus they are often bought as propaganda platforms.
But propaganda is tricky, you need people to keep paying attention which means the most overt spin is to be avoided. Done well you shift the narrative over decades not just swap positions on day one. Fox News is the most well known US example, but you don’t want to just preach to people who already believe your message.
Thus you want to control the widest possible selection of media.
The Fox horizontal integration is brilliant. They pull in people with sports and other complimentary content and cross-sell the profitable propaganda.
The New York Post is a great example. It was the sports and bookie newspaper - they’d publish Vegas odds and have tabloid news. They slowly transformed into a giant editorial paper and funnel into the broader Fox ecosystem.
They have an effective, free product. I need to pay to read The NY Times, but Fox is free and the sponsors are all low quality high margin stuff. Radio is prostate pills, TV is old people drugs and gold, etc.
Fox calls itself "Fox News". Only when they're pressed and presented with evidence that they're liars will they hide behind "That's okay, this is all just entertainment!" excuses. Their viewers don't think they're watching made up stories for entertainment. They're convinced that Fox/OAN are the only news agencies that tell the truth.
CNN isn't good, but it's not even close to being equivalent. I doubt there's a single news org that doesn't let their bias slip from time to time, but let's not pretend that makes them all the same or that there aren't some much much worse than others.
I’m not a fan of CNN, but they do a better job at distinguishing the difference between news and editorial.
The Fox issue is they conflate the two. I used to watch alot of TV news and the actual news content was pretty good on Fox on national issues, but their affiliates were usually pretty awful.
The news product produced by the networks until circa 1999 were a superior product in every way. Cable outlets have always danced with these issues as a TV channel that says the same thing all day gets boring.
I think there are two interlocking arguments: first, a historical argument: news organizations substanitally misleading the public is basically normal, in most countries and time periods. Second, the structural argument: why exactly should we think that a news organization should be capable of providing the basic facts?
If you consider the decades of scolarship it takes to clarify extremely well doccumented events, like the outbreak of the first world war, it's clear that even with a mountain of evidence, and all the time in the world, the 'basic facts' can be stubornly elusive even with the best of intentions.
The idea that an accurate picture should be able to emerge before 9-o'clock, in a newsroom, in a haze of conflicting reports, seems pretty incredible to me: and historically, that's not what has happened. So 'accurate news' is neither something we should expect, nor something we have a great deal of evidence of.
Do you watch professional wrestling by any chance? They are in essence the same business model. Most people know both are largely fake, but some people actually believe. It’s the entertainment industry. Capital influences everything.
Seems like a cynical take by someone that knows what they watch is largely fake, and they want to apply the same rules to the other side so they feel better about their exclusivity to confirmation bias enabling programming.
No, the underlying business model, get people to watch your product in order to maximize ad sales, is basically the same. The incentives are therefore essentially the same. Money talks.
Personally, I don’t watch anything. I read across a broad array of print sources and prefer to trust specific journalists rather than entire organizations. I try to get most information from primary sources, or to triangulate information from multiple outlets which are preferably maximally uncorrelated. This is much easier than it may sound. And think tanks and academics are often better information sources than entertainment news outlets.
> The incentives are therefore essentially the same. Money talks.
Are you implying the NYT never publishing anything that upsets their readership? Every week #CancelNYT trends because they "platformed" something their left wing audience didn't like.
Even Fox News lost viewers because they dared declare the 2020 election free and fair, and in favor of Biden.
Most western audiences of professional wrestling know its scripted/practiced/"fake". Most western audiences of Fox News think it's all real.
Interesting, I worked in Saudi Arabia for awhile...most of the Africans and Southeast Asian laborers were all 100% convinced that professional wrestling was real. Pro wrestling is HUGE in developing nations.
The difference is that a lot of the old wrestlers and promoters hate Vince macmahon for goingnto court and admitting Pro Wrestling was fake during the steroid trial, but the likes of Tucker Carlson has gone to court and has testified that hes an entertainer and people still believe him.
Saying this is a "spin" seems like an attempt to undermine the comment.
> Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind of wooden interpretation of words and lazy disqualification is what leads someone to the "black and white" spin you're accusing the GP of. This falls in line with the type of _gotcha_ logic that insists: "Well you said x, and x means X regardless of rhetorical device usage." and "OP has expressed sentiment in Y, which leads me to believe he's actually Y and therefore not $CREDIBLE".
The point is, engaging like this deprives the dialogue of nuance, rhetorical freedom and grace. If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
>I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
This is still too extreme. "Lying" requires intentionality and implies maliciousness. It suggests that people who work in media are mostly evil people with the primary goal of misleading you. It both ignores and shows ignorance of how the media industry actually works. It also removes any hope of actually fixing the media industry because the only solution according to this mindset is getting rid of all the lying journalists. It doesn't leave any room to understand or address the incentives that actually got us to our current situation.
One form of obvious lying is the modern headline. Now that clicks drive revenue many story's don't even come close to what the headline suggests. I do think this is maliciousness, they're telling a lie to draw you in to make money off of you.
This is an example of what I'm talking about. Journalist by and large are not in favor of editors slapping misleading headlines on their work. You are ascribing this practice to maliciousness when it is actually a reluctant response to incentives.
Yeah, it does baffle me when audiences that are supposed to tackle complex topics everyday (and complexity in general) have to fallback to black and white explanations in social aspects.
What do you think is the proper response if someone steals of loaf of bread? Would you label them a dishonest irredeemable criminal and throw them in jail for life?
If there was an abundant, inexpensive, legal supply of bread and all the thief had to do was value honesty more than free bread, rather than continuing to steal, across decades, thousands of loafs of bread, yes.
I think it's ok to take the illustration to that extreme, given the postulation that you say someone thinks that you should destroy a person's life over one loaf of bread.
Disagree. "Lying" is objectively deceit, or intending to deceive. It can be, and often is, malicious, but to ascribe all lying as malicious is a step too far.
I lie to my children when I say that the TV needs to recharge after their morning shows. A way to divert their attention elsewhere, but not out of malice.
It is pretty funny to see this reply from you. You are guilty here of the exact thing you were criticizing in your last comment. It is "Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what [I'm] saying".
I never described "all lying as malicious". I said it "implies maliciousness" and you said it "often is, malicious". I don't see a disagreement here.
I think the tension we're walking here is to keep one hand grounded in the fact that words can have a discrete, objective meaning *while also* allowing for individual freedom of expression. Modernity vs unhinged relativism.
> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, ...
is exactly what you call a "wooden" statement. But even when the author meant "by and large, the media lied", the statement is a dishonest exaggeration it is. Of course there are media that can be caught lying over and over again, but there are sufficient large, conscientious news outlets to suppose it is a dirty spin.
> If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
Discrediting all media equally is part of polarization, and letting it go isn't helpful. Discussing it as if it were true, as many seem to do, is a symptom that it has gone too far.
Yep. This is a cynical counsel of despair. "Don't try filtering truth from lies. Everyone does it. Just lie back and think of England."
There is a difference between withholding information, selective emphasis, and outright lies. They are all bad, but they are equally bad. If you want to make things better you attempt to differentiate better from worse actors.
TLDR; all media, and all people, are biased, but they are not all equally biased. This bias can produce false beliefs. If you think false beliefs are a bad thing you promote the better actors and condemn the worse.
Also some news media actually reports on events that hurts the cause of their collective political leanings, some just don't. This isn't apples to apples.
They're lying though, that's the problem. Not 100% lying, but ignoring facts that contradict the narrative they have ongoing with their readership (so they don't look like they were wrong), and picking out those that contribute to their fantasy.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've just seen first hand (1) the real information on the battlefield (2) the public affair office's briefing to medias, which is factual although omits sensitive things and (3) the media's subsequent reporting which largely ignores what the PAO said and goes on with their made up interpretation. It's frankly sickening. They're writing fantasy.
"Even though this, and all information quoted in this piece, is readily available to any reporter with access to Google, countless references to the dangers presented by phosgene are giving the public anxiety over the decision to execute the controlled burn. To pick one example from many dozens, a Newsweek story, titled Did Control Burn of Toxic Chemicals Make Ohio Train Derailment Worse?, includes the following sentence: “Phosgene is a deadly gas that was used in chemical warfare during World War I.” The report goes on to quote – and we kid you not – a TikTok video from an “entrepreneur” for more insight.
> For clarity, 40 ppm (parts per million) is equivalent to 0.004% of the composition.
Lots of things are dangerous even at concentrations measured in PPM. For example, the level of Phosgene that’s “immediately dangerous to life” is 2 ppm: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/75445.html.
Maybe the point is that this 20 ppm quickly turns into less based on further dilution. But there’s a lot of analysis required to support the post’s assertions that the author just skips over.
> but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy.
Isn’t… isn’t that a pretty black and white spin on the idea of sociology? Do you have any studies to share that indicate “politically colored armchair philosophy”?
A curated set of facts or as you call it “incomplete, but not counter-factual” is not the truth. All facts are the truth and that’s what non opinion news should be reporting.
> there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
No, not for propaganda. If you want people to have a certain perception and position on a topic, selective reporting of topics and the presentation of them is far more relevant. This certainly does qualify as misleading.
Lies are even more ineffective since they often can be directly disproved, which biases people to believe the opposite. You want to present your spin in a certain blur.
Many prominent sociologist pretty much explain the mechanisms media and advertisers employ in detail. To say this is a fringe position is misleading too.
I was living in the US but spending considerable time in Europe in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.
Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.
At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.
It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)
> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.
Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.
What a naïveté. Independent journalists are even more beholden to their audiences, if they start talking up something those audiences don’t like, their incomes dwindle. I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence.
> I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence
Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.
Not those that value truth. They are pandering to contrarians and people who need the world to make sense and have order hence all the nefarious plots behind everything.
Do you mean when he apologized for adamantly saying that Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and it was only 'dishonest types' that were pushing the narrative that Russia was going to invade? I mean, when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong in such a biased (an anti-discourse) way I kinda stop following anything old boy says so you are going to have to give me more details about what specific walk back of his you are referring to?
