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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

#201

Post by IIAOPSW »

karpierz wrote: post #160
kodah wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Well let's steelman journalism a bit; journalism provides context. Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this morning." Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government is looking to roll back more regulations, which are expected to…

>Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%.

See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your premise which proves with any certainty that the increased speed limits are the cause of the change in accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it as part of the basic record of events we call "news", rather than as part of the opinion discourse.

This was even a good faith example. If you were trying to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.

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

#202

Post by jawns »

I formerly worked as a news editor at a metro daily newspaper, and before that I worked at various other news outlets and magazines.

Here's the reality: The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness. I worked with a bunch of really talented reporters and editors throughout my career, and almost without exception, they highly valued those things. Moreover, many have an anti-authoritarian bent, and that leads to a desire to expose corruption, rather than protect it.

But ...

* I've seen publishers kill stories because they thought it would make advertisers unhappy.

* I've seen senior execs put pressure on editors to downplay stories that painted the region in a bad light.

* I've seen a political campaign refuse to permit a certain reporter to attend their campaign events because they didn't like that the reporter wasn't acting like a PR tool.

* I've seen budgets for "watchdog journalism" become slowly starved, in favor of clickbait.

And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business (who are really trying to make money and exert influence).

Granted, there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued, and unfortunately that's where a lot of eyeballs end up these days, because so many people just want their existing biases to be re-inforced.

But what America really needs is more media literacy, so we can better distinguish the former from the latter. We, as a society, are SO BAD at this. Our B.S. detectors have lots of false positives and false negatives. We look to the wrong signals to determine whether a news report is trustworthy. We fail to evaluate information critically as long as it validates our pre-existing views. We have a hard time separating facts from opinions.

This lack of media literacy is worrisome enough, but now we've got political leaders capitalizing on the fact that we're bad at this and actively trying to delegitimize the media (as if it's a single thing) because it serves their own purposes.

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

#203

Post by gamechangr »

They do. (deliberately mislead)

The days of subjectivity are over.

It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for Large corporations to have self interest and to highlight stories that benefit them and minimize/ignore things that would negatively effect them.

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

#205

Post by bnralt »

VieEnCode wrote: post #101
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…

"But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims" I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue…

Audience capture is probably the biggest driving point behind media bias, whether the media is commercial or independent. Walter Lippmann put it wall 100 years ago [1]:

> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.

[1] Public Opinion, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html

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

#206

Post by jcampbell1 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #95
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.

Triangulation is the best strategy to approximate the truth and counter biases/agendas. Works best when you get news from sources that are not tightly connected. For example: NYT (American) + NPR (American) + DW (German) + Aljazeera (ME) + Reddit (people "on the ground"). Different financing/revenue models, different ownership, different continents, different cultural biases and norms, different perspectives. Nothing…

I like google news because I can see both right and left takes on stories, and which stories are only covered by one side. It also has international coverage, which is nice for instance where Israeli media had by far the most accurate reporting on the nature of Covid-19.

I use media to find out what America believes, and where it is headed. Your list of sources is going to leave you surprised fairly often. My goal is to not be surprised.

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

#207

Post by smcl »

In an ideal world this means people will simply start taking what they're told with a pinch of salt and are little bit more sensible about believing sensational things. However we don't live in such a world. I suspect that what's more likely is that a bunch of people will fall into believing in stupid shit like flat earth or qanon, and will end up following weird conspiracy freaks like Alex Jones or white supremacists like Nick Fuentes.

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

#208

Post by tomatotomato37 »

brookst wrote: post #20
elil17 wrote: post #13

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

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…

Not directly related, but I've come to really appreciate the idea that a drug cartel is the ultimate example of a conspiracy, because not does it fit the definition really well, but it demonstrates what one actually looks like. There's no shadowy boardroom of hooded figures meeting in some underground bunker, but rather playboys loudly broadcasting their wealth & power with only the barest minimum of deniability maintained at the legal perspective, with the general populace fully aware but powerless to really do anything about it. And yet, it still is a multi-national network of coordinated logistics and execution for multiple tons of product that both the official powers & general public would really prefer to not to be there.

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

#209

Post by nivenkos »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #172
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.

Julian Assange is not a journalist https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-ass...

Au contraire - https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-the-western-media-is...

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

#210

Post by pjc50 »

stuckinhell wrote: post #185
soctac wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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