This is hardly surprising. More people are able to see things for themselves and coming to sharply divergent opinions than those of media outlets. So for example you'll watch actual trial coverage-all of it, not just any one day-and get to see clips like this:
The funny thing is that I don't think there's a single statement in the second article that's actually factually inaccurate with what USA Today said. They're just repeating what was said in court in that one part of the trial and just not mentioning that some of those statements are completely and utterly bogus for myriad reasons that anyone who watched the trial could tell you.
But damn if it doesn't give you a different impression of how things are going in court than actually watching the thing itself with context.
Traditional media paints in broad brush strokes. They simplify or streamline their stories for two reasons that are not nefarious, but lead to a lot of problems:
1. Time - Television news, which is how most of America consumes news needs to fit a story into a 30 seconds to 1 minute spot. Even if they devote more time to it, it is a series of short spots. It is almost an art form to try and package it and they are doing it on a break neck deadline. Even written content will often have a strict word count.
2. They are producing content for the lowest common denominator. Since you used USA Today, they, for example, write to an 8th grade reading comprehension level. This often involves simplifying the narrative.
And then you add on top any biases or partisan news, which sells. There is a profit motive to have a lot of angry upset readers. This is where it gets dangerous.
I don’t know what the solution is. More and more people are turning to even simpler news sources like a Facebook post. I think reading comprehension is a major issue. We have so much access to information but a large portion of the population seems unwilling or unable to effectively parse it.
Sometimes, when things don't make sense it's cause no one in the room has any idea what to do.
They don't have the time, skills, resources or experience to produce a good outcome. And so whatever they do produces either no outcomes or creates more issues.
There are only two know strategies for such scenarios
1. Find a simpler problem - refocus everyone on something simple, within their abilities to solve so that atleast outcomes are produced how ever simple they maybe.
2. Exit the room and disconnect from the people trapped in there (cuz they want to pull as many ppl into the trap hoping it will solve the prob)
The Kyle Rittenhouse trial was a great example of this. The media painted him as a white supremacist and all that, and one of Biden’s campaign ads implied he was those sort of things. I was buying into the mainstream news narrative at first, but then I watched most of the actual trial. In the evidence and testimony presented I didn’t see even a hint of racial bias, and my conclusion is he probably shouldn’t have even been charged since the video footage clearly shows what he did was lawful. I will never trust most news sources again.
I don’t think there is much doubt that traditional media companies put profits over reporting and facts. It is difficult to critique war when defense contractors buy up much of your ad space. Likewise, it is difficult to critique big pharma when pharmaceutical companies buy up many of your ads, etc.
The problem with the proposal to make the news publicly funded is that that just replaces one set of incentives with another. If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much, then it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government. This same kind of thing has started to creep into other parts of society like the public education system where standardized test scores are often considered more important than a well-rounded education.
Personally, this is why I like the business model of places like Substack where you can find specific journalists you trust to actually hold people in power accountable and can support them directly. Finding truly unbiased information these days is not easy.
Speaking of Substack, I highly recommend this three part series about conflicts of interest and media companies:
Defense contractors don’t buy ad space in regular media outlets. In Aviation Week and maybe Foreign Policy and some trade
journals, sure. When was the last time you saw an ad for an F-35 on nytimes.com? Why would they advertise defense systems there?
Anyway I actually agree that traditional media fails to put the truth first. But the reasons are way more complicated than your post indicates. Raytheon is not buying ads in the Condé Nast magazines, the WSJ, CNN etc.
There are a number of reasons these media orgs fail the truth. Certainly money is part of it. But I think the biggest single reason is how they source their stories. It is rooted in history and inertia and laziness and a certain awe of power. They are very comfortable talking to institutions and way less comfortable dealing with individual actors. Workers, dissidents, whistleblowers, the disgruntled, call them what you will. Finding a real human experience is so much harder than being spoon fed by people paid to make you swallow easy truths.
I mean, it’s 1000x easier now than it was 25 years ago. But learning how to listen to and vet that information is still hard, and digging on it is hard, and it’s all incredibly risky. No one ever got fired for printing an Apple statement. No one ever got dragged on Twitter because their corporate PR source got exposed and arrested.