> when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong
I see. So, when he retracts and apologizes for a mistake, he can't be listened to anymore. If he doesn't retract a mistake, he's one of the Bad Guy independent media who never corrects a mistake. The requirement then is to be 100% right about every take in his career.
I wonder how that standard holds up to the corporate media who, just as a single example, told everyone the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian op, likely changing the result of our Presidential election, whereas Hunter years later admits the story was real and the laptop was his?
> nefarious plots behind everything
The "nefarious plot behind everything" is that our government is corrupt. Just like most governments around the world, and just as has been largely the case within empires for millennia. To frame government corruption as a wild conspiracy theory requires ignorance to much of human history.
Taibbi admitted he was wrong on Ukraine because there's no other way to spin it, he was out of options. He's still giving his new and largely right wing audience what it wants:
"Elon isn't right wing, give me one example of that"
The 'powers that be' bias is a bit different and takes mant forms.
Aka institutional powers (aka Dem/GOP), individual institutional powers (aka stop a story from embarrassing a colleague Executive), Natoinal bias (aka stories during wartime are not quite the same), 'Civil/Public' bias (aka stories about vaccines during a pandemic), Corporate Institutions (aka advertisers, don't want to upset them).
Funny enought those tend not to be the one's we get the most in a huff for, rather, we fixate more in the ideological narrative stuff because it's more visible.
You don't really see the 'national bias' at all unless you're outside of the country. You don't see the 'corporate bias' bedcause it tends to be displayed in terms of 'stories that don't exist'.
Thanks for this. Nice to see it at the top of the conversation. Two words: Operation Mockingbird. The big news outlets get daily intelligence briefs. This isn't even controversial. But the real problem within that setting is self-censorship. You don't get the job unless you've proven than you know what not to say. Many credible books on that topic to read.
Seymour Hersh is the Journalist/Investigative Reporter and he does not mess around.
Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger outlets would not publish it without source information etc and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking to his word of "Not revealing sources".
That's appeal to authority. And it's a good hypothesis, we shouldn't discount it, but ... also not take it as gospel.
It's pretty clear that to get to the bottom of this we either need some leak or enough politicians in Congress who take this seriously, and get people to testify under oath. (Of course it'd be a good start to hold accountable those who lie to Congress, like Keith Alexander and James Clapper.)
Objectivity is easy to access if you're not totally censored. Propaganda works by concealing alternative opinions - once you know the trick, it's easy to hack, even a weak effort can work.
Sounds weird, but one of the easiest paths to objectivity is not to seek objective sources. One can look at multiple sources with obvious opposing spins to form your own understanding. Even the sources labeled as most objective tend to miss the nuance behind the main few arguments.
I gave up on the dream of "objective news" when I was about 18.
I had been taught that The Times was the most objective news organ here; it did carry an aura and style that seemed objective. I realized that what the objective "facts" are turns out to depend on your point-of-view, and it's harder to know what that point-of-view is if the organ is pretending to be "objective".
Ever since, I've preferred to get my news from sources that wear their bias on their sleeve.
We've just gotten to the point where views are not cross pollinated. Local news is not really local are much as it's controlled by a couple of companies with their own agenda so the same view is presented over and over and over again. In addition they've convinced the populace that the other side is evil so people have become tribal and only watch "their news" and that just feeds the loop. They don't have to conceal anything, it can be right there in front of them and it won't matter because they won't believe it because their tribe tells them it's a lie.
Do you think syndication of at least Fox, CBS, and ABC stops and starts with the specific clips that were gathered for this video clip? There are 7,000 stations... are you saying the fact that VH1 isn't saying this particular message means, "not all media..."
What a disingenuous argument. Proceed, I won't stop you.
That’s just cynical blah blah that ignores the pretty obvious cause.
It’s pretty easy why trust in media has eroded in my lifetime (I’m a 40 something). We deregulated and allowed for consolidation of ownership of print, broadcast and eventually online media.
That changed the dynamic. People will always correctly call out right wing talk radio as an example but the problems with media are more subtle as well. Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. If you were around in the 90s, you’ll remember how the OJ Simpson drama was a transformational event - which would not have happened in 1982. Serious journalism gave way to circus.
Our wiser predecessors learned in the 1920s and 1930s of the danger of mass media. Right wing nutcases like Father Coughlin, demagogues like Huey Long, America First, and more extreme left wing labor activists bear a strong resemblance to the characters in modern media.
> Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment.
One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.
Once people acept media bias the next jump they make that this is a partisan issue. It's easy to understand why, particularly now when there are major news outlets who deliberately lie.
But the problem is way more insidious and pervasive than performative partisan issues, which are generally manufactured culture wars. Those issues serve two purposes:
1. To make people angry and keep them angry. Angry people are "engaged"; and
2. To sow division and prevent class solidarity.
One of the most wildly successful examples of propaganda is the idea of the middle class. This serves to demonize the so-called "lower classes", typically labeling them as lazy, criminal, morally bankrupt and drains on the state.
There are only two classes: labor and capital owners.
Yet propaganda has been so successful that labor will defend the interests of billionaires to the detriment of their own interests. The number of people who would die on the hill of opposing Musk and Bezos paying slightly more taxes is depressing.
Media is a key tool in this endeavour. It's why you see wall-to-wall coverage of the China balloon (which literally does not matter at all) and a virtual media blackout of the environmental catastrophe and massive corporate failings that underpin the East Palestine train derailment.
Media represents and advocates for corporate interests and systemic interests.
> Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols.
Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. Even among the non-postal "decentralized" distribution protocols. The old saying that people become leery of media reporting when they see how their own specialty is botched applies to even the credentialed bloggers when they step out of their lane just a bit.
I've personally noticed fact reporting biases when, for instance, reading a story on the same event from Fox News and CNN. But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
> Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation.
That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore.
The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.
> But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
> With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.
Definitely agree. But it's also difficult to fact check even if you do distrust. Even educated bloggers and readers can have difficulty accurately interpreting information, and what that information indicates, if technological advances make their knowledgebase outdated.
> Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
In some cases, such as when the source of particular facts all originate from the same person, sure. Or when everyone's article is just a rewrite of the AP News or Reuters release. But in the general case we all can know who won the superbowl, and by what margin and what plays.
All US news stations covered Trump's campaign at least 20x more than Sanders.
All US news stations covered Hilary's campaign at least 5x more than Sanders.
That's without even getting into the hit pieces, the lies, the questions sneaked to Hillary in advance.
That style of narrative warping is repeated across every topic that might hurt corporate profits. There's facts, and then there's repetition, presentation, sentiment.
Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern train derailment - one story on page 20, with no context linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock buyback last year, no context about their lobbying against the very regulations that would have prevented this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't even name the company.
US media is absolute unequivocal dogshit across the board. It's utterly indefensible. That half of American's have any faith at all in corporate news is astounding. Trust them for sport coverage, sure - but that's entertainment friendo, not news.
> Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern train derailment - one story on page 20, with no context linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock buyback last year, no context about their lobbying against the very regulations that would have prevented this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't even name the company.
And all of the investigative journalism sites that would report in this detail on events like this are asking for donations to keep going. The advertiser support isn't there.
The issue, to me at least, is what people are choosing to trust/believe instead. I find they're not being critical and looking at multiple sources, they're just instead putting their faith in other untrustworthy groups (see: Alex Jones).
I don't really believe that non profit news is any more objective if that is what you mean by independent. They are beholden to their donors who can afford it. This will often be large foundations set up by corporations and extremely rich people. There is even a tax incentive that a corporation or foundation/trust can use to get a tax break while ensuring that the non-profit publishes things that align with their own opinions. I actually think the "charity" sector that operates in journalism and politics is extremely corrupt and serves no public interest.
I actually don't think it's possible to solve the problem of funding being able to influence journalism. Although there are independent journalists like on substack (which could be what you mean) I am not convinced that is much different from corporate media except the journalist is more like an LLC or sole proprietorship.
Independent does not mean objective. Independent journalists are generally not dependent on corporations, states, or publishing organizations to fund their reporting. Independence is a gradient rather than black or white. If he does publish something through a MSM outlet, he is generally paid for the piece published. Substack is one of many examples where funding is direct from readers or patrons. Good independent journalists are transparent about their biases since everybody has them.
Maybe some non profit news organizations are objective?
I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA.
Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.
There are plenty of for profit podcasters & writers out there that make money and honest living with small paypal subscriptions (before patreon was even a thing), plus small one-time donors and the like.
Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1.
They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources.
So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.
> So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through."
But most sociologists are totally in on the game. It used to be that the mainstream media narrative was opposite of what the sociologists preferred people to believe, and at the time you had academics talk about Manufactured Consent, and False Consciousness etc. These days, the press is more aligned with academics, so they prefer to keep it shush.
Here is an explicit example, published just a few weeks ago:
> The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents
From the abstract:
> Low-income Black fathers have been portrayed in the media and in research as uninvolved and disengaged from their children. The current study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 2578) to examine adolescents’ reports of relationships and interaction with their biological fathers. The results showed there were no significant differences among Black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, and Other fathers for adolescents’ perceptions of closeness or interaction with fathers.
Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.
The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.
Imagine reading a paper which “debunks” a “myth” of lack of involvement of women in corporate boards or C-level position, which simply excludes companies that have zero women on boards or as C-level officers from consideration. It would be hard to view it as anything other than deliberate deception. This sort of ignoring of obvious factors is, however, extremely common in published sociology research, and the academic community is extremely good at pretending to not notice deliberately lousy scholarship, when it aligns well with political opinions of 90% sociologists, and attacks anyone who tries to bring attention to it.
> Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.
There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study.
> The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.
Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this.
The problem is that the popular, "scandalized" understanding of "the media lie!!" doesn't have the nuance of sociological and political theories.
The sociologist notes will note that the media serves the interests of the powerful while still reporting some number of facts. The most extreme of the scandalized public will say "the media lies - they say X so Y must be true and X must be a plot". This produces a whole of truly bizarre thinking (often on the right but no doubt on the left as well).
What makes it hard for me to trust online news nowadays is click-bait. As advertising dollars going the way of polar ice caps it's gonna get worse, not better.
