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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

#411

Post by Forgeties79 »

llanowarelves wrote: post #317
jawns wrote: post #202

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 ha…

People need better media literacy, but that's still a type of "victim blaming" and there's a reason why in law we tend to go after producers more than consumers of a thing, due to effects of scale. What the (not all, and not all the time..) media does when they bait people into moral hazard could easily be categorized as a crime (harming the informational commons) in some cases. How do we know? Imagine if the news ha…

The issue whenever we discuss punishing journalists/news organizations for "not telling the truth" is that "the truth" is often hard to identify. We also have a classic "who watches the watchmen?" problem, where we have to decide who gets determine the "real" truth. That can get real dicey really quickly. I find the lesser of two evils is to lean towards "well they can publish what they want, by and large" (obviously we have libel and slander laws and such).

I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?

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

#414

Post by rewilding »

q1w2 wrote: post #306
Merad wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#415

Post by yalogin »

There are good and bad parts about the media, just like everything else. Unfortunately the current political landscape just accentuates the bad and just hammers it down into people's minds. The perception that media is biased is more important for politics than nuanced observation and we are here because of that. People should always be skeptical about what is fed to them but taking these kind of blanket mind alterations are just bad for society. Not sure how to fix it though once someone is on that slope.

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

#416

Post by Aperocky »

becquerel wrote: post #319
Aperocky wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Even stories reported with utmost objectivity fall prey to the fact that somebody has to choose which stories get reported in the first place .

Perfect cannot be the enemy of good, it's the direction that we want something to happen, doesn't mean it must be perfect, or even need to be perfect eventually.

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

#417

Post by pas »

bilekas wrote: post #380
pas wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two words: evidence where? > Many credible books on that topic to read. Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!

Seymour Hersh is the Journalist/Investigative Reporter and he does not mess around. Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger outlets would not publish it without source information etc and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking to his word of "Not revealing sources".

That's appeal to authority. And it's a good hypothesis, we shouldn't discount it, but ... also not take it as gospel.

It's pretty clear that to get to the bottom of this we either need some leak or enough politicians in Congress who take this seriously, and get people to testify under oath. (Of course it'd be a good start to hold accountable those who lie to Congress, like Keith Alexander and James Clapper.)

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

#418

Post by anonym29 »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #384
giantg2 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems spot on to me. "they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting." This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.

Are not "intend to mislead" and lying synonyms? Misleading without intent may not be, but if you mislead with intent you are lying.

Lying? Of course not! It's just paid marketing for a sponsor's ideological position! /s

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

#419

Post by rewilding »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #408
throwaway8689 wrote: post #398

Genuinely surprised its only half because Fox News viewers often think CNN is lying and CNN viewers often think the same about Fox News. Both groups can therefore answer 'Yes' if asked if they think news organisations deliberately mislead. I'm picking those two as being big news channels but I think it holds for other tv and for newspapers too.

It's so interesting how our country can be divided almost perfectly into "do you subscribe to the thought process/consensus of FOX news or CNN?" Like, how often is there a viewer who actively watches both/switches between the two? It's very polarizing. I can't think of any way to fix it culturally. One party thinks the other is deranged and lying. Will it get worse? Will it get better? Where does this lead us?

They're both biased; watching both doesn't necessarily accomplish anything. In fact they share the same basic pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist biases.

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

#420

Post by rootusrootus »

mjr00 wrote: post #284
MrMan wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The actual news on Fox News, i.e. not Tucker and the rest of the talk shows, is not fake news, even remotely. Absolutely has a conservative bias, but not to the extent it would qualify as fake news. It's even listed on Wikipedia a reliable source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

Fox News is the clearest example of mainstream propaganda that I've ever seen. I take a pass through there periodically just to see what the aren't covering. Which isn't to say places like CNN don't sometimes pull that same stunt, but it's much more prevalent on Fox News -- they'll completely omit even really big stories that aren't what they think their audience wants to see.
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