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Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

fortune.com

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

#181

Post by jeroenhd »

dzikimarian wrote: post #75
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.

This is not binary. 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,…

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.

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

#182

Post by Workaccount2 »

fimdomeio wrote: post #28
elil17 wrote: post #13

Better headline: half of Americans don't know that (many) news organizations deliberately mislead them.

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'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.

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

#183

Post by brookst »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #154
brookst wrote: post #31

Conspiracy theorists strong in this thread. Is this really a HN-aligned topic? The responses do not reflect well on the community.

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 ne…

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.

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

#184

Post by randcraw »

twoodfin wrote: post #89
potatototoo99 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean in exile?

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.

Yes, assuming he was willing to spend the rest of his life in a US prison, if not Khashoggied en-route.

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

#185

Post by stuckinhell »

soctac wrote: post #85
pjc50 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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 w…

Isn't that what the LGB did during the 2000's ? Trans advocacy groups are simply doing the same thing.

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

#186

Post by nhchris »

kodah wrote: post #146
m463 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> 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.

Cherry-picking.

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

#187

Post by fortran77 »

I'm not sure if it's "deliberate" though. I think the biases of the reporters just comes through. There's no big conspiracy.

Still, to cite a recent example, the reporting from most news outlets on things like the Kenosha shootings and trials were outrageously bad.

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

#188

Post by throwaway894345 »

fimdomeio wrote: post #28
elil17 wrote: post #13

Better headline: half of Americans don't know that (many) news organizations deliberately mislead them.

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.

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.

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

#189

Post by NDizzle »

kleiba wrote: post #129
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.

"It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?"

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

#190

Post by Aperocky »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #152

Well, you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that pretty much all of American MSM is highly partisan, some worse than others. I grew up in the UK and 70s-80s BBC seemed a lot more neutral, but of course every news organization has their own implicit world view, relative to which they report the news. There is no such thing as an unbiased news source, although there are those that try to brainwash you a…

I've always thought about having one news agency/aggregator that are strictly opinions verboten, i.e. just report the fact and nothing else, use as little adjective or subjective wording as possible.

Something happened here at date involving these people. Done. No opinion, no analysis, no conjectures or sarcasm, no calling people with words that either accurately describe them or inaccurately, only official titles and names.

It might just be possible when the rest of the field have clearly departed from objectivity, competition seems low enough.

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