Don't trust any news organization that doesn't publish opinion pieces, or pretends that the guest editorials they publish are anthropology rather than assistance. They're hiding their bias as neutrality.
Almost certainly true. Just look at how they dealt with the Epstein story, for example. So many high-profile rapists and child abusers, and it was all swept under the rug. The news organizations are captured by these abusive elites.
“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.” - William Randolph Hearst
I think it is undeniable that new organizations are deliberately misleading the public in many cases, not necessarily part of the conspiracy but simply acting as the agent of the government. There are many cases when is became obvious.
It is also easy to find sources that are free from government collusion usually classified either far left or far right whatever those mean.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 423 ms ] threadhttps://AstralCodexTen.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
I don't think it's true (why would it be), and even it is true, it is stupid to assume that it is true. It only can cause harm, but no benefits at all.
you’re on HN. surely you have the imagination.
edit: apparently not
Meanwhile, the NY Times has made a few mistakes or let some bias slip through by the human beings who work there and produce thousands of relevant and accurate stories per year. Many of which are of vital national interest.
The headline presents the conclusions as unambiguous: "New Vaccine Data Shows Alarming Number Of Stillbirths And Miscarriages Caused By Covid Shot". Aside from referring to "covid shot" as a single thing and the 8 different vaccines available.
You seem to be talking about the general existence of media bias, for some reason.
Almost everything that someone posts is an anecdote, and you can't expect everyone to come armed with reams of well-researched facts.
I don't know what purpose you think what you're saying has, but it seems negative for discussion purposes and for fact-finding purposes.
MSNBC doens't generally run 'propaganda' for Pfizer, so much as they will avoid stories that make them look bad as they are big advertisers.
During a pandemic or war, the news system will close ranks and the stories come out differently but there are civil reasons for that.
And FYI I'm not denying propaganda exists, but it's of a very different nature that most of the bias in the press.
If all we had to deal with was state supported propaganda it would be frankly refreshing.
But it shall not be confused with journalism.
So it is approximately false, they don't deliberately mislead.
My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't.
The Democrats are pro-war, pro-capitalism, only nominally anti-gun, pander to the Christians as much as Republicans, and don't even side with labor anymore, as we saw with Biden crushing the railroad workers' strike, which was even supported by supposed progressive firebrand AOC.
I don't put those 2 channels in different categories at all. And certainly they don't divide from each other along lines of objectivity. They are both in the News Entertainment industry. Neither cares in the least about objectivity.
The only split I see between them is their mutually exclusive audiences.
Fox News is actually in a better place because they don't seem to be hiding the fact that they are there for entertainment and audience-building. They both care about their ratings first and foremost, but CNN is still trying to keep some veneer of serious journalism.
As a test: I haven't watched it recently, but how has CNN mea culpa'd over the news that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? A "serious news organization" should have had a real period of soul-searching over that. I bet it was barely a blip on their radar.
Yes, but not really the issue... thats why there is an editing process. If an org has a proper editing process then a lot of that gets accounted for.
Most of the skewed stories come from organizations that don't employ trained editors, don't have a clear editorial workflow, don't have a corrections policy, and don't have fact-checkers.
I would argue that medium to large orgs like CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, Bloomberg, WSJ, FT, Guardian, USA Today, Texas Tribune, LA Times, SF Chronicle, New Yorker, Vox, NPR, Houston Chronicle all have these processes in play and are reliable.
(Yes, there are always stories with issues that get though out of thousands and thousands of otherwise solidly reported pieces. No system is perfect.)
Because... Editors couldn't possibly have motives that similarly contain bias, corruption, out other such common frailties of the human condition?
Think of it from a coding point of view.
Many people think that some developers write code directly on production, to their personal style, and thats it. That certainly happens.
Other teams have coding standards, style standards. Tabs versus Spaces. CamelCase for Class names but something different for variables?
The commit their code, and do a pull request and someone else reviews it. Edits are proposed or demanded. Code is reviewed again, then maybe it goes to production. Its been known for production code to have issues, but generally after going through a process most are prevented then if the developer was able to merge in code without review.
The larger orgs I mentioned have a involved editorial process for editing stories.
I think you have it the other way around. The bias is institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias point of view out of the organization.
Look at how tightly political leanings are tied to news outlets.
If it were as easy and objective as you say we would get a lot more random pieces out of outlets instead of the rather rigid ideological publications we see in existence today.
Even Reddit subs and hacker news, which are much more random than news outlets, have pretty clear political leanings. With sufficient samples you can even break down the subgroups within the community.
News orgs don't have nearly the internal diversity required to possibly remove such bias. They are homogenous.
That appears to be your opinion, likely that of many here. However thats not how it works.
I have worked in media for 20 years and have had the opportunity to see how many editors, newsrooms, and publications in general work. I have sat in editorial meetings where coverage and stories are discussed. I have been present when editors and writers go back and fourth on stories.
The problem is that for any given news org, you and most people do not know what it takes to publish a story at some of these places. Thats NOT a criticism of you - I think we'd all be better off if folks knew how it worked.
Money is on, it was homogeneous. Which means, You can't even see your own biases as other points of view were culled in creating and nurturing the org structure.
One more point.
Companies never ever have evil anti user dark patterns enter production because of code reviews, do they?
That said, I believe you're thinking of Fox News.
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2021/07/26/l-a-times-needs-to-st...
and usually these days when you find an LA city councilmember with an FBI indictment for corruption, they had an LA times editorial board endorsement.
This is more about the rising belief that there is a massive conspiracy by them (the liberals, the Jews, the military industrial complex, the star chamber, take your pick) to systematically distort news in a coordinated way so as to realize their plans for world domination / genocide / fascism / destroying the family (circle one).
Eg keeping people bickering about racial issues instead of agreeing on the aspects of policing which need reform, or from focusing on class issues.
The tens of thousands of reporters, mostly young liberal arts majors?
It’s the “meant to” that makes it a conspiracy theory. Tell me that news is unhealthy, or that each individual actor has self interest in promoting some agenda, and I think it’s an interesting topic.
But as soon as there is a person or group out there secretly “meaning for” some result from the actions of tens of thousands of people, that’s by definition a conspiracy.
I think it’s just human nature. We are wired to believe that “there must be some explanation”, and it’s easy to lean into a sentient God or an evil cabal.
IMO the truth, that it’s a runaway uncoordinated emergent behavior with thousands of actors pushing and pulling in different directions for their own reasons, is a lot scarier.
While there isn't some hidden moustache twirling mastermind carefully directing all of the media about what to report and how to report it. Practically, I don't think the distinction matters too much because they all share the same incentives and they are individually deliberate in applying those same incentives.
As a broad example, Tucker and Rachel both benefit from appealing to their respective base's political views. They also benefit greatly from the bickering between their bases, thus it suits them to further push that divide (if they actually get issues addressed they have to constantly figure out what people want next to stay relevant). Similar incentives apply to politicians, so they do the same. Both Tucker and Rachel also benefit from being close with the associated politicians, so they tow that line too. The result being that they act in concert without explicitly conspiring with each other to do so.
There are many interest groups pushing to influence mass behavior in many kinds of ways. Some do so transparently, others less so.
We've overloaded "conspiracy" to mean at least two different things: the traditional definition of secret plotting to do bad things and a more modern derogatory connotation involving far-fetched conspiracies like politicians being lizard people.
Something can be a conspiracy and also be true and it is reasonable to investigate the extent to which reporting is influenced by different interests.
I personally am quite certain that some news orgs are deliberately misleading and pushing agendas. Some are doing absolutely heroic work investigating and reporting. And there's a huge spectrum in between. Are "most" being dishonest? Idk how to even measure what "most" means.
There's news podcast I listen to ("Raport about state of the world" - Polish only sadly), and host always tries to advocate for both sides when asking questions and often there are guests from the both sides, that present their point in calm, collected manner.
Then there's our state TV, which will tell you that EU is devil, opposition is devil, basically everyone is devil apart from ruling party, which is presented as (quote) "National Champions".
We must expect and educate next generation to expect truth-seeking in journalism, because otherwise we have no future.
Sometimes, something just isn't true and the other side doesn't get equal attention to defend their points. You can calmy explain how lizard people inside hollow earth run Hollywood to turn our children into gay frogs, but these people shouldn't get any air time, not even to be made fun of.
Sorry to be clear we're both in agreement, I just could see a both-sides-er chiming in that actually a debate on lizard-people would be a bloodbath and therefore everything actually should be presented this way, and wanted to added another issue.
Additionally for another real-world example with more immediate consequences we can look at the whole "vaccines causing autism" issue - something that was completely fabricated by a now-disgraced ex-doctor called Andrew Wakefield, but which gained traction due to being presented to the public as if we just don't know for sure (when we did, and his "research" was utterly eviscerated). Wakefield was basically laughed out of the medical profession, but due to the legwork the media did he's managed to establish himself over in the USA and his work effectively kick-started the modern-day anti-vaxx movement.
Not necessarily. The thing about arguments is that it’s like businesses. What determines your success isn’t if you have the best product. It’s that you have the best business. Marketing , connections , etc. The best product , and likewise the best argument, doesn’t necessarily win on merit alone. You just have to make it look good enough for it to be viable , even if the idea isn’t viable at all.
I’m not saying that I could get on TV and argue about lizard-people. But there certainly is someone who could and that’s enough.
Of course it sometimes creates other problems. In the end I think root problem is almost complete lack of responsibility for lying to wide public(not even legal responsibility, but just social). As climate change denier you're free to repeat the same disproven BS over and over, without no evidence and nothing happens.
If one side says cook at home as much as possible for your family to be healthy, and the other side says go down to the ditch and drink the pond scum, what are you doing by representing both sides there? One of the important duties of journalism is making editorial decisions that drinking pond scum isn't a balanced opposition to cooking dinner.
Journalist practice for decades has been going incredibly far out of its way to find an alternative "side" for any perspective that's presented. They then do a lot of work for them making it seem as reasonable and mainstream as possible.