> If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much, then it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government
Often public broadcasters are set up where their funding doesn't come from taxes but from a license fee that they collect themselves.
What I've seen in these countries is that public broadcasters still have a bias (due to journalists generally coming from the same background/education/maybe even geography) but it's not strictly aligned with whoever is currently in the government.
> If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much, then it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government.
That's why you need both. You need private journalism to serve as a check on government, and public journalism to serve as a check on private interests. Forbid political advertising in private papers, and forbid private journalists from working for government after leaving private media; forbid corporate advertising in public papers, and forbid public journalists from working for corporate interests after leaving public media.
When have defense contractors ever bought ad space in national news? That seems like wasted ad dollars targeting a lot of people who aren't in the market to buy arms.
> If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much
Parliaments decide how and how much funding media outlets receive. Not governments. And the people elect the members of parliaments. You make it so that every outlet that reaches over a certain threshold of viewers gets funding proportionate to the share of viewers it has. Just like public election funding and how parties receive funding based on their vote shares.
This wasn’t supposed to be a problem because to get airwaves from the FCC broadcasters had to agree to broadcast a certain amount of public interest programming, which they do with news.
The problem is basically everyone seems to be trying to see how far they can push the line on “good enough” without ending up getting fined.
And the FCC knows how dangerous it is to try to rein that in.
And media consolidation means you can produce crappy news and not fail because you only compete with yourself or one other corporation that also happens to try to send as little possible on news.
All incentives to do a good job (as a corporation) are gone. And as long as the slide wasn’t too fast they wouldn’t get called on it.
So here we are.
Edit: and oh yeah, not airing a prime time presidential address to the nation because your ratings would go down. I’m sure the public interest rule was designed to protect your ratings above all else.
When I got into journalism a little less than two decades ago it was common to see “firewalls” between different departments at major publications like newspapers and magazines, which protected the coverage.
That is, the advertiser had no influence on the editorial coverage, and opinion doesn’t bleed into the content.
I think in the digital age, the complicating factor is that the decision-makers have winnowed down this work so much that the firewalls just don’t hold up as well as they used to. Owners with an agenda may not care about church-state arguments. In the case of small publications, the writer or the editor is also the ad-seller. And in publications that lean more ideological, opinion-oriented content can prove deeply influential on the editorial coverage. (See what’s happened to cable TV over the last quarter-century.)
All of which is to say that the reason this point of view is prevalent is because we haven’t done enough to invest in these institutions to ensure that firewall exists in the first place. To do it right, you need:
- An owner that actually cares about having a firewall
- Strong ethical rules for the journalists
- Advertising standards that help ad-buyers understand where the wall is
For newspapers, a key element of show a limit of ad influence is the front page. If there’s a deeply integrated ad of some kind, that reflects a negative influence on the coverage. But in the online world, we have native ads and tracking, and both of these can be deeply integrated into the experience.
I think what we’re seeing is that there aren’t strong enough firewalls—and if I were to blame anyone, I would blame the ad department. They allowed their standards to lower to the point where publications simply gave advertisers too much. We need to get back to more magazine-style advertising in publications where a single sponsor buys a premium spot and it pays for a good chunk of the coverage.
I'd be willing to pay for news from organizations like the AP or Reuters. Trad newspapers like NYT/WSJ seem to just cater to their bases. Cable companies are more entertainment and are beholden to their advertisers.
I felt things like PBS are a public good. Growing up I got educational programming from there and that should be available to the public as a last resort.
A bit tangential but HUGE shout-out to PBS for their science shows on YouTube. I follow PBS Eons and PBS Space Time, both are fantastic and highly educational.
The AP is made up of CNN, USA Today, NBC, Washington Post, etc writers be them local or national branch. Reuters is slightly better but this isn’t a problem that can be solved with just throwing more money at someone.
Disclosure: I work in public media. It's a pretty broad ecosystem of NPR and PBS affiliates and independent news sources like Pro Publica, The Guardian or niche sources like The Markup or Grist. If you follow a few big ones and few local ones, you'll get almost everything you'd need. That being said, I think it's impossible to live without the top tier papers of records like Axios, NY Times and WaPo. They definitely push profitability, but they also unmatched resources to dig up hard news and get it to a huge audience. I even love CNN (cnn.com, not the TV network) just because their coverage is so broad and exhaustive even if so much of it is fluff. There's stuff that sucks about all of them, but we'd be much worse off if they didn't exist.
