Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them • Hacker News Board

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

#121

Post by jesusofnazarath » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #37

brookst wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google "manufacturing consent." Chomsky's entire point is that it is emergent behavior from a system with certain incentives.

[dead]

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

#122

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

soco wrote: post #110

dotnet00 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

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".

Indeed. People are replacing mainstream news with something that's often far less accurate.

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

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Post by ohmanjjj » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

The other half are in denial.

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

#124

Post by pessimizer » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #97

nivenkos wrote: post #16

They do. The only real investigative journalists these days - Edward Snowden and Julian Assange - face life in prison and exile. 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.

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.

> Assange also collaborated with Russian intelligence.

If you have no evidence of this, you're spreading misinformation.

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

#125

Post by barry-cotter » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #99

nokcha wrote: post #2

Highly relevant: https://AstralCodexTen.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...

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.

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

#126

Post by gwbas1c » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #107

brink wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was after a citation for the claim that talking about media bias is correlated with media bias. You seem to be talking about the general existence of media bias, for some reason.

This isn't Wikipedia. It's a discussion.

Almost everything that someone posts is an anecdote, and you can't expect everyone to come armed with reams of well-researched facts.

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

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Post by kleiba » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

Thanks, Don!

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

#128

Post by pessimizer » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

potatototoo99 wrote: post #71

tallanvor wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean in exile?

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.

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

#129

Post by kleiba » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

bigger_inside wrote: post #47

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 de…

> With a mountain of examples

It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.

Re: Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

#130

Post by megaman821 » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

RivieraKid wrote: post #24

gtmitchell wrote: post #4

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.

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 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.