This is exactly how you get fringe reactionary political views elevated to the level of national concern.
Works best when you get news from sources that are not tightly connected.
For example: NYT (American) + NPR (American) + DW (German) + Aljazeera (ME) + Reddit (people "on the ground").
Different financing/revenue models, different ownership, different continents, different cultural biases and norms, different perspectives.
Nothing is perfect and free from influence, but the broader one's consumption, the more angles one can work with on a particular topic.
Personal opinion is not news. It's merely one person's unfiltered view of the world. And because it's uncurated by a trustworthy filter, it's impossible to know whether it's worth your attention, much less serious consideration.
Once again, even in a Reddit thread, the goal is to triangulate. This may include, for example, seeking out info in other sub-Reddits (moderator bias), seeking more niche sub-Reddits, etc.
I use media to find out what America believes, and where it is headed. Your list of sources is going to leave you surprised fairly often. My goal is to not be surprised.
They want to be able to set agendas but also want to be known as authoritative and uhhh unbiased. Both cannot be true simultaneously. Cry me a river!
I don't think it's a good idea for journalists to proclaim that they are abandoning objectivity. https://reason.com/2020/06/24/journalists-abandoning-objecti...
I need accurate news to know what’s going on in the wider world because my day to day is so insular, and I’d hazard I’m not an anomaly here. It’s annoying because I feel like half of my friends are crazy but I’m not sure which half it is. My wife is glitching out and believes all sorts of crazy stuff but heck, maybe it’s true. Maybe the world has always been like this, and I’m just old enough to realize that the news media is bullshit. But it just felt like the older journalists that have retired now were less desperately and smugly trying to convince me that they’re correct than the ones working now. I wish I felt like I could trust literally anyone beyond my immediate family.
Sorry for the bluntness here.
I don’t mean I never leave the house. I go to concerts and the zoo with my kids and whatever. I went on vacation across the country the other day. None of those things are helping me discern what’s going on in the world, unless “Disneyworld is a fun place” and “the ocean is a nice place to laze around” count as my lived experience.
There at least used to be a remaining vestigial substructure to society in things like churches and civic organizations. As we've slowly grown into a society of unbelievers, the churches have splintered into myriad heterodox sects, and we've supplanted much civic engagement with work and internet use, this substructure is failing.
Chapo Trap House touches on this frequently, but their recent episode called Arrival (ep 706) had a pretty poignant example. It was commentary on a series of NY Post and Times articles about the supposed drastic increase in crime, and how people, especially those who live in the burbs, are starkly disconnected from the reality of the world. And specifically because of some of these factors I outlined above.
I have slowly formed a trusted circle of programmers on Discord of various political stripes that are able to keep each other somewhat in check and connected to reality WRT the happenings in the world over the past 7 years or so. It has definitely helped keep me grounded in the past few years of covid and suburbia driven isolation and a drastic increase in media consumption.
I bring up twitter and did not claim it was 'authoritative' but to show that behind the scenes our political machine is shaping the narrative. Spiking stories and promoting others. The people who run those orgs are doing it gladly. To pretend the same thing that happened at twitter is not happening at NBC/CNN/FOX/NYT/etc would be a bold claim. Like you point out twitter is not that valuable but they made a point of it to do it. Proper suppression of people and censorship and narrative shaping. The very same people who used to say 'the internet see censorship as damage and routes around it' are the very ones building a censorship news controlling apparatus. Then gaslighting us with 'how dare you question them they are doing it for our safety!'
News is very unreliable in most forms. You can push particular opinions very easily. It is not that hard to do. Our news is basically gossip and talk shows. With news as the thin premise that they are doing.
Democracy is dying and "both sides" believe the other is the "enemy".
It's going to get bloody, folks.
You cannot have politicians and media telling people day in and day out that people who don't look like you or believe like you are the enemy and not have people try and hurt their "enemy". You can't.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
Rare to be able to factcheck an article without leaving the page and disprove it from its own content, but the lies are not rare.
https://www.newsweek.com/video-mike-rogers-held-back-he-lung...
I’ve worked in a newsroom. The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity.
Yes, Rupert Murdoch, etc. But it’s all emergent behavior. There is no master plan. These organizations are not well run enough to deliberately get stories out in time, let alone conspire to mislead.
You'd also likely want to implement standards around language use that would create a consistent product with broad appeal, limit an editor's ability to go off the rails and do something that would harm the brand image, and that limits legal liability.
A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.
That is a demand from a trans advocacy group. They don't want criticism of the movement they are promoting because it brings up uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's rights, and the medical abuse of children. Rather than addressing these questions, they attempt to shut down any coverage. Much of social media has been censored this way already, and they are attempting complete ideological capture of traditional media too.
The only right alleged is a right to exclude trans women, and consequentially a right to screen all women suspected of being trans.
> and the medical abuse of children
The children in question want to transition, and their parents or the state want to prevent them; defining this as "abuse" without actually listening to the allegedly abused is the problem.
Which is basically what the NYT said in their response:
"We received the letter from GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD sees our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and The Times's journalistic mission are different.
"As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
"The very news stories criticized by GLAAD in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society - to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we're proud of it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
There is no need for a conspiracy for the media to be misleading.
Most of all, you understand the risk of breaking rank. If you look at a story, and think "hey, why aren't others covering this story? Why aren't more people upset at this? Shouldn't this be a big deal?", you either learn to think "No. Everything is all right in the media world." or you have a bad, bad time.
I was in 2 tv interviews so far and both of them have released footage that totally and entirelly distorted the message to an infuriating degree. This was in a top tier European country, once state tv , once a major private station.
Do not trust them blindly is all I can say.
This.
I have problem organizing 2 intelligent people to place dirty laundry in the laundry box or to do their homework on time or to place dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
But there's a mastermind somewhere who can organize something so complex, with so many variables where each depends on a human being of varying intellect and skillset and the plan is so intricate that out of 100,000 possibilities - all of them play in the hand of the mastermind. And the plan includes the two from above, who can barely get a cup of water when they're thirsty!
If such mastermind existed, I wouldn't even be angry for being manipulated - in fact, I would like to continue to be manipulated because if such a person (or group) existed - please, continue! Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.
The story you're portraying doesn't need any kind of imagination, Hanlon's razor works perfectly well there and doesn't require any kind of special ability granted by smoking weed while doing nothing besides looking for conspiracies.
Religion shaping culture, and thus the decisions of countless people to go out and actually kill each other is a thing. Divine? I think so.
Culture is programming for the masses. Is culture a conspiracy? Our intel agencies have caught onto this, color revolutions are a conspiracies, but the victims of such revolutions would hardly consider their own deeply held beliefs and subsequent actions to be conspiratorial.
Culture shaping happens now at an insane speed with everything from the search engines we use, to the radio, tv, music, advertisements, and so on. If you can pull those levers, people will act accordingly. Pfizer has advertising dollars everywhere. Is it a conspiracy that people will literally stake their professions on defending Pfizer vaccines?
So have I
> The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity
It’s not controlling, but there is little doubt that reporter’s and politicians partipate in quid pro quo
I’m fairly distrusting in even my preferred primary news source, not because I suspect that there’s some grand conspiracy, but because the system under which modern journalists (seem to) operate encourages very subtly but very consistently stretching the truth. The KPIs are the puppet master.
These material interests are not entirely individual and distinct; they fall within broad strata based on the overall structure of the economy (e.g., the class of people with the capacity to own a major media organization and the class of people who make a living by serving them). Thus, there is no need for a conscious conspiracy coordinating every aspect of the media machine since the basic character of the consciousness of those involved flows from a more fundamental material reality. At the same time, there’s no reason one can’t become consciously aware of the stratum of shared material interests that one exists within, and I think it would be foolish to assume that the people at the highest levels of power and wealth in the world have failed to do so.
Superhuman coordination and execution abilities along with extreme secrecy as needed.
But they are not well co-ordinated or executed, that is the reason many people are catching on to the manufactured narratives.
This isn't done by some Matrix-type entity or does it need to be run by something as perfect as an AGI. All it takes is to have the top editors deciding which stories to run and with what narrative. Of course this break down as the rank and file journalist are the ones in charge of writing the stories and presenting them.
And the people at the top of this aren't by any matter a cohesive group or a big brother type entity rather just people with money and power doing what they think will help them keep money and power.
Even without validating beliefs, there are so many cases of news organizations publishing incorrect or misleading information in a rush to cover a story, only to then issue a silent correction weeks later when the damage has been done.
This weakens trust in two ways, first is just people who pay enough attention to notice the correction and gradually lose trust as they see how often that happens. The other is the more damaging, more common way, where someone has read the incorrect/misleading article and internalized the information only to find out much later that the information they internalized was incorrect (without ever seeing the original correction).
One example that comes to mind is regarding the supposed sudden Starlink outages in Ukraine back in October around when Musk was tweeting dumb stuff about appeasing Russia. CNN was quick to report the outage implying that it was unexpected by Ukraine and they were shutdown to blackmail the West into paying. This article was all over the news.
Then weeks later they put out an article stating that it was just 1300 terminals which were being provided by the UK which were shut-off due to the UK deciding not to pay for the subscription anymore, with Ukraine having been fully aware and having swapped them out beforehand with the other ~18000 still operating terminals. But this one got nowhere near the same traction and was still misleadingly headlined.
Think about it: broadcasting information costs something. Nobody is going to pay that cost unless they're getting a return for it. Nobody is going out of their way to provide you with information out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it so that you buy what they're selling (e.g. pharmaceuticals, gold) or vote for their party, etc.
A lot of times that information will be technically not wrong, but that's not the goal.
Unless I am asking the taxi driver about traffic problem in their work area, or rider behavior, or...
We have become citizen journalists. We have to research our own news. I think that is not a bad thing.
I write journalist because if an establishment journalist can get away with single-sourcing something, why can't I?
YouTube is a cesspool of hot garbage, but there is also plenty of good information.
The key part in my opinion is to have the ability to collect, sift, confirm, and then make deduction.
Alas, we no longer teach fundamental thinking skills in schools.
Control this and you can control the world.