> I'd be willing to pay for news from organizations like the AP or Reuters.
reuters.com is free as an invdividual, you just need to make an (entirely free) account or you get limited to X articles per month. I don't think apnews.com even asks you to make an account.
I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong. PBS generally has been some of the best news / reporting I’ve seen.
That said, it’s still driven by ideology — “good” being defined by someone. You can see it in the titles of their documentaries and programming.
If you go through their programming objectively and put yourselves in the mindset the opposing side it becomes rather clear. This includes things like portraying nationalism as bad or Christianity as evil (see some of their frontline documentaries)
While the bias is there. PBS is generally one of the least bias in the space, I think that’s what makes it so frustrating. A slight improvement in breadth and depth would make it amazing.
I also have to give credit to pbs for often releasing full-length interviews. I’ve really appreciated watching hours long interviews with various people about a specific topic. See “Putin files”
Most news organizations say their mission is to inform people, but their actual mission is to tell people what to think, regardless of what the facts are. Their political agenda shines through their "reporting" on just about everything but the weather report.
Strike that, even the weather report has become politicized.
It makes me wonder, has it always been this way, or do I just notice it more as I grow older?
As for government funding of news media, we all know where that leads - all you'll read in it is the government's political agenda. Do you really want to get your news from the White House press secretary?
Do people in America (or anywhere else) actually believe that news organizations actually follow some kind of "mission"?
Why? How does being a news organization suddenly puts you apart from any other organization/corporation with all the corruption factors?
I don't really get this mythos of journalists being white knights in shining armor or wise sages with a holy "mission".
From where I stand, it seems like an over-glorification of people who are essentially just experts on writing texts, and not much else. And just as all the other people and organizations, they will have their own agenda, their own biases and their own ways of corruption.
Personally, I don't really see much point of modern journalism, other than maybe political signaling. Narrative writing style became a weird norm and it just feels like you are being treated like cattle. I want facts, references, comparisons, critical analysis. Instead I get a story-time and have to do all the analysis myself - most of the times the story ends up being a misrepresentative or omitting crucial facts. And you just sit there wondering, whether it was a deliberate "control the narrative" kind of manipulation, or maybe it's just the author being an idiot, or maybe today it's this post-truth thing of not addressing the parts of truth that may be beneficial to adversaries.
Well of course they do. The "mission" doesn't pay squat in the current environment. Fabricated outrage and tribal politics is far more lucrative and all the integrity in the world wont save you from operation expenses. People mostly just use news articles as justification for their existing political biases and the news organizations are happy to accommodate.
It’s difficult to accept the amorality of something you are interacting with, particularly if you are reacting to it. It forces accountability onto oneself which one often tries to avoid.
Think of it like a drug. It’s totally amoral, but it will take you to the end if you let it. Blaming the drug shifts accountability. Once you realize the drug is amoral and it is you who must stop, that’s when you take accountability.
The institution of the Media is amoral. If we sit here and say they do things for money is the same as saying such and such drug is addictive, or even more ridiculous, such and such drug has nicotine in it. Okay? It’s amoral.
Facing something amoral within yourself or outside of yourself is often unbelievable. You will always try to describe it or comprehend it, but the answer is simple and frightening.
The media actually hasn’t shifted from its virtues. We want them to be divorced from what they report and who they report it to. The amoral quality is of the essence to do it right. They should not care about right or wrong, just do, report. That same underlying trait is manifesting in another way, is all.
Most of what we call “news” these days are not really news, but reporting on an endless stream of negative events, because negativity and sensationalism attracts more viewership (and thus, money).
Real news should be mostly local, about all of the good and bad things around us that actually matter in our lives. Otherwise, there’s really no sense in following the “news”, it’s just a meaningless waste of our lives.
