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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

#471

Post by [deleted] »

Aperocky wrote: post #190
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 a…

[deleted]

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

#472

Post by HDThoreaun »

Aperocky wrote: post #190
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 a…

CSPAN exists. People aren't interested in just the facts.

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

#473

Post by hedora »

m463 wrote: post #120
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…

> 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?

Ah, yes. I remember getting the annual morning news paper every April 1st.

Seriously though, within a city, they had morning and evening editions (12 hour lag) hundreds of years ago. For national stories, the lag was more like a week, then dropped to 12 hours when the telegraph was invented. Also, back then, there were orders of magnitude more newspapers (multiple in each big city, and at least one in small towns), so most modern censorship techniques simply would not work. Yeah, Elon Musk would have owned a paper, but (by law) only one, and multiple other wealthy tech people would own papers in the same market.

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

#474

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #254
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He has to come from the Journal region of France, otherwise he's just a sparkling whistleblower. /s From the tone of the article it seems like the author simply detests Julian Assange and Weiss puts forward no standard for who can rightly be called 'a journalist'.

They say that a journalist knows not to assist people in committing crimes.

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

#475

Post by yamtaddle »

GeekyBear wrote: post #394
rendall wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. I suspect that the news was just as partisan and biased back then, but the public was less able to independently verify news reports.

There was a time when journalism was seen as an expense in the public interest and not as a partisan entertainment profit center / propaganda outlet. Stations that did run an editorial with a given partisan viewpoint were even required, by law, to allow an opposing view to be aired in response.

Early SNL (1970s) turned this into a bit on the news segment, with Chevy Chase introducing someone to respond to some (non-existent) editorial of theirs from a past program, to provide alternative viewpoints, as was their journalistic duty (which respondent invariably had mis-heard some word and so was responding, passionately, to entirely the wrong thing—that was the joke)

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

#476

Post by ecommerceguy »

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]

[flagged]

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

#477

Post by lordfrito »

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…

Before Trump they dumped on Obama

Before that they dumped on Bush II and Chaney

Before that they dumped on Clinton

Before that they dumped on Bush I (I remember the ridiculous attacks on Quayle)

I'm sure they did it to Regan too, and Carter before that, and Ford before that.

But I would agree that any pretense of "balanced" or "fair" reporting got thrown out of the window with Trump. It's like they aren't even hiding their intentions anymore.

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

#478

Post by woooooo »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #456
woooooo wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Documenting links between intelligence agencies and domestic propaganda is "reactionary"?

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

#479

Post by yamtaddle »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #466

Cronkite, Murrow, and Russert have been spinning in their graves for years. As soon as the fairness doctrine died, real journalism was crushed by corporate greed.

That and de-regulation of media ownership, allowing unprecedented consolidation.

Hard to tell which did more damage, since they came so close together. Possibly one would have been fine if the other hadn't happened.

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

#480

Post by TeMPOraL »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #234
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…

I think it's interesting that this is a highly upvoted comment considering it leans on sociology as an academic study as a source of truth for its claim. The social sciences have long been harangued by HN for not being "real science", but I've seen exceptionally little pushback to the claim above. Why is this? [To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of w…

> I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.

HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either.

The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.

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