The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their ideas were good and some were bad, but every single day, this consensus influenced which stories made it to the front page and how they were framed.
Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.
But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.
You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course.
And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university and therefore share points of view with people who went to university is the same thing as William Randolph Hearst wholly inventing a story about Spain attacking a US ship to convince the public to start a war.
And what we have today, with social media & search monopolies sucking all economic surplus completely out of journalism, plus foreign-run and profit-run influence farms, plus algorithmic custom-tailoring of propaganda, is undoubtedly the worst we have ever seen.
> the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking.
It's constantly been with us since the beginning of the republic. Several of our founding fathers were actually publishers.
> this consensus
Consensus doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a product of an interest in profiting off the news. It seems obvious from this vantage what the fundamental problem is and why "journalists" are not a homogeneous group with identical outputs and why terms like "main stream" even exist.
> it helped with social cohesion and national identity
Which is why the FBI and CIA target it for manipulation so relentlessly.
> The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking.
We generally assume that there is an external reality that can be observed and understood. When someone 'consumes' journalism, how well does that reporting reflect the external reality? How well do people's perceptions match up with what physically happened?
For example: in November 2020 there was an election. Who got more votes, both in the popular vote and in the various states individually that counts towards the Electoral College? Who "won" the election?
It turns out that some news organizations—even with any biases—allow their readers/viewers to have a better picture of reality than others:
In France, at a very young age, we're taught that journalism is not impartial: people must take sides to express interesting opinions. We simply need to read them all: the Humanite to understand the communist point of view, the Monde for the socialists, the Figaro for the conservatives, the Croix for the Christians, etc.
Once you mix all these perspectives of the same events, you get, if not "the truth", a view of the impact of the events on each sub group in the nation, what they propose to do about it, and put some water in your own wine whichever side you're on: when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.
Thinking "The Washington Post" was "impartial" and "about the truth" before is a pipe dream: they were partial, rational within the confines of their choice ideology, and disagreeing with many subgroups in your country anyway. They just shifted sides but you can find other newspapers now to counter balance.
As long as no newspaper pretend to be impartial and is clearly identified, the national debate stays healthy, no ?
The problem with modern print journalism is the business model just doesn't work anymore. In the old days everything the paper provided was bait to get you to read the classified ads. DBAs, obits, for sale, for rent, seeking someone... all that stuff was in the paper, and you had to pay a lot of money to get your ad there.
The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly, but the classifides were what paid for the organization's fixed costs.
Now that revenue stream is gone. So most papers are in a death spiral, in which they cut costs, which causes the paper to be less attractive, causing people to drop their subs, forcing another round of cost cutting. The Sunday paper where I grew up used to be about two inches thick in half a dozen sections. Now it totals about twenty pages in one section.
Beyond that, you can't copyright news. You can copyright news copy, but there's nothing stopping other organizations from rewording your stuff and publishing without ever shouldering the cost of gathering news themselves.
My view is that we need a good micropayment system to enable low-friction payments for per page access. Pay walls that can be bypassed with a $0.01-$0.05 payment effected by a single click would be much better suited to digital media consumption patterns. Building out the infrastructure for such a system is not trivial though. It requires significant development (as well as adoption and legal acceptance) across an entire stack of technologies:
• a scalable open financial system at the base. The best candidate is the blockchain, but it is still not ready in terms of being capable of providing sufficient scalability, and its privacy gaps (the activity of every account is public) are still not solved due to highly aggressive AML/KYC policies that make even decentralized protocols that provide strong financial privacy (e.g. Samourai Wallet's CoinJoin, Tornado Cash) legally suspect
• broad adoption of open e-wallets, like cryptocurrency wallets
• wide adoption of digital cash that is not confined to a proprietary platform. Stablecoins are furthest along in this category
> They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore! I suppose that’s the final humiliation.
While there were always problems with bias (esp. to the ownership) of outlets, it feels there were stronger social-mores or collective beliefs that still helped curb things.
Consider the difference between a biased judge that needs to appear unbiased--or considers it part of their self-identity--versus one who does not.
The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and eventually torn to shreds.
It's very cable-news-brained to believe there always have to be two sides that are equally viable and that the only respectable unbiased stance is in the middle, dragged by the Overton window wherever it happens to go.
The newspaper industry has never been neutral. It has always been on the side of its owners. Whether that surfaced as warmongering, real estate hucksterism, flogging migration, reforming the entire nation to accommodate the car, or inventing white flight, newspapers always stood on the side of their owners' profits, not from the newspaper itself but from the owners' actual lines of business.