Nationalizing the most watched news sources leads to horrible political consequences. Politicians quickly figure out that whomever gets more airtime wins and elections so the news becomes a visual diary of the activities of whoever is in power + whomever owns non-government media. In Eastern Europe the mafia bought most media in small countries, and now they cannot be dislodged.
As a general rule, people aren’t willing to pay for the things considered public goods.
Then they whine that said news chases views.
Like Republican communities that underpay teachers and wonder why their kids have no futures because someone with a brain built a robot to do their repetitive trivial job.
It's so crazy to me how many people are OK with ad-supported news while complaining about the objectivity of news generally. IMO (having worked for news organizations), this one of the biggest problems with the industry.
I worked for a non-profit news org in 2016 and we spent a lot of time and energy covering the presidential race. One of the biggest ethical challenges we constantly faced as an organization was the reality that a certain candidate for president drew astronomical traffic to our site when his name was in a headline compared to everyone else, which meant more revenue for us. It wasn't even close.
We hated this because we wanted to apply coverage to candidates equally, but the discrepancies in traffic were impossible to ignore. And so every time we ran another story about this candidate, we had to ask ourselves if it was appropriate or not since he was not local to our state or region.
The news industry has been dying a painfully slow death ever since the internet arrived and it's not easy to leave money on the table with any sort of regularity. And when news organizations do choose to leave the money on the table, they are never recognized for it because nobody will come out and say "we really wanted to run another story about X, but we chose not to because we didn't feel it was right to keep doing that". It's a no-win situation.
Here's the bottom line: ad-based news models rely heavily on traffic metrics to generate ad revenue, which is derived from serving ads. I believe this is the single most poisonous aspect of making news today because those who make news can quite easily see what kind of news sells and what doesn't. As long as news organizations are focused on driving traffic to their site to generate ad revenue, this will be a problem. But people don't want to pay for news, so where does that leave our system? We're not willing as a society to give up the convenience that this deeply corrupt system gives us.
I’ll happily call bullshit. It’s not money - money in news organizations is drying up and everyone knows it. It’s the CYA mentality that comes before the product these days. With so little money to go around, no one wants to be the one to have screwed up in their organization for management to blame their money woes on.
They’ve all become hyper polarized in the last ~10 years. Go find some footage of BBC or CNN or MSNBC from pre-2010. You might be a bit shocked how, well, boring it all is.
I apologize for my American-centric view of politics, but something fundamentally changed about the world around the time Trump, Bernie, etc were making waves in 2015-2016 in US politics. It’s almost like we entered a parallel reality. Shortly after the media has gone extremist, not only in the US but globally.
It's hardly just the media that's seen a change of tone; go look at a Presidential debate from 20-30 years ago. Look at how Bush and Reagan debated the issue of illegal immigration in 1980; it's a short clip, but it feels totally foreign these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixi9_cciy8w
I agree and I can’t figure it out. It’s not only the media either - it’s everyone. Extreme polarization is everywhere, and all of it seems to boil down to a struggle for power. Rich vs poor, citizens vs police, republican vs democrat, autocratic vs democratic - all being seen in extreme forms. It’s like the world has fallen under a spell or a mass psychosis.
I would love to hear theories of what the root cause is. Is it due to massive state sponsored manipulation campaigns via social media?
I disagree. I saw a huge change when Clinton passed the baton to George W. Bush. For the last 2 years of Clinton’s presidency, the press (all of it, CNN, NBC, Fox, etc.) were reporting daily on the various scandals in the White House. They seemed to be asking hard-hitting questions all around and being very skeptical of the answers. Literally the first weeks of Bush’s presidency, it was like all of that went out the window and they just started accepting whatever his cabinet told them. It was like stepping into Bizarro land. Even the supposedly liberal outlets felt like they just gave up. It was so strange.
It is hard not to feel that way. I guess most of the staff at those organizations would say that the mission comes first, but they have to stay in business to do the mission.
[+] [-] Natsu|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hw0QSbDQNo
And then you'll read stories like this which are only about one single part of the trial:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/10/20/darrel...
The funny thing is that I don't think there's a single statement in the second article that's actually factually inaccurate with what USA Today said. They're just repeating what was said in court in that one part of the trial and just not mentioning that some of those statements are completely and utterly bogus for myriad reasons that anyone who watched the trial could tell you.