I think for the most part, people who take their news from youtube and random taxi drivers fall into the former category, whereas people who vote against the party/candidate recommended (overtly or covertly) by their local paper fall into the latter category. It's quite possible that a lot of people in the latter category would say they don't trust the news as part of a national opinion survey, but they wouldn't ever outright say to a stranger "oh, don't read the stuff printed in the City Courier, it's all lies". Particularly as the news is more and more national, but the political parties continue to attract around 50% of the vote each, I'd generally expect about 50% of the population to have at least this much distrust for at least some of the news.
You’ll quickly learn not to trust the news. Not because it’s wrong – it’s pretty factual for the most part – but because it keeps trying to make you care about the wrong things. Whipping up an emotional reaction to matters that don’t affect you. Ignoring large elephants in small rooms. Talking juuuust slightly past the core issue hoping you won’t notice.
Much of news, especially daily news, is like discussing the color of a bike shed instead of the core design problems of the reactor it sits behind. Because talking about the big stuff isn’t sexy and doesn’t get the clicks.
And even when you do find a source of boring news, you’ll find that most of it affects your life not one bit. It’s just entertainment to keep you busy. In the words of a quote I once heard and can never find again: ”The news doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about”.
This is part of the reason I don't trust the news, because they all are focusing on the same things for a few weeks and then it drops never to be heard from again. Some examples
When Trump met with Kim Jong Un everything in the news media was about North Korea for weeks, it was painted as the vital question of our times that was a clear and present danger to democracy. 3 years into Biden I have barely heard anything about NK.
Another exmaple is oil prices, does anyone else remember during the Bush years how the oil prices dominated everything in the news and the Middle East was the most important region in the world, to the point that we supposedly went to war in Iraq over oil? Yet when it was hitting $5-6 a barrel I wasn't hearing anything about it. Or how many of us have heard anything on Iraq or Syria since ISIS?
You can look for countless examples but even if it isn't outright lying by choosing what to focus on the media already sets an agenda.
There can be a huge discrepancy between what your experience is and what is being reported. Most people will tend believe what they see and know.
The easy angle is product placement [1]. Literally fork over a small sum of money and you get the news org to rave about your product without doing any verification.
There's also how a headline is not written by the author so it won't always reflect the contents of the article.
> And a lot of the times is just because news are not validating their own beliefs
IMO, the news orgs have a symbiotic relation with their viewers. The viewers want their viewpoint reinforced and the news org wants views. So the news org put out a biased product so that their viewers will selectively watch that news org. However, this still means that news org aren't actually trying to inform.
My biggest gripe is how often they'll refuse to link to actual legal documents when talking about filed lawsuits and the like and in general I don't find some of their claims in the article to be as supported by the actual filings.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM
https://www.lawfareblog.com/
This is a good thing. For too long the media was trusted as a believable source of acceptable impartiality and truth.
The audience has matured and no longer believe in the fairy truth teller.
My view is that serious news organizations clearly don't deliberately mislead but they have some amount of bias and contain inaccuracies as a result of low-quality reporting.
And I think the perception of "MSM" which is common among the group of people which includes Elon / libertarians / MAGA fanatics / alt-right is obviously wrong and stupid.
(Assuming you're right that there was non-stop coverage, I don't know.)
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated, "I think the President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."[4]
Because admitting to a typo in an unfinished, now deleted tweet was apparently impossible for the man in charge of nuclear weapons. That's worth a bit of coverage.
Aka cable news (one site specifically with the largest reach) is constantly engaging in deception and the viewership doesn't know. Other orgs are also engaged in deception but not with the same level of flagrant abuse.
Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I
If a vaccine makes it less likely that you catch a disease, wouldn't that make it less like that you spread the disease? Am I missing something here?
CDC changed their definition of vaccine and vaccination:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...
> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.”
> The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
Even dictionaries were edited:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fact...
> Merriam-Webster revised its "vaccine" definition to replace "immunity" with "immune response."
This was done when it became clear that COVID vaccines didn't actually create any kind of immunity and thus weren't technically vaccines. Like always in public health they fixed this problem by manipulating language - now it only has to provoke some sort of response from the body. If that response turns out to be useless or actively harmful, no big deal, it's still a vaccine.
Observe that this change totally alters the meaning of being anti-vaxx. Take a substance that provokes an immune response but it's the wrong sort of response and doesn't work, diverting the immune system into wasting time whilst the virus replicates. It is 100% rational to oppose such a useless product, but by subtly manipulating the definition of vaccine they have now trained people to consider such opposition anti-vaxx and therefore automatically irrational.
Unfortunately this problem is not theoretical, bringing us to negative efficacy. It exists and is visible in many studies, but hidden by governments which use a variety of invalid statistical methodologies to alter the raw data, which is kept secret. Nonetheless, they aren't the only ones that can count cases. It's a big topic but some studies and explanations of what's going on can be found here:
https://bartram.substack.com/p/even-more-negative-vaccine-ef...
The root biological cause seems to be related to the definitional game playing. The vaccines targeted the 2019 Wuhan spike and the antibodies vaccinated people produce are meant to dock with those specific proteins. But by the time vaccination is rolling out big time we are already at Delta, the virus spike has evolved quite significantly and the antibodies aren't so effective anymore. The body doesn't seem to recognize this quickly enough and spends a lot of time producing the wrong sort of antibodies, thinking it's successfully fighting the invader. Unvaccinated people have immune systems that haven't been trained in any way, so their first real SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the antibody learning process immediately and they develop immunity to the latest version of the virus quicker.
This problem is called imprinting and is visible in the booster and bivalent trials. They didn't help reduce COVID cases and even made them higher - actually 100% of test subjects got COVID when exposed in the bivalent trials, but the vaccin...
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
All media critique comes form comedians these days. Which is kind of grim because sometimes things actually matter and aren't just jokes. Yet Journalist A gets to carry water for criminal X, and Journalist B doesn't say anything about it. Then some comedian makes a joke and everyone moves on. The journalists still get to be journalists. The comedian's are making jokes and were all out here seeing no consequences for anything.
The post truth world of journalism isn't fun.
There's checks and balances in government, but the 4th estate just seems to be a wild lands of bullshit and can't check itself. And those same Journalists seem to think this is a good system.
Anyway rant over. I use patreon to support indie media and news I like. But even that has downsides, filter bubbles etc.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchdog_Journalism>
Organisations and institutions include:
- On the Media, WNYC Studios -- center-left: <https://onthemedia.org>
- Poynter Institute <https://www.poynter.org/>
- Columbia Journalism Review <https://www.cjr.org/>
- FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) -- left/progressive: <https://fair.org/>
- Center for Media and Democracy -- conservative: <https://www.exposedbycmd.org/>
Amongst many others.
You'll also find journalism beats at various outlets, though those tend to focus more strongly on business side (often dismal for old-school print).
Even Seymour Hersh has been smeared to discredit him now he dared speak against the establishment.
It is not journalists' role to be a mouthpiece for the government, but to challenge it.
> Contrary to his public claims that he notified numerous NSA officials about what he believed to be illegal intelligence collection, the Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities - legal, moral, or otherwise - to any oversight officials within the U.S. government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so. Snowden was aware of these avenues. His only attempt to contact an NSA attorney revolved around a question about the legal precedence of executive orders, and his only contact to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Inspector General (IG) revolved around his disagreements with his managers about training and retention of information technology specialists.
> Despite Snowden's later public claim that he would have faced retribution for voicing concerns about intelligence activities, the Committee found that laws and regulations in effect at the time of Snowden's actions afforded him protection. The Committee routinely receives disclosures from IC contractors pursuant to the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (IC WPA). If Snowden had been worried about possible retaliation for voicing concerns about NSA activities, he could have made a disclosure to the Committee. He did not.
https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_r...
They violate the US constitution and you expect them to hand out evidence?
There has been previous episodes of people (proved and documented) of people attempting to speak up and being silenced, imprisoned etc. Any person threatening to go to the press can be arrested for treason.
And if you look at similar organizations starting from 100 years ago you'll see the same patterns again and again: people who try to speak up are silenced in a way or another.
Otherwise, you are asserting that a bipartisan intelligence committee of elected officials are all lying.
The only reason to use “exiled” is to imply that Snowden is in Russia (or at least outside of the US) by someone’s choice other than his own. That’s what’s misleading about it.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803779
That's insulting. There are thousands of investigative journalists doing real work every day. Do some research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_journalism
> Seymour Hersh
His recent story was very sketchy, but he has always spoken against the establishment. The government has been smearing him since 1969.
Whereas if Watergate happened today they'd just say it's justified against Russian spies or something.
There are better examples of what you're saying, not saying your point doesn't have merit, just that Hersh is a bad example.
This colours my attitude to his Nordstream "revelations".
Done. Bellingcat exists as a parallel construction for US and British intelligence agencies and its only other purpose is to smear non-state controlled journalistic outlets. There was a leaked email from another source that indicates that even internally, US intelligence agencies don't think that Bellingcat is still a good way to spread information because normal people don't believe it any more.
On the other side, Hersh is a journalist with a long track record who wrote a story that is likely true, although we won't know until if and until comes out. Won't stop nationalists from pretending that they know something that they don't. They love a traitor.
I could have mentioned Hersh's account of the killing of Bin Laden too. At this point his track record is a lot longer than it is good. I can't keep giving him free passes based on good work done almost 50 years ago
Also Hersh's point about the NATO head being an asset in his late teens is definitely feasible, as that was exactly what the Norwegian government did at the time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lund_Report
Your link is about illegal electronic surveillance and contains nothing related to recruiting random Norwegian teenagers as agents in the hope that they would become General Secretaries of NATO 40 years later, and thus somehow (?) able to direct clandestine missions of the Norwegian Navy.
Let's turn it around: Is there something Hersh's source told him that was surprising and could be verified independently?
And neither Snowden nor Assange are journalists at all. Snowden stole some docs and Assange runs a wiki. Assange also collaborated with Russian intelligence.
If you have no evidence of this, you're spreading misinformation.
