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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

#551

Post by phatfish »

woooooo wrote: post #478
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I guarantee, if he wasn't getting fluffed by Elon sycophants on Twitter he would back to Covid conspiracy theories or whatever else get the attention of rubes these days.

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

#552

Post by denton-scratch »

Spooky23 wrote: post #358
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…

That’s just cynical blah blah that ignores the pretty obvious cause. It’s pretty easy why trust in media has eroded in my lifetime (I’m a 40 something). We deregulated and allowed for consolidation of ownership of print, broadcast and eventually online media. That changed the dynamic. People will always correctly call out right wing talk radio as an example but the problems with media are more subtle as well. Broadca…

> Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment.

One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.

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

#553

Post by bjornsing »

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…

> there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued

After learning the Bayesian way of thinking I feel more and more certain that this whole “objective news” idea is just plain wrong. There simply is no objective description of reality at that level of abstraction.

Note though that this is not the usual postmodern viewpoint: reality is not a social construct, or at least that construct is heavily constrained. There is still untruths and outright lies.

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

#554

Post by adolph »

mlindner wrote: post #527
fidgewidge wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness The average journalist thinks they value the truth, accuracy and fairness. Observed behavior is very different to this flattering self portrait which is why they aren't trusted. Actual behaviors of real journalists that create distrust which can't be blamed on advertisers or editors: - Accepting large grants from bi…

> - Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory. On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any…

“There was message distortion,” former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told The Fact Checker in a telephone interview. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.” He said he was unaware of how Biden described the letter during the debate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-bi...

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

#555

Post by rhcom2 »

nostromo wrote: post #529
keyanp wrote: post #197

Yes I know that traditionally media has been used for propaganda, but I'm surprised by the reactions in this thread and those who find what seems like fairly objective reporting as biased. Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news sites that are deliberately misleading? If this propaganda is so rampant then where is it? (Note: I'm opinion articles excluded because they are uh opinions). https://www.ny…

The 1619 project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project#Historical_ac... https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...

Controversial sure, deliberate misleading? I don't see it.

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

#556

Post by layer8 »

akira2501 wrote: post #495
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…

> But what America really needs is more media literacy You describe a mountain of problems _inside_ your own industry, and yet you walk away with the idea that it's the public that needs extraordinary change to account for this. I appreciate your point of view, but I think your conclusion is horribly biased.

The question is, which change would be more practical and more realistic. Is there any plausible world where media literacy wouldn’t be an important skill?

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

#557

Post by rocket_surgeron »

I have believed this since 1993.

I was a student in high school and did interviews for both a local newspaper and television station.

In both instances they misrepresented what I said, editing or rearranging my words to construct a different narrative, or in the case of the newspaper they just made up things.

The stories weren't even about anything serious, just local hometown feel-good filler stories and the actual, literal, lies that the journalists willfully constructed were inconsequential and actually made me look good.

But I figured if are willing to lie about something so trivial as what they lied about, then it was highly likely the entire system is a sham.

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

#558

Post by diimdeep »

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...

Wikipedia reliable sources list is basically implicit whitelist, and there is implicit blacklist, news sources from countries with hundreds of millions of people banned from Wikipedia. All this is contradicting its core content policies. Reliable sources based solely on being Western, such as being located in the Western world, having a Western worldview, being owned by Western entities, or aligning with Western national interests or security policies.

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

#559

Post by anonymouskimmer »

mandmandam wrote: post #489
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore. Definitely agree. But it's also difficult to fact check even if you do distrust. Even educated bloggers and readers can have difficulty accurately interpreting information, and what that information indicates, if technological advances make their knowledgebase outdated. > Yep, a…

All US news stations covered Trump's campaign at least 20x more than Sanders. All US news stations covered Hilary's campaign at least 5x more than Sanders. That's without even getting into the hit pieces, the lies, the questions sneaked to Hillary in advance. That style of narrative warping is repeated across every topic that might hurt corporate profits. There's facts, and then there's repetition, presentation, sent…

> Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern train derailment - one story on page 20, with no context linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock buyback last year, no context about their lobbying against the very regulations that would have prevented this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't even name the company.

And all of the investigative journalism sites that would report in this detail on events like this are asking for donations to keep going. The advertiser support isn't there.

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

#560

Post by overrun11 »

rewilding wrote: post #414
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]

It is inarguable that there were many examples of unfair or plainly factually wrong reporting on Trump. This list was compiled just a year in: http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-rep...

> But while you're looking, take note of how many articles were on substantive evils he was constantly committing.

The implication you are making is that it's acceptable for the media to report inaccurately or unfairly if the subject deserves it.

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