Journalists have always pretended to be some sort of righteous class. Upon closer examination you'll find they always are focused on conveying certain facts and steering the conversation. This is mostly a self perpetuated mythological construction that is not related to reality.
Fox News seems to be going strong, so I don't think this holds - we see the rise of the right wing shady and sloppy news dominating the market because its cheap, fast, and appeals to the public's basal natures. No tug of war there, they do not care about integrity or reporting and thus make bank.
Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.
If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.
The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.
Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is usually yes. There's not enough info coming in.
The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.")
Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.
"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago.
So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.
I feel like I'm in a psy op reading this comments section.
As if we aren't very clearly in a completely different place now compared to even 10 years ago, when it comes to the veracity of information people are exposed to on a moment-to-moment basis. As if we aren't all fed an AI-manipulated, algorithmically tailored personal selection of wholecloth lies by the media mechanisms that replaced some biased ones.
So what? Soon all legacy media will die or be subsumed into different organizations save for NYT who will be the only outlet left with the gumption to have a VTuber as EIC in 7 years?
It is now easier than ever to locate, contact, and spotlight for questioning individuals of any given movement, no matter how fringe. Yet the public still hears from the same journos, commentators, talking heads, and explainers, year after year, decade after decade. Really makes you think.
It's partly because many papers have the same stories, culled from the same few press agencies, and poor writers. Most of their original content is often on non-news topics, and the Hollywood image of the roving investigative reporter is rarely mirrored in reality.
So, it's a term of art, and i'll even agree that it's got a bit of a tech-y pejorative lean to it, but it's in wide use, and Jarvis certainly isn't solely a person who comes from tech.
No history to be found here, but the phrase 'legacy media' started making sense to me, in Australia, when it became obvious to me that said legacy media were being intentionally dishonest / obviously biased in their reporting of progressive topics like renewable energy and fiber optic internet roll out.
'Legacy' basically meaning a representation of the past, not the future.
I'm just realising that Google is pretty much 'legacy search' given that the choice is generally between paid promotions and scams (which could be two ways of saying the same thing). AI may actually have saved Google as their search results were enshittifying themselves into oblivion.
>n the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds milking them dry, or by billionaires
I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.
> I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine.
There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to enforce it? I don’t trust my own “side” to do so, and I sure as heck don’t trust the other side.
Jarvis is off the reservation here. Newspapers aren't being "milked dry" by anyone, since they don't make money. The billionaires are there because they want their own views in the public discourse, and they can afford to lose money every year making it happen.
I don't see how the fairness doctrine will help. It feels like a brutal disgusting tool Carr whips out to censor perfectly reasonable talks.
"Fair & balanced" Fox News has had token left people on (and good left people every now and then), but these people are there to look week, to flail and suck, to not portray well or strongly, to be heels. Attacked disineguinely. Meanwhile when Steven Miller comes on he's an aggressive lying weasel, spewing disgusting rhetoric and not answering any questions.
The idea that just having equal airtime will somehow make journalism good again is a joke to me. Trying to satisfy a technical obligation like this will allow disinformation to spread, will be manipulated by the wiley vicious forces that be. It's not gonna help .
I agree about limiting the number of media companies. Consolidation such as we have seen is an absolute horror how, is ghastly evil, and directly robs democracy of a vital independent 4th estate that is essential to democracy's health.
the_fall|20 days ago
Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.
But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.
cowpig|20 days ago
You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course.
And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university and therefore share points of view with people who went to university is the same thing as William Randolph Hearst wholly inventing a story about Spain attacking a US ship to convince the public to start a war.
And what we have today, with social media & search monopolies sucking all economic surplus completely out of journalism, plus foreign-run and profit-run influence farms, plus algorithmic custom-tailoring of propaganda, is undoubtedly the worst we have ever seen.
themafia|20 days ago
It's constantly been with us since the beginning of the republic. Several of our founding fathers were actually publishers.
> this consensus
Consensus doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a product of an interest in profiting off the news. It seems obvious from this vantage what the fundamental problem is and why "journalists" are not a homogeneous group with identical outputs and why terms like "main stream" even exist.
> it helped with social cohesion and national identity
Which is why the FBI and CIA target it for manipulation so relentlessly.
throw0101c|19 days ago
We generally assume that there is an external reality that can be observed and understood. When someone 'consumes' journalism, how well does that reporting reflect the external reality? How well do people's perceptions match up with what physically happened?
For example: in November 2020 there was an election. Who got more votes, both in the popular vote and in the various states individually that counts towards the Electoral College? Who "won" the election?
It turns out that some news organizations—even with any biases—allow their readers/viewers to have a better picture of reality than others:
* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/study-wat...
* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...
* https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/19/the-most-consistent...
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/knowless/final.pdf
* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/confirmed/final.pdf
* https://www.fdu.edu/academics/centers-institutes/fdu-poll/
xwolfi|20 days ago
Once you mix all these perspectives of the same events, you get, if not "the truth", a view of the impact of the events on each sub group in the nation, what they propose to do about it, and put some water in your own wine whichever side you're on: when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.
Thinking "The Washington Post" was "impartial" and "about the truth" before is a pipe dream: they were partial, rational within the confines of their choice ideology, and disagreeing with many subgroups in your country anyway. They just shifted sides but you can find other newspapers now to counter balance.
As long as no newspaper pretend to be impartial and is clearly identified, the national debate stays healthy, no ?
laughing_man|20 days ago
The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly, but the classifides were what paid for the organization's fixed costs.
Now that revenue stream is gone. So most papers are in a death spiral, in which they cut costs, which causes the paper to be less attractive, causing people to drop their subs, forcing another round of cost cutting. The Sunday paper where I grew up used to be about two inches thick in half a dozen sections. Now it totals about twenty pages in one section.
Beyond that, you can't copyright news. You can copyright news copy, but there's nothing stopping other organizations from rewording your stuff and publishing without ever shouldering the cost of gathering news themselves.
ETH_start|20 days ago
• a scalable open financial system at the base. The best candidate is the blockchain, but it is still not ready in terms of being capable of providing sufficient scalability, and its privacy gaps (the activity of every account is public) are still not solved due to highly aggressive AML/KYC policies that make even decentralized protocols that provide strong financial privacy (e.g. Samourai Wallet's CoinJoin, Tornado Cash) legally suspect
• broad adoption of open e-wallets, like cryptocurrency wallets
• wide adoption of digital cash that is not confined to a proprietary platform. Stablecoins are furthest along in this category
cowpig|20 days ago
Terr_|20 days ago
> They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore! I suppose that’s the final humiliation.
While there were always problems with bias (esp. to the ownership) of outlets, it feels there were stronger social-mores or collective beliefs that still helped curb things.
Consider the difference between a biased judge that needs to appear unbiased--or considers it part of their self-identity--versus one who does not.
MarkusQ|20 days ago
add-sub-mul-div|20 days ago
jeffbee|20 days ago
calvinmorrison|20 days ago
hobs|20 days ago
jauntywundrkind|20 days ago
If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.
The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.
Animats|20 days ago
The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.
"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago.
So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.
laughing_man|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect|20 days ago
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890034
cowpig|20 days ago
As if we aren't very clearly in a completely different place now compared to even 10 years ago, when it comes to the veracity of information people are exposed to on a moment-to-moment basis. As if we aren't all fed an AI-manipulated, algorithmically tailored personal selection of wholecloth lies by the media mechanisms that replaced some biased ones.
tolerance|20 days ago
nickdothutton|20 days ago
nephihaha|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0|20 days ago
Sounds like techy-speak to make it sound old so people move to social media bullshit.
knowtheory|20 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jarvis
So, it's a term of art, and i'll even agree that it's got a bit of a tech-y pejorative lean to it, but it's in wide use, and Jarvis certainly isn't solely a person who comes from tech.
pixl97|20 days ago
4ndrewl|20 days ago
BLKNSLVR|20 days ago
'Legacy' basically meaning a representation of the past, not the future.
I'm just realising that Google is pretty much 'legacy search' given that the choice is generally between paid promotions and scams (which could be two ways of saying the same thing). AI may actually have saved Google as their search results were enshittifying themselves into oblivion.
jmclnx|20 days ago
I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.
gdwatson|20 days ago
There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to enforce it? I don’t trust my own “side” to do so, and I sure as heck don’t trust the other side.
laughing_man|20 days ago
treetalker|20 days ago
jauntywundrkind|20 days ago
"Fair & balanced" Fox News has had token left people on (and good left people every now and then), but these people are there to look week, to flail and suck, to not portray well or strongly, to be heels. Attacked disineguinely. Meanwhile when Steven Miller comes on he's an aggressive lying weasel, spewing disgusting rhetoric and not answering any questions.
The idea that just having equal airtime will somehow make journalism good again is a joke to me. Trying to satisfy a technical obligation like this will allow disinformation to spread, will be manipulated by the wiley vicious forces that be. It's not gonna help .
I agree about limiting the number of media companies. Consolidation such as we have seen is an absolute horror how, is ghastly evil, and directly robs democracy of a vital independent 4th estate that is essential to democracy's health.
tgv|20 days ago