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

#301

Post by yonaguska » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:06 PM UTC

zmxz wrote: post #68

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…

> There is no master plan This. I have problem organizing 2 intelligent people to place dirty laundry in the laundry box or to do their homework on time or to place dirty dishes in the dishwasher. But there's a mastermind somewhere who can organize something so complex, with so many variables where each depends on a human being of varying intellect and skillset and the plan is so intricate that out of 100,000 possibi…

> Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.

Religion shaping culture, and thus the decisions of countless people to go out and actually kill each other is a thing. Divine? I think so.

Culture is programming for the masses. Is culture a conspiracy? Our intel agencies have caught onto this, color revolutions are a conspiracies, but the victims of such revolutions would hardly consider their own deeply held beliefs and subsequent actions to be conspiratorial.

Culture shaping happens now at an insane speed with everything from the search engines we use, to the radio, tv, music, advertisements, and so on. If you can pull those levers, people will act accordingly. Pfizer has advertising dollars everywhere. Is it a conspiracy that people will literally stake their professions on defending Pfizer vaccines?

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

#302

Post by jasmer » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:06 PM UTC

Good, we need to stop being naive.

Obvoiusly they do.

They are clickbait and narrative drive, almost all of them.

Even those with high journalistic standards can be heavily misleading.

MSNBC has high journalistic standards (and some brilliant minds, with great researchers) and some of their taalking heads have pretty heavy bias and FYI I'm not 'taking sides' here.

The most interesting thing about the 'news' is trying to determine where the bias comes from.

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

#303

Post by golemotron » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:07 PM UTC

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.

Russia has been just about the lose the war for close to a year now.

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

#304

Post by aww_dang » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #126

robertlagrant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another issue is the ease of cherry picking supporting "facts" to suit one's argument.

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

#305

Post by yonaguska » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

nickdothutton wrote: post #194

Edward L. Bernays published his book "Propaganda" in 1928. Even that only came after his earlier works in on a similar theme in the early 20s. I clearly remember questioning my father at the breakfast table (where newspapers were read) about the veracity of some story I barely grasped at age 5. He explained to me that not everything you read in the papers was true, and some of it was made up from whole cloth. My 5 ye…

New people are born every day, and increasingly they are raised on the teat of whatever media they are exposed to at a young age.

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

#306

Post by q1w2 » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

Merad wrote: post #264

barbariangrunge wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not a fan of trump, at all, but even I noticed this. If trump scratched his butt in public, figuratively speaking, the media jumped on him for it, and would then decline to cover any story about whether butt scratching (figuratively speaking) was ever appropriate. The media also cast his supporters in an incredibly dark light, which was worrying because that was roughly half of voters who voted for a major cand…

If you really think that this started with Trump, you must not have been paying attention before. The media (conservative media in particular) hounded Obama about some extraordinarily stupid things. Famously there was a significant controversy one time about the color of his suit [0]. I honestly can't remember whether Bush 43 got similar treatment. Maybe the prominence of clickbait/outrage journalism didn't come abou…

It got way WAY worse with Trump.

Many news organizations happily threw out their journalistic integrity to "fight Trump". Honest reporting became taboo. You were either FOR or AGAINST Trump, and anyone not choosing a side was just secretly on the other side.

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

#307

Post by jasmer » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:09 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…

The media is mostly in service for themselves.

The 'powers that be' bias is a bit different and takes mant forms.

Aka institutional powers (aka Dem/GOP), individual institutional powers (aka stop a story from embarrassing a colleague Executive), Natoinal bias (aka stories during wartime are not quite the same), 'Civil/Public' bias (aka stories about vaccines during a pandemic), Corporate Institutions (aka advertisers, don't want to upset them).

Funny enought those tend not to be the one's we get the most in a huff for, rather, we fixate more in the ideological narrative stuff because it's more visible.

You don't really see the 'national bias' at all unless you're outside of the country. You don't see the 'corporate bias' bedcause it tends to be displayed in terms of 'stories that don't exist'.

All of that said we should strive to be better.

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

#308

Post by goatlover » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:10 PM UTC

uhtred wrote: post #291

The "respectable" ones don't lie, but they do choose what to not cover and what to draw attention to. For example, the lack of coverage of the train derailment in Ohio. And zero articles since the government said the UFOs they shot down were benign asking "Hey, government, that's it? No explanation as to why you wasted millions of dollars shooting down benign objects? With all your capabilities you really can't find…

They have to decide what's newsworthy. There's limited time and space. Your examples might be apt, but not because they're making decisions. That's a given for any possible news organization. You can call that a kind of bias, sure. But professional news people will have a pretty good idea of what their consumers are likely to consider relevant news.

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

#309

Post by carapace » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:10 PM UTC

twelve40 wrote: post #136

So much bitterness here in the comments like "duh", "took them long enough", etc. So, honest question: if, you know, a pillar of democracy is by default laughed at, how can then this democracy function? If half the country thinks they are getting brainwashed, and the other half doesn't think they are getting brainwashed (while possibly getting brainwashed right in that same moment). How can such people make educated…

They don't make educated choices, they don't make choices at all.

Human societies can be broadly categorized into three groups:

1) The largest group (typically more than half) don't know what's going on.

2) The second group sees what's going on but doesn't do anything about it.

3) The third group (which is really tiny, like 1-in-10000) sees what's going on and does things, or they try to.

The open secret among groups 2 and 3 is that group 1 has to be managed (otherwise they go off the rails and crash civilization pretty quickly. It's happened before.)

So you get things like Religion, Sports, War, etc. all more-or-less to keep "the masses" on the tracks. The invention of the TV was a huge advance for this purpose. Suddenly people are staying inside and not causing trouble! You can even sort of program them: en mass people behave with statistical predictability. (E.g. you can get women to start smoking cigarettes. True example.)

Anyway, from this POV (I read "Manufacturing Consent" at a tender age) the masses have no agency. Democracy is a side-show, part of the management API for the masses.

What we're seeing now (from my POV) is the Internet ripping the lid off of the propaganda control system. "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"

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

#310

Post by user3939382 » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

yks wrote: post #300

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…

> don't apply to independent journalists What a naïveté. Independent journalists are even more beholden to their audiences, if they start talking up something those audiences don’t like, their incomes dwindle. I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence.

> I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence

Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.