But damn if it doesn't give you a different impression of how things are going in court than actually watching the thing itself with context.
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
1. Time - Television news, which is how most of America consumes news needs to fit a story into a 30 seconds to 1 minute spot. Even if they devote more time to it, it is a series of short spots. It is almost an art form to try and package it and they are doing it on a break neck deadline. Even written content will often have a strict word count.
2. They are producing content for the lowest common denominator. Since you used USA Today, they, for example, write to an 8th grade reading comprehension level. This often involves simplifying the narrative.
And then you add on top any biases or partisan news, which sells. There is a profit motive to have a lot of angry upset readers. This is where it gets dangerous.
I don’t know what the solution is. More and more people are turning to even simpler news sources like a Facebook post. I think reading comprehension is a major issue. We have so much access to information but a large portion of the population seems unwilling or unable to effectively parse it.
[+] [-] gsatic|3 years ago|reply
They don't have the time, skills, resources or experience to produce a good outcome. And so whatever they do produces either no outcomes or creates more issues.
There are only two know strategies for such scenarios
1. Find a simpler problem - refocus everyone on something simple, within their abilities to solve so that atleast outcomes are produced how ever simple they maybe.
2. Exit the room and disconnect from the people trapped in there (cuz they want to pull as many ppl into the trap hoping it will solve the prob)
[+] [-] TexanFeller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsociety999|3 years ago|reply
The problem with the proposal to make the news publicly funded is that that just replaces one set of incentives with another. If governments dictate when media outlets receive funding and how much, then it is unlikely that said media companies will be overly critical of the government. This same kind of thing has started to creep into other parts of society like the public education system where standardized test scores are often considered more important than a well-rounded education.
Personally, this is why I like the business model of places like Substack where you can find specific journalists you trust to actually hold people in power accountable and can support them directly. Finding truly unbiased information these days is not easy.
Speaking of Substack, I highly recommend this three part series about conflicts of interest and media companies:
- https://rebeccastrong.substack.com/p/big-media-big-conflicts...
- https://rebeccastrong.substack.com/p/the-monopoly-on-your-mi...
- https://rebeccastrong.substack.com/p/the-monopoly-on-your-mi...
[+] [-] eduction|3 years ago|reply
Anyway I actually agree that traditional media fails to put the truth first. But the reasons are way more complicated than your post indicates. Raytheon is not buying ads in the Condé Nast magazines, the WSJ, CNN etc.
There are a number of reasons these media orgs fail the truth. Certainly money is part of it. But I think the biggest single reason is how they source their stories. It is rooted in history and inertia and laziness and a certain awe of power. They are very comfortable talking to institutions and way less comfortable dealing with individual actors. Workers, dissidents, whistleblowers, the disgruntled, call them what you will. Finding a real human experience is so much harder than being spoon fed by people paid to make you swallow easy truths.
I mean, it’s 1000x easier now than it was 25 years ago. But learning how to listen to and vet that information is still hard, and digging on it is hard, and it’s all incredibly risky. No one ever got fired for printing an Apple statement. No one ever got dragged on Twitter because their corporate PR source got exposed and arrested.
[+] [-] kalleboo|3 years ago|reply
Often public broadcasters are set up where their funding doesn't come from taxes but from a license fee that they collect themselves.
What I've seen in these countries is that public broadcasters still have a bias (due to journalists generally coming from the same background/education/maybe even geography) but it's not strictly aligned with whoever is currently in the government.
[+] [-] SamoyedFurFluff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cocacola1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solatic|3 years ago|reply
That's why you need both. You need private journalism to serve as a check on government, and public journalism to serve as a check on private interests. Forbid political advertising in private papers, and forbid private journalists from working for government after leaving private media; forbid corporate advertising in public papers, and forbid public journalists from working for corporate interests after leaving public media.
[+] [-] kshahkshah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Timwi|3 years ago|reply
The (publicly funded) BBC is plenty critical of the British government. The same is true of ARD in Germany.