Its sort of interesting to me that in this thread there are a lot of people trying very hard to make indirect connections between Western journalists and Western governments. Here we have a direct connection between a "journalist" and a government and its dismissed as "misinformation".
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-report-julian-assange-...
He published the DNC hacks which he acquired from GRU which he deliberately obscured by pointing to Seth Rich.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-ass...
From the tone of the article it seems like the author simply detests Julian Assange and Weiss puts forward no standard for who can rightly be called 'a journalist'.
We never discussed it in the context of new media but it feels quite relevant.
> Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.
The headline defines "mislead" as including "leading via truthful reporting" aka "present opinion".
I sometimes daydream about a "grey news" organization. No hosts, just text articles with confidence intervals next to claims, all sources listed, no editorials, and all interviews and videos reported on have full transcripts next to the full unedited video.
Org A is the one you want to promote. Only show clips that make org A look good. Org B is the one you want to demote. Only show clips that make org B look bad. If org A does something bad pad it with 'org B' doing the same thing or never show it. If org B does something good never show it.
What is shown to you, and order matters. The talking heads bits most orgs go for along with it just adds color to it. But it is the same editorial process. You only have X amount of time and Y amount to show X < Y. Something has to go. You can pick sides even with that method.
I've also thought of a structure where there's a news organization that's just openly biased, the prime directive is listed on the front page, and each news article is explicitly edited to explain how the article is presented to support the main mission of the organization. Maybe could link to refutations to keep the appearance of honesty.
This of course falls into a funny counterfactual scenario that I don't have a clever term for. "In the world where this solution is possible to deploy, the problem doesn't exist". If you could staff an entire news organization that was so dedicated to exposing its own bias, it would mean you had a critical mass of adults in society that were actually concerned about the truth, and you could just do news the regular way.
Either way its always been a factor, and was likely worse before the age of information.
The big problem now is there are multiple competing false narratives, instead of just the one in the paper.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/564013066...
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers"
Makes you wonder who remains to be trusted, the governments are not reliable at all times either in most parts of the world.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/jefferson-s-preference-for...
Seymour Hersh, Jeff Gerth and the CJR, Wemple at the WaPo, Chris Hedges (ex-NYT Middle East bureau chief, ex-NYT Balkans bureau chief during the Yugoslav wars.)
Not to mention recent nonpersons like Taibbi or Greenwald.
You were required to read and believe what these people wrote in order to get your liberal card in the very recent past, but for having the wrong opinions on rising nationalism they get demoted to "random guys."
This doesn’t come from a partisanship bias, as nearly all well known media outlets, large and small, engage in that behavior. Their content often still has some value, and we need both hard and soft reporting to make sense of this world. That doesn’t mean all this content is motivated or framed by some selfless desire to shine the brightest light on the darkest places at any cost.
I don’t think automatically equating skepticism with conspiracy theory adoption is fair. I can’t really think of any conspiracy theory I buy into.
Untangling that sentence gets us the much clearer, and I think more accurate, “new organizations chase clicks without any interest in whether their headlines are true or false”.
Skepticism is not conspiratorial thinking, of course. I meant it in the most narrow way — many people in this thread believe, without evidence, that some group of people is consciously coordinating massive distortions of news to further specific ends.
Is that "deliberately mislead"? It depends on what exactly you mean by that. Don't agree and shift the meaning.
0: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/
Though of course this is the wrong reaction; it has always trickled through. Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols.
Every piece of information is produced with interests for audiences; objectivity is a pink unicorn Santa Claus, something you really shouldn't believe exists after you're, like, 8. But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims, and who are not organizations whose literal existence depends on state licensing as a corporation. Not to say that there is no structural pressure in the independent realm; ideology still exists, years of socialization in the country of origin with their (often folly) "self-evidence" myths exist, the need to eat and make money somehow still exists. But the pressures are much, MUCH fewer than in the case of corporate and state news.
I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.
It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...
I think people reading opinion as news is part of the problem.
> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
[1] Public Opinion, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html
> There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways. There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's. His version of the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street. And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which stains the white radiance of eternity.
I recommend giving the book a read at some point if you have the chance (there's also a free audio book up on YouTube). It's a very thought provoking journey through how public opinion gets formed, and the myriad of different elements at play shaping them.
Some support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare#Seattle_Genera... "Even before the strike began, the press begged the unions to reconsider. In part they were frightened by some of labor's rhetoric, like the labor newspaper editorial that proclaimed: "We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country ... We are starting on a road that leads – NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!"[6] Daily newspapers saw the general strike as a foreign import: "This is America – not Russia," one said when denouncing the general strike.[7] The non-striking part of Seattle's population imagined the worst and stocked up on food. Hardware stores sold their stock of guns.[8] "
> The underlying trouble appears in the news through certain easily recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike, disorder. From the point of view of the worker, or of the disinterested seeker of justice, the demand, the strike, and the disorder, are merely incidents in a process that for them is richly complicated. But since all the immediate realities lie outside the direct experience both of the reporter, and of the special public by which most newspapers are supported, they have normally to wait for a signal in the shape of an overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter. Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these feelings. But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings. Their feelings may be that their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping goods they need in their work, that there will be shortage and higher prices, that it is all devilishly inconvenient. These, too, are realities. And when they give color to the abstract news that a strike has been called, it is in the nature of things that the workers are at a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to say, of the existing system of industrial relations that news arising from grievances or hopes by workers should almost invariably be uncovered by an overt attack on production.
It brings in contrast the public response to workplace shootings, or even the rarer instances when the entire staff of a workplace quit at once.
We quickly found out about a bunch of the nuance of the Half Moon Bay shootings, and appear to be doing things to make those workplaces and living places better (though of course this doesn't help the larger problem of agricultural labor practices). And I think most readers get a vicarious sense of justice out of mass quitings. But yeah strikes, and unionization in general, make bystanders nervous.
If Matt Taibi get Keshloggied it would not amaze me if his former colleagues bury the story or even spin it as a good thing. I don't predict he will actually get killed but ask yourself, would you be surprised if he was or does a part of you half expect it at this point?
He certainly won't be working a corporate gig anytime soon. Where will his income come from in the future? Nevermind what is he going to do to make ends meet, how will he afford going places to interview people and perform research? You can't realistically be a journalist sitting around at home in your underwear (unless you work for the NYT writing provoking social criticisms about something you just watched on Netflix).
And this is a very famous award winning guy with published books to his name from a time when people still used to read and pay for books. What is going to enable more people like this going forward? Seems like a pretty stressful life actually.
His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.
I watched a debate panel with several journalists who were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had full access to everything because an engineer sat in the room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to believe that the database couldn’t have possibly been pre filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the journalist literally claimed that they couldn’t have possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase myocarditis that quickly.
I know we’re in tech and have a closer understanding of technology than experts in other fields but it was kind of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the data they were being shown could be manipulated and I feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their credibility.
Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.
You are right though that there is a certain level of trust here in Taibbi's reporting and fact checking.
I’ve also read the Twitter files and the stated summaries on the tweets routinely didn’t match the linked evidence, or stretched it to the weakest but still technically possible conclusion.
> Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.
While calling this out as a conspiracy is kinda laughable given the content of the Twitter files, I want to make it more clear that I was appalled by the journalists being certain that the data couldn’t have been manipulated and then giving examples of how it would be impossible that were actually relatively trivial to implement. They also claimed they had access to “all” the data when that was patently not true. They had access to a gate kept version of the data which they could not verify, and I think that’s an important point given that one of the major critiques they have about Twitter 1.0 and the government is a lack of transparency. I also found this suspect when Musk and the journalists involved like Taibbi claimed they were going to show “everything” and instead of a database dump they keep linking excerpts of documents. Maybe they’ve finally done a database dump but after the first 5 or 6 Twitter threads where it was all cherry-picked I stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt
His Twitter lovers and haters mostly haven't, and are generally making judgments based on "social group" rather than the factual record.
I understand that you feel he is getting rich but do you have knowledge of his personal finances to make this assertion? Or even some sort of a basis for this intuition you can point people towards? Please enlighten me with some napkin math.
Meanwhile, the slacks and emails he posted are certainly real.
> He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his existence.
As opposed to journalists who don't need eyeballs to justify their existence?
You are correct. Its a hardscrabble life.
There is no payoff, except for the duty of the profession.
This is unfortunately the one thing that society seems to be lacking dramatically these days. From policemen that don't rush in to rescue children in danger of being murdered by psychos, to administrators that feel that doctors should get time off to "reflect" on X person getting killed by a cop (cancer doesn't take days off... grandma's back pain doesn't take the day off). Duty is severely lacking across all layers of society.
The tone from the top seems to be encouraging this. Now, "its ok to be soft" instead of "power through, people depend on you"
We need more Taibbis and Intercepts, willing to do their duty.
So that makes me wonder how this is getting out. Is it a news organization such as an opposing organization, or outspoken journalists? Is it democratized news reporting via forums and social media?
Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.
Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"
Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this morning."
Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government is looking to roll back more regulations, which are expected to increase fatality rates by 6%."
See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your premise which proves with any certainty that the increased speed limits are the cause of the change in accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it as part of the basic record of events we call "news", rather than as part of the opinion discourse.
This was even a good faith example. If you were trying to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.
I think this idea that we need to somehow strip all news of even the vaguest hint of a perspective is actually pretty condescending to the average news reader, imagining that they are so stupid and credulous that merely seeing a bit of bias is going to immediately warp their brains.
The question when becomes whether there is any value in publishing these most likely faulty narratives compared to simply reporting the facts. I would argue that there is actually negative value in the former, because the audience ends up less informed than if they had never consumed that piece of media.
This is why journalists will often attribute cause and effect interpretation of facts to expert sources.
But Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that educated, informed readers readily fall victim to, so it's clear that the media seems to have some kind of privilege of credulity.
I wonder if it's really an effect of people reading media primarily for entertainment - isn't there some old saying about "people who read the Times are less I formed than people who read nothing at all?"
"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents overall have jumped 12% since AG John Smith added driving-without-a-license to the city's informal do-not-prosecute list."
