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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

#451

Post by foldr »

sumtechguy wrote: post #313
foldr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to ignore good reporting because there’s also some bad reporting.

A lot of people who come to the conclusion that news is 'fake' have a gateway moment. Mine is from 25 years ago and something rather silly. In this particular case a typo. What we see out of the email dumps on twitter should scare many this is the case. They were having twitter 'take care of it'. To pretend they are not doing this to our media and other web sources would be a bit of a stretch to say the least. Our me…

I'm not sure anyone has ever suggested that Twitter (in general) is a reliable source of information, so I'm not sure why you bring it up. Apart form that, perhaps I am misunderstanding, but you seem to be saying that you decided not to trust the news because you saw a typo in a news story 25 years ago. I'm doing my best to be charitable here, but how can that possibly make any sense?

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

#452

Post by ptero »

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.

I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors might be way off, but I think those two things are quite different. Lying is making statements that the speaker knows are false.

An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court.

To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.

Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.

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

#453

Post by captainbland »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #388
csours wrote: post #350

How many Americans believe that news organizations deliberately mislead OTHER people? If you dig a little deeper, how many people realize there are different formats like opinion, commentary, and analysis? Opinions can't be WRONG, but they sure can be BAD. You can only fact check facts. You can't fact check analysis. You have to apply critique (aka critical thinking skills, or a critical framework).

This is a good insight. When you see people complain about "misinformation," and especially if they complain about "needing to do something about it," your follow-up question should be: do you want your news to be censored, or do you want other people's news to be censored? I suspect when most people reference "protecting from misinformation," they actually mean protecting you from misinformation, not themselves. Aft…

At least here in Britain I recognise a lot of the news outlets I prefer often print total crap. I wouldn't say there's much of an answer in censorship (for instance the existing limits on what can legally be called 'corrupt' already go too far). But I'd call into question incentives for sure, because some journalists seem to act without self respect in the levels of barrel scraping they go to when clearly trying to contrive a story to conform with some particular direction.

I could elaborate but the short version for me is: If we could decouple editorial direction from funding sources I think we'd end up much better off.

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

#454

Post by none_to_remain »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #361
cramjabsyn wrote: post #25

Why is it that propaganda somehow has become a new idea? Is it because the phrase “fake news” dumbed it down? Either way its always been a factor, and was likely worse before the age of information. The big problem now is there are multiple competing false narratives, instead of just the one in the paper.

Except that the purpose of the phrase “fake news” was, in fact, to create propaganda itself. It is certainly not better for the president of the country to be the gatekeeper of truth based on what aligns with their political motivations. It is the very definition of propaganda.

It was journos who started the "fake news" meme. I believe they were complaining about completely fabricated clickbait like "Pope endorses Trump". The journos were seemingly unaware that their own perceived fakeness would be much more salient.

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

#455

Post by yamtaddle »

brewdad wrote: post #403
q1w2 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Some of the stuff they covered was ridiculous, too, but they guy was an absolute machine for creating gaffes and outrageous behavior. Giving him the same treatment as any other candidate would still have looked like "picking on him".

If anything, they didn't pick on him enough for some things—I still can't believe the man became President after suggesting his supporters might assassinate his opponent, if she won. And that wasn't spin or bias, that's just what he did, the whole thing's available for anyone to watch. When he did that and his campaign kept trucking along without a hitch was the moment I decided our democracy itself was in danger (which turned out to be very right—maybe I should join a think-tank or become a political commentator or something, I also got a ton of the course of Iraq more-correct than most commentators)

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

#456

Post by MisterBastahrd »

woooooo wrote: post #406
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taibbi is making a great living by being a reactionary on podcasts and fringe outlets. Journalists are suckers. He hasn't done "journalism" in forever. Editorialism is where it's at.

Taibbi is publishing a ton on the links between government agencies and Twitter right now, by doing the work of poring through thousands of emails. He's been doing it for months. His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.

He's publishing it because it is more of the same reactionary crap that he's getting rich off of. The difference between him and an actual journalist is that a journalist would wait until they were done with the investigation to write a story. He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his existence.

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

#457

Post by screwturner68 »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #333
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…

Objectivity is easy to access if you're not totally censored. Propaganda works by concealing alternative opinions - once you know the trick, it's easy to hack, even a weak effort can work.

We've just gotten to the point where views are not cross pollinated. Local news is not really local are much as it's controlled by a couple of companies with their own agenda so the same view is presented over and over and over again. In addition they've convinced the populace that the other side is evil so people have become tribal and only watch "their news" and that just feeds the loop. They don't have to conceal anything, it can be right there in front of them and it won't matter because they won't believe it because their tribe tells them it's a lie.

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

#458

Post by null0ranje »

now__what wrote: post #311

Using this thread to yet again pound the drum of local news. I don't work in media; I've just found my local newspaper subscription to be extremely valuable. Your local news organizations will be biased in some ways, yes, but it's easier to keep track of the writers who lean one way or another (smaller journalist teams). Since they're regional they can't skew too far on either end of the political spectrum or they'll…

I agree with the sentiment, but local papers are dying. My hometown paper is still locally owned, but I suspect it will be bought up by Gannett or some other national outlet soon. As it is, the paper is ~90% AP Wire stories anyway.

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

#459

Post by rootusrootus »

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.

> It got way WAY worse with Trump.

Trump was a birther FFS. He was part of that lovely group of people who thought Obama was the antichrist for wearing a tan suit or eating arugula. He made media worse, not the other way around. They sullied themselves by pandering to his and his supporters' insanity. This happened way before he became president.

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

#460

Post by dylan604 »

NDizzle wrote: post #189
kleiba wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?"

That was one of the lessons that stuck with me from the first time a teacher actually admitted that "history is written by the winners".
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