[+] [-] interotrong123|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
Parliaments decide how and how much funding media outlets receive. Not governments. And the people elect the members of parliaments. You make it so that every outlet that reaches over a certain threshold of viewers gets funding proportionate to the share of viewers it has. Just like public election funding and how parties receive funding based on their vote shares.
[+] [-] MBCook|3 years ago|reply
The problem is basically everyone seems to be trying to see how far they can push the line on “good enough” without ending up getting fined.
And the FCC knows how dangerous it is to try to rein that in.
And media consolidation means you can produce crappy news and not fail because you only compete with yourself or one other corporation that also happens to try to send as little possible on news.
All incentives to do a good job (as a corporation) are gone. And as long as the slide wasn’t too fast they wouldn’t get called on it.
So here we are.
Edit: and oh yeah, not airing a prime time presidential address to the nation because your ratings would go down. I’m sure the public interest rule was designed to protect your ratings above all else.
[+] [-] shortformblog|3 years ago|reply
That is, the advertiser had no influence on the editorial coverage, and opinion doesn’t bleed into the content.
I think in the digital age, the complicating factor is that the decision-makers have winnowed down this work so much that the firewalls just don’t hold up as well as they used to. Owners with an agenda may not care about church-state arguments. In the case of small publications, the writer or the editor is also the ad-seller. And in publications that lean more ideological, opinion-oriented content can prove deeply influential on the editorial coverage. (See what’s happened to cable TV over the last quarter-century.)
All of which is to say that the reason this point of view is prevalent is because we haven’t done enough to invest in these institutions to ensure that firewall exists in the first place. To do it right, you need:
- An owner that actually cares about having a firewall
- Strong ethical rules for the journalists
- Advertising standards that help ad-buyers understand where the wall is
For newspapers, a key element of show a limit of ad influence is the front page. If there’s a deeply integrated ad of some kind, that reflects a negative influence on the coverage. But in the online world, we have native ads and tracking, and both of these can be deeply integrated into the experience.
I think what we’re seeing is that there aren’t strong enough firewalls—and if I were to blame anyone, I would blame the ad department. They allowed their standards to lower to the point where publications simply gave advertisers too much. We need to get back to more magazine-style advertising in publications where a single sponsor buys a premium spot and it pays for a good chunk of the coverage.
[+] [-] mjevans|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yhippa|3 years ago|reply
I felt things like PBS are a public good. Growing up I got educational programming from there and that should be available to the public as a last resort.
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|3 years ago|reply
It’s a lack of integrity.
[+] [-] hairofadog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpm|3 years ago|reply
reuters.com is free as an invdividual, you just need to make an (entirely free) account or you get limited to X articles per month. I don't think apnews.com even asks you to make an account.
[+] [-] lettergram|3 years ago|reply
That said, it’s still driven by ideology — “good” being defined by someone. You can see it in the titles of their documentaries and programming.
If you go through their programming objectively and put yourselves in the mindset the opposing side it becomes rather clear. This includes things like portraying nationalism as bad or Christianity as evil (see some of their frontline documentaries)
While the bias is there. PBS is generally one of the least bias in the space, I think that’s what makes it so frustrating. A slight improvement in breadth and depth would make it amazing.
I also have to give credit to pbs for often releasing full-length interviews. I’ve really appreciated watching hours long interviews with various people about a specific topic. See “Putin files”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk9igTqTx9s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88
or Steve bannons interview on frontline.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0
[+] [-] RajT88|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemvoltage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway6734|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|3 years ago|reply
AP is just as biased as the rest. Even if you remove ads the people with agenda are still everywhere.
> PBS are a left public good.
Fixed that for you, because it's so obvious how it has changed.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
Strike that, even the weather report has become politicized.
It makes me wonder, has it always been this way, or do I just notice it more as I grow older?
As for government funding of news media, we all know where that leads - all you'll read in it is the government's political agenda. Do you really want to get your news from the White House press secretary?
[+] [-] foverzar|3 years ago|reply
Do people in America (or anywhere else) actually believe that news organizations actually follow some kind of "mission"? Why? How does being a news organization suddenly puts you apart from any other organization/corporation with all the corruption factors?
I don't really get this mythos of journalists being white knights in shining armor or wise sages with a holy "mission".