In our toy example, all of these could be simultaneously true, and the data given does not support one cause over the other. Note that the "due not" need not be present, the intended implication is still clear. (For bonus points, read these examples again, imagining that overall driving increased by about 12% due to people working from home less.)
The idea that the journalist should present only the directly related "bare facts" is so silly that I can't even take the suggestion as coming from a place of good faith.
Knowing stuff is hard, reporting on stuff is hard, understanding what is read is hard. The solution to these problems is not, nor could it be, restricting one's attention to the "bare facts." Indeed, these are often quite hard to identify and agree upon. We should expect and cultivate a little sophistication in ourselves and our fellow citizens.
"A person who our reporter spoke with who went by the name of Bob Dylan and claimed to be the coroner of James County, said that three individuals passed away recently, and he said he believes that they died due injuries similar to those involved in car accidents. Our reporter also asked the James County Sherriff's Department to corroborate, and a person who claimed to be the spokesperson for the James County Sherriff's department said that there were three individuals in a car accident last night, and they were taken to the hospital."
Anyways, I wasn't trying to write a rigorous example for each, I assumed that the reader could fill in the detailed. I just aimed to give the gist of what it should look like. You'd talk to experts, cite papers, etc.
Even your definition of 'reporting' can be (and is) easily abused to play to narratives, by the simple and necessary act of determining what is "newsworthy". Reporters will go by their biases and beliefs on deciding e.g. which homicides are "random" and not worth reporting, vs. which are indicative of systemic issues in society, and so require national attention.
Cherry-picking.
Hasn't Trump been talking about the 'fake news media' for 5+ years? And don't half of Americans lap that stuff up?
I know broken clocks and all, but just because you disagree with someone most of the time it doesn't mean that they are wrong about everything.
Actually, he did call Fox News fake news at one point, although yes it was due to them running a story about polls that were unflattering to him.
However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.
> However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.
That doesn't make him, or any other source of information, more trustworthy than the corporate news media.
> The term “fake news” became mainstream during the US election campaign, when hundreds of websites that published falsified or heavily biased stories sprung up to capitalise on Facebook advertising revenue.[1]
> Mr Trump and his supporters then adopted the term to describe media coverage critical of the President, especially that of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.
1: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2017/10/09/donald-trum...
Fox and Friends and Tucker Carlson are lying to viewers every day.
Seriously though, within a city, they had morning and evening editions (12 hour lag) hundreds of years ago. For national stories, the lag was more like a week, then dropped to 12 hours when the telegraph was invented. Also, back then, there were orders of magnitude more newspapers (multiple in each big city, and at least one in small towns), so most modern censorship techniques simply would not work. Yeah, Elon Musk would have owned a paper, but (by law) only one, and multiple other wealthy tech people would own papers in the same market.
It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.
"Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"
* As Russia changes its aims, the definition of "winning" changes. This is a separate way Russia can win: declare victory with whatever territory you have seized and call for peace negotiations.
Fixed it. There are historical evidence that this has gone on in some form or fashion in ancient empires (e.g., Roman, Egyptian, Chinese), be it written or the town crier.
There have always been people who knew this was going on, spoke up, but were considered crackpot, conspiracy theorist, or simply beheaded.
[To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of what forces influence media that influence people. I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.]
This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.
HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either.
The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.
I'm merely pointing out this broad inconsistency.
First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements.
Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."
This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court.
To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.
Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.
Your grasp of English seems fine, to me.
I think your "quite different" distinction is incorrect. The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one. There's a gradation from plain lying your face off, through mixing in a few truths with your lies, through lying by omission, through presenting true facts in such a way as to make the reader believe falsehoods.
The tactic most-used by newspapers is lying by omission. Newspapers routinely "spike" stories that aren't aligned with the paper's political agenda. You can search the paper's output, and you won't find a direct lie; but a parallel search for truth will also fail. Truth is to be found in the gaps.
There is if you look up definitions. Lying involves falsehoods. You can mislead someone using selective truths without using falsehoods. That's why the article etc was about misleading, persuading, etc and not mentioning lying (aside from the commentor I originally responded to).
If someone can't see how a person could be misleading without lying they're going to fall for a lot of bullshit.
> intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public
persuasion is not misinforming is not misleading.
This is literally the definition of lying.
You can intentionally mislead someone through the selective use of truths without using any "counter-factual" or untrue statements.
* used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression. "all their married life she had been living a lie"
Google "define lying". It says this:
tell a lie or lies.
and this
(of a thing) present a false impression; be deceptive.
---
Intentionally misleading is deceptive, even if it states only facts.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lying
But wait, let's look at the instant replay. You claim that lying and deception at the same. So why would you get involved in this conversation to say that? According to you, their use is interchangeable and makes no difference.
If you have something to add to the actual conversation and not about definitions, then please do.
There is a difference between telling a lie and being mistaken, no? If you are learning something and give the wrong answer on a quiz, are you lying? Both of those are falsehoods that aren't intending to deceive, and most people wouldn't count those as lies.
The word lie, requires an intent to deceive.
This isn't being debated.
"There is concept called a "lie of omission"."
And that's why it's a concept and requires additional words to convey. It's not included by default. This would moee generally fall under deception.
I'll ask again, anything to add to the actual discussion?
Lie of omission is an atypical use and is inconsistent with the definition that I posted earlier. You can cherry pick your definition while ignoring the one I posted and use typical examples that don't correleate to this atypical use that changes the very definition.
If I withhold information from you it may be misleading, but it quite simply is not a lie. Now please stop trolling and actually contribute to the conversation about distrust of the media instead of focusing on the very thing you complained about - semantics.
Your source is spinning the definition of lie, for some reason.
A question for you: if you make a mistake or misunderstand something then share it, are you a liar?
I don't mean like your current actions - the part where you are pretending that you have never encountered the notion of lying like this is clearly itself some sort of lie. I mean like say you apply some math rule incorrectly on a test. Should you be kicked out for lying to the teacher?
Saying something incorrect, but which you believe to be true, is no lie.
> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war ...
But propaganda is tricky, you need people to keep paying attention which means the most overt spin is to be avoided. Done well you shift the narrative over decades not just swap positions on day one. Fox News is the most well known US example, but you don’t want to just preach to people who already believe your message.
Thus you want to control the widest possible selection of media.
The New York Post is a great example. It was the sports and bookie newspaper - they’d publish Vegas odds and have tabloid news. They slowly transformed into a giant editorial paper and funnel into the broader Fox ecosystem.
They have an effective, free product. I need to pay to read The NY Times, but Fox is free and the sponsors are all low quality high margin stuff. Radio is prostate pills, TV is old people drugs and gold, etc.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news-bias/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/one-america-news-network/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/cnn-bias/
The Fox issue is they conflate the two. I used to watch alot of TV news and the actual news content was pretty good on Fox on national issues, but their affiliates were usually pretty awful.
The news product produced by the networks until circa 1999 were a superior product in every way. Cable outlets have always danced with these issues as a TV channel that says the same thing all day gets boring.
The Onion does a better job than Fox.
If you consider the decades of scolarship it takes to clarify extremely well doccumented events, like the outbreak of the first world war, it's clear that even with a mountain of evidence, and all the time in the world, the 'basic facts' can be stubornly elusive even with the best of intentions.
The idea that an accurate picture should be able to emerge before 9-o'clock, in a newsroom, in a haze of conflicting reports, seems pretty incredible to me: and historically, that's not what has happened. So 'accurate news' is neither something we should expect, nor something we have a great deal of evidence of.
Personally, I don’t watch anything. I read across a broad array of print sources and prefer to trust specific journalists rather than entire organizations. I try to get most information from primary sources, or to triangulate information from multiple outlets which are preferably maximally uncorrelated. This is much easier than it may sound. And think tanks and academics are often better information sources than entertainment news outlets.
Are you implying the NYT never publishing anything that upsets their readership? Every week #CancelNYT trends because they "platformed" something their left wing audience didn't like.
Even Fox News lost viewers because they dared declare the 2020 election free and fair, and in favor of Biden.
Interesting, I worked in Saudi Arabia for awhile...most of the Africans and Southeast Asian laborers were all 100% convinced that professional wrestling was real. Pro wrestling is HUGE in developing nations.
> Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind of wooden interpretation of words and lazy disqualification is what leads someone to the "black and white" spin you're accusing the GP of. This falls in line with the type of _gotcha_ logic that insists: "Well you said x, and x means X regardless of rhetorical device usage." and "OP has expressed sentiment in Y, which leads me to believe he's actually Y and therefore not $CREDIBLE".
The point is, engaging like this deprives the dialogue of nuance, rhetorical freedom and grace. If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
This is still too extreme. "Lying" requires intentionality and implies maliciousness. It suggests that people who work in media are mostly evil people with the primary goal of misleading you. It both ignores and shows ignorance of how the media industry actually works. It also removes any hope of actually fixing the media industry because the only solution according to this mindset is getting rid of all the lying journalists. It doesn't leave any room to understand or address the incentives that actually got us to our current situation.
It's dishonest. End of story.
I think it's ok to take the illustration to that extreme, given the postulation that you say someone thinks that you should destroy a person's life over one loaf of bread.
Certainly makes me feel warm and fuzzy that our news orgs are looking out for us! :)
Do you not understand how horrifying a comparison this is?
I never described "all lying as malicious". I said it "implies maliciousness" and you said it "often is, malicious". I don't see a disagreement here.
:). My apologies, I've misread what you wrote.
I think the tension we're walking here is to keep one hand grounded in the fact that words can have a discrete, objective meaning *while also* allowing for individual freedom of expression. Modernity vs unhinged relativism.
> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, ...
is exactly what you call a "wooden" statement. But even when the author meant "by and large, the media lied", the statement is a dishonest exaggeration it is. Of course there are media that can be caught lying over and over again, but there are sufficient large, conscientious news outlets to suppose it is a dirty spin.
> If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
Discrediting all media equally is part of polarization, and letting it go isn't helpful. Discussing it as if it were true, as many seem to do, is a symptom that it has gone too far.
