[cbondurant]

I think the biggest thing that makes me distrust the news as it stands is that I feel like news reporting is far too prone to overly leveling debates. And by that I mean making both sides come across as equally credible, even when that could not be further from the truth.

The most common way I see it happen is like this: you have a situation some group says that some totally safe thing is actually super dangerous. There's a large body of scientific literature that really clearly shows its totally safe. the news reports on it as such: "While many within the scientific community state that there is no harm with X, anti-X proponents respond that the current studies are not substantial enough, and that they are simply asking questions." This framing, does not point out that the anti-X proponents are just a group of 10 people, nor does it describe how much evidence there exists in the scientific literature showing the thing is safe. Both sides are made to sound equally reasonable, which in my mind is practically a lie by omission. Because they aren't equally reasonable.

Edit: One additional thought. I still will read news articles if they get shared to me, and I try to evaluate based off of what the source is. but another reason I don't actively keep a news subscription is because news orgs love reporting on tragedy. Because its more noteworthy. I'm just not interested in reading yet another article about how crime is on the rise. Or about the most recent fatal car crash. Etc.

I stare into the void enough as it is. I don't want another.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Strong agree. There seem to be a lot of people who think that being in the middle without taking a side is virtuous in itself, as if there's a law of equilibrium keeping both sides equally crazy or competent or corrupt at any time. In reality they're just getting dragged by the Overton window as other, richer people slide it around.

[Aunche]

You're overestimating the number of people who trust scientific concensus. More people believe in creationism than evolution by purely natural selection. What's your alternative to treating both sides with equal weight without making the unscientific side feel disenfranchised?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/647594/majority-credits-god-hum...

[BeFlatXIII]

Make them disenfranchised write-offs.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Its a long-standing criticism, where if the president suddenly announced that he thought the earth was flat, the New York Times headline the next day would be "Shape of the Earth; Views Differ".

[gdulli]

Dems Retreat to Round Earth Bubble, Succumb to Flat Earth Derangement Syndrome

[MangoToupe]

Not to mention problems often have many causes and many possible solutions—even framing the reporting having merely two sides is crippling to news quality

[ZeroGravitas]

"crime is on the rise" is a strange example to give as it's been trending down most places for decades.

So it's a perfect example of, assuming they're not knowingly lying, focusing on random noise in the signal to generate misleading stories

[giardini]

ZeroGravitas says>" it's been trending down most places for decades."<

The problem is that reported crime is a political number: those in power want the number to go down on their watch and they have control of the reporting mechanism. Pressure exists at every level, from patrolmen filling out incident reports to statisticians collating the numbers for the mayor, to move the numbers downward.

There is every reason to be skeptical of reported criminal statistical trends in USA cities today.

[itbeho]

I hear this "crime is down" theme a lot. But I see with my own eyes, in my own neighborhood, that the opposite is happening. Other people do as well and that is a big reason why the news media is viewed negatively.

[watwut]

One problem is that the most distrust toward "traditional media" is from people who completely trust to even more dishonest resources. It is not that traditional media would be perfect, but their faults are not the actual reason for the fall of trust.

Instead, it is well paid grifters for whom the issue with traditional media is that they do not lie enough.

[jasonlotito]

I've heard this referred to as sanewashing. You really started noticing this with Trump. Compare what he literally says to what he's quoted as saying. He likes to rail against MSM, but man, they do a lot of heavy lifting, making it seem like what he says is remotely sane.

[noir_lord]

They often edit his speeches for brevity because they don't have time in a news report to post the full hour long ramble of tangents off tangents off tangents even doing that makes his speeches seem considerably more coherent than they actually are if you watch the whole thing.