From where I stand, it seems like an over-glorification of people who are essentially just experts on writing texts, and not much else. And just as all the other people and organizations, they will have their own agenda, their own biases and their own ways of corruption.
Personally, I don't really see much point of modern journalism, other than maybe political signaling. Narrative writing style became a weird norm and it just feels like you are being treated like cattle. I want facts, references, comparisons, critical analysis. Instead I get a story-time and have to do all the analysis myself - most of the times the story ends up being a misrepresentative or omitting crucial facts. And you just sit there wondering, whether it was a deliberate "control the narrative" kind of manipulation, or maybe it's just the author being an idiot, or maybe today it's this post-truth thing of not addressing the parts of truth that may be beneficial to adversaries.
[+] [-] CivBase|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encryptluks2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jesuscript|3 years ago|reply
Think of it like a drug. It’s totally amoral, but it will take you to the end if you let it. Blaming the drug shifts accountability. Once you realize the drug is amoral and it is you who must stop, that’s when you take accountability.
The institution of the Media is amoral. If we sit here and say they do things for money is the same as saying such and such drug is addictive, or even more ridiculous, such and such drug has nicotine in it. Okay? It’s amoral.
Facing something amoral within yourself or outside of yourself is often unbelievable. You will always try to describe it or comprehend it, but the answer is simple and frightening.
The media actually hasn’t shifted from its virtues. We want them to be divorced from what they report and who they report it to. The amoral quality is of the essence to do it right. They should not care about right or wrong, just do, report. That same underlying trait is manifesting in another way, is all.
[+] [-] dinvlad|3 years ago|reply
Real news should be mostly local, about all of the good and bad things around us that actually matter in our lives. Otherwise, there’s really no sense in following the “news”, it’s just a meaningless waste of our lives.
[+] [-] dzink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysleep|3 years ago|reply
Then they whine that said news chases views.
Like Republican communities that underpay teachers and wonder why their kids have no futures because someone with a brain built a robot to do their repetitive trivial job.
[+] [-] bilsbie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thr0wawayf00|3 years ago|reply
I worked for a non-profit news org in 2016 and we spent a lot of time and energy covering the presidential race. One of the biggest ethical challenges we constantly faced as an organization was the reality that a certain candidate for president drew astronomical traffic to our site when his name was in a headline compared to everyone else, which meant more revenue for us. It wasn't even close.
We hated this because we wanted to apply coverage to candidates equally, but the discrepancies in traffic were impossible to ignore. And so every time we ran another story about this candidate, we had to ask ourselves if it was appropriate or not since he was not local to our state or region.
The news industry has been dying a painfully slow death ever since the internet arrived and it's not easy to leave money on the table with any sort of regularity. And when news organizations do choose to leave the money on the table, they are never recognized for it because nobody will come out and say "we really wanted to run another story about X, but we chose not to because we didn't feel it was right to keep doing that". It's a no-win situation.
Here's the bottom line: ad-based news models rely heavily on traffic metrics to generate ad revenue, which is derived from serving ads. I believe this is the single most poisonous aspect of making news today because those who make news can quite easily see what kind of news sells and what doesn't. As long as news organizations are focused on driving traffic to their site to generate ad revenue, this will be a problem. But people don't want to pay for news, so where does that leave our system? We're not willing as a society to give up the convenience that this deeply corrupt system gives us.
[+] [-] jimbob45|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|3 years ago|reply
That basically sums up the state of "reporting".
Payout is view-driven which means anything goes to survive.
Media today is the equivalent of going to work sick "whatever it takes to not become homeless, frack everyone else".
[+] [-] pyuser583|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oceanplexian|3 years ago|reply
I apologize for my American-centric view of politics, but something fundamentally changed about the world around the time Trump, Bernie, etc were making waves in 2015-2016 in US politics. It’s almost like we entered a parallel reality. Shortly after the media has gone extremist, not only in the US but globally.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|3 years ago|reply
I would love to hear theories of what the root cause is. Is it due to massive state sponsored manipulation campaigns via social media?
Worth reading: https://consilienceproject.org/social-media-enables-undue-in...
[+] [-] bink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewebcount|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|3 years ago|reply