There is a difference between withholding information, selective emphasis, and outright lies. They are all bad, but they are equally bad. If you want to make things better you attempt to differentiate better from worse actors.
TLDR; all media, and all people, are biased, but they are not all equally biased. This bias can produce false beliefs. If you think false beliefs are a bad thing you promote the better actors and condemn the worse.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've just seen first hand (1) the real information on the battlefield (2) the public affair office's briefing to medias, which is factual although omits sensitive things and (3) the media's subsequent reporting which largely ignores what the PAO said and goes on with their made up interpretation. It's frankly sickening. They're writing fantasy.
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/railroaded
"Even though this, and all information quoted in this piece, is readily available to any reporter with access to Google, countless references to the dangers presented by phosgene are giving the public anxiety over the decision to execute the controlled burn. To pick one example from many dozens, a Newsweek story, titled Did Control Burn of Toxic Chemicals Make Ohio Train Derailment Worse?, includes the following sentence: “Phosgene is a deadly gas that was used in chemical warfare during World War I.” The report goes on to quote – and we kid you not – a TikTok video from an “entrepreneur” for more insight.
Sigh."
Lots of things are dangerous even at concentrations measured in PPM. For example, the level of Phosgene that’s “immediately dangerous to life” is 2 ppm: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/75445.html.
Maybe the point is that this 20 ppm quickly turns into less based on further dilution. But there’s a lot of analysis required to support the post’s assertions that the author just skips over.
Isn’t… isn’t that a pretty black and white spin on the idea of sociology? Do you have any studies to share that indicate “politically colored armchair philosophy”?
No, not for propaganda. If you want people to have a certain perception and position on a topic, selective reporting of topics and the presentation of them is far more relevant. This certainly does qualify as misleading.
Lies are even more ineffective since they often can be directly disproved, which biases people to believe the opposite. You want to present your spin in a certain blur.
Many prominent sociologist pretty much explain the mechanisms media and advertisers employ in detail. To say this is a fringe position is misleading too.
Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.
Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.
At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.
It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)
> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.
Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.
What a naïveté. Independent journalists are even more beholden to their audiences, if they start talking up something those audiences don’t like, their incomes dwindle. I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence.
Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.
Your comment makes no sense with Matt Taibbi's statements. I'm not sure you understand what he said and corrected.
Do you mean when he apologized for adamantly saying that Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and it was only 'dishonest types' that were pushing the narrative that Russia was going to invade? I mean, when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong in such a biased (an anti-discourse) way I kinda stop following anything old boy says so you are going to have to give me more details about what specific walk back of his you are referring to?
I see. So, when he retracts and apologizes for a mistake, he can't be listened to anymore. If he doesn't retract a mistake, he's one of the Bad Guy independent media who never corrects a mistake. The requirement then is to be 100% right about every take in his career.
I wonder how that standard holds up to the corporate media who, just as a single example, told everyone the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian op, likely changing the result of our Presidential election, whereas Hunter years later admits the story was real and the laptop was his?
> nefarious plots behind everything
The "nefarious plot behind everything" is that our government is corrupt. Just like most governments around the world, and just as has been largely the case within empires for millennia. To frame government corruption as a wild conspiracy theory requires ignorance to much of human history.
"Elon isn't right wing, give me one example of that"
- Endorsed Ron desantis
- Told everyone to vote Republican
- Tweeted out "I am a Republican"
The 'powers that be' bias is a bit different and takes mant forms.
Aka institutional powers (aka Dem/GOP), individual institutional powers (aka stop a story from embarrassing a colleague Executive), Natoinal bias (aka stories during wartime are not quite the same), 'Civil/Public' bias (aka stories about vaccines during a pandemic), Corporate Institutions (aka advertisers, don't want to upset them).
Funny enought those tend not to be the one's we get the most in a huff for, rather, we fixate more in the ideological narrative stuff because it's more visible.
You don't really see the 'national bias' at all unless you're outside of the country. You don't see the 'corporate bias' bedcause it tends to be displayed in terms of 'stories that don't exist'.
All of that said we should strive to be better.
> Many credible books on that topic to read.
Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!
Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger outlets would not publish it without source information etc and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking to his word of "Not revealing sources".
It's pretty clear that to get to the bottom of this we either need some leak or enough politicians in Congress who take this seriously, and get people to testify under oath. (Of course it'd be a good start to hold accountable those who lie to Congress, like Keith Alexander and James Clapper.)
[0] https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113
What is your evidence such a system exists today?
I had been taught that The Times was the most objective news organ here; it did carry an aura and style that seemed objective. I realized that what the objective "facts" are turns out to depend on your point-of-view, and it's harder to know what that point-of-view is if the organ is pretending to be "objective".
Ever since, I've preferred to get my news from sources that wear their bias on their sleeve.
It's not one uniform block, it's thousands of people with different intensions and knowledge.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ
The US has over 7000 stations
What a disingenuous argument. Proceed, I won't stop you.
It’s pretty easy why trust in media has eroded in my lifetime (I’m a 40 something). We deregulated and allowed for consolidation of ownership of print, broadcast and eventually online media.
That changed the dynamic. People will always correctly call out right wing talk radio as an example but the problems with media are more subtle as well. Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. If you were around in the 90s, you’ll remember how the OJ Simpson drama was a transformational event - which would not have happened in 1982. Serious journalism gave way to circus.
Our wiser predecessors learned in the 1920s and 1930s of the danger of mass media. Right wing nutcases like Father Coughlin, demagogues like Huey Long, America First, and more extreme left wing labor activists bear a strong resemblance to the characters in modern media.
One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.
But the problem is way more insidious and pervasive than performative partisan issues, which are generally manufactured culture wars. Those issues serve two purposes:
1. To make people angry and keep them angry. Angry people are "engaged"; and
2. To sow division and prevent class solidarity.
One of the most wildly successful examples of propaganda is the idea of the middle class. This serves to demonize the so-called "lower classes", typically labeling them as lazy, criminal, morally bankrupt and drains on the state.
There are only two classes: labor and capital owners.
Yet propaganda has been so successful that labor will defend the interests of billionaires to the detriment of their own interests. The number of people who would die on the hill of opposing Musk and Bezos paying slightly more taxes is depressing.
Media is a key tool in this endeavour. It's why you see wall-to-wall coverage of the China balloon (which literally does not matter at all) and a virtual media blackout of the environmental catastrophe and massive corporate failings that underpin the East Palestine train derailment.
Media represents and advocates for corporate interests and systemic interests.
In the years before the internet we had newsletters and amateur radio. https://media.tenor.com/9k_DNT8tBA4AAAAd/simpsons-i-wish-to-...
Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. Even among the non-postal "decentralized" distribution protocols. The old saying that people become leery of media reporting when they see how their own specialty is botched applies to even the credentialed bloggers when they step out of their lane just a bit.
I've personally noticed fact reporting biases when, for instance, reading a story on the same event from Fox News and CNN. But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore.
The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.
> But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.
Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
Definitely agree. But it's also difficult to fact check even if you do distrust. Even educated bloggers and readers can have difficulty accurately interpreting information, and what that information indicates, if technological advances make their knowledgebase outdated.
> Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.
In some cases, such as when the source of particular facts all originate from the same person, sure. Or when everyone's article is just a rewrite of the AP News or Reuters release. But in the general case we all can know who won the superbowl, and by what margin and what plays.
All US news stations covered Hilary's campaign at least 5x more than Sanders.
That's without even getting into the hit pieces, the lies, the questions sneaked to Hillary in advance.
That style of narrative warping is repeated across every topic that might hurt corporate profits. There's facts, and then there's repetition, presentation, sentiment.
Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern train derailment - one story on page 20, with no context linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock buyback last year, no context about their lobbying against the very regulations that would have prevented this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't even name the company.
US media is absolute unequivocal dogshit across the board. It's utterly indefensible. That half of American's have any faith at all in corporate news is astounding. Trust them for sport coverage, sure - but that's entertainment friendo, not news.
And all of the investigative journalism sites that would report in this detail on events like this are asking for donations to keep going. The advertiser support isn't there.
I actually don't think it's possible to solve the problem of funding being able to influence journalism. Although there are independent journalists like on substack (which could be what you mean) I am not convinced that is much different from corporate media except the journalist is more like an LLC or sole proprietorship.
I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA.
Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.
Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1.
They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources.
So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.
Trickle through to HALF the population. Frankly it's shocking that 50% don't think information they receive is a component of some narrative.
Which ones prove systemic, deliberate deception?
But most sociologists are totally in on the game. It used to be that the mainstream media narrative was opposite of what the sociologists preferred people to believe, and at the time you had academics talk about Manufactured Consent, and False Consciousness etc. These days, the press is more aligned with academics, so they prefer to keep it shush.
Here is an explicit example, published just a few weeks ago:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X2211509...
> The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents
From the abstract:
> Low-income Black fathers have been portrayed in the media and in research as uninvolved and disengaged from their children. The current study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 2578) to examine adolescents’ reports of relationships and interaction with their biological fathers. The results showed there were no significant differences among Black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, and Other fathers for adolescents’ perceptions of closeness or interaction with fathers.
Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.
The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.
Imagine reading a paper which “debunks” a “myth” of lack of involvement of women in corporate boards or C-level position, which simply excludes companies that have zero women on boards or as C-level officers from consideration. It would be hard to view it as anything other than deliberate deception. This sort of ignoring of obvious factors is, however, extremely common in published sociology research, and the academic community is extremely good at pretending to not notice deliberately lousy scholarship, when it aligns well with political opinions of 90% sociologists, and attacks anyone who tries to bring attention to it.
There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study.
> The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.
Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this.
[1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/d...
The sociologist notes will note that the media serves the interests of the powerful while still reporting some number of facts. The most extreme of the scandalized public will say "the media lies - they say X so Y must be true and X must be a plot". This produces a whole of truly bizarre thinking (often on the right but no doubt on the left as well).
I think it is undeniable that new organizations are deliberately misleading the public in many cases, not necessarily part of the conspiracy but simply acting as the agent of the government. There are many cases when is became obvious.
It is also easy to find sources that are free from government collusion usually classified either far left or far right whatever those mean.