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Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

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

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intend to mislead This is literally the definition of lying.

Source? The definitions I saw do not match. You can intentionally mislead someone through the selective use of truths without using any "counter-factual" or untrue statements.

Google define lie:

* used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression. "all their married life she had been living a lie"

Google "define lying". It says this:

tell a lie or lies.

and this

(of a thing) present a false impression; be deceptive.

---

Intentionally misleading is deceptive, even if it states only facts.

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

#582
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a black and white spin. First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements. Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, b…

This comment is well intended, I'm sure. I always respect anyone trying to 'stick to the facts.' Unfortunately, it's just not history. Easy to google history. You are simply not familiar with how this all works.

How does it all work?

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

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but not really the issue... thats why there is an editing process. If an org has a proper editing process then a lot of that gets accounted for. Because... Editors couldn't possibly have motives that similarly contain bias, corruption, out other such common frailties of the human condition?

My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow works. You may not even be aware there is one. There is. It usually accounts for a lot of this. Not perfect, most systems are not - but it goes a long way to providing better reporting. Think of it from a coding point of view. Many people think that some developers write code directly on production, to their personal style, and thats it. That certainly happe…

> My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow works.

I think you have it the other way around. The bias is institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias point of view out of the organization.

Look at how tightly political leanings are tied to news outlets.

If it were as easy and objective as you say we would get a lot more random pieces out of outlets instead of the rather rigid ideological publications we see in existence today.

Even Reddit subs and hacker news, which are much more random than news outlets, have pretty clear political leanings. With sufficient samples you can even break down the subgroups within the community.

News orgs don't have nearly the internal diversity required to possibly remove such bias. They are homogenous.

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

#584
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find unflattering footage of anybody's supporters. I was never a Trump supporter, but as someone who has friends and family who are/were supporters, I resent the situation where people think like you do. In fact, I think that attitude is part of why these people end up voting for Trump. They know what the cool kids on the blue team say about them when they aren't in the room (hell, even when they are in the r…

I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I unfriended them. I believe in morals. I believe in God. There's no way I can be friends with people who, at best, only pay lip service to those concepts while using them to further patent evil. To be clear, I'm not really on the "blue team" either. But that's a team that hasn't been taken over by the worst of its fans, nor is it motivated by things such as xenophobia,…

Agreed, I did the same. I decided a couple years into his presidency that I'm fundamentally morally incompatible with people who could support such an abhorrent asshole. Not to mention their incredible propensity for confirmation bias, which is frankly reason enough on its own to remove them from my life. I lost a few acquaintances and one friend during the latter Trump years. I value my friends highly, but I regret nothing, and would happily do it again.

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

#585
post #543
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You realize Hilary lost election using that same argument? Labeling your political opponents as “trash” turns off a lot of people.

Sometimes spades need to be labeled as such.

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

#586
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them is sufficient to expose them as bad people You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people, as if they have no other motive than to do evil. I didn’t like him either, but give me a break and try to let go of that media narrative. His supporters were just people. Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight

>You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people

They're not all bad people, most are just stupid.

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

#587

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…

> literal mountains of sociological studies

Which ones prove systemic, deliberate deception?

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

#588
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people So? You judge the moral and intellectual merits of things by how popular they are? That's your call. I don't. > Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight Not really. Only one set of nutjobs actually stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election. You've bought into a narrative that minimizes what is an insane fact.

QAnon nuts don't represent all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals. Black and white thinking is stupid in this day and age yet it seems to persist

The ideals of Qanon were implicitly accepted into the American right, and have been working their way into the mainstream. How do you think MTG got where she is?

The Republican party is the party of conspiracy nuts. If you don't like it, then kick them out. But you can't, because a significant percentage of your group would be gone, and a larger percentage don't disagree with much of what the Q-tards believe.

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

#589
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a black and white spin. First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements. Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, b…

Do you watch professional wrestling by any chance? They are in essence the same business model. Most people know both are largely fake, but some people actually believe. It’s the entertainment industry. Capital influences everything.

Seems like a cynical take by someone that knows what they watch is largely fake, and they want to apply the same rules to the other side so they feel better about their exclusivity to confirmation bias enabling programming.

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

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I think a lot of problems would become non-problems if people would admit they read the news primarily for entertainment. This expectation that "the news must supply me with reliable facts" is an intellectually-dishonest complaint from an unreliable narrator. It's nobody's job to tell you what to think, and even if it were, it's not also their job to tell you what's important to think about. An objective press is definitionally impossible as long as "the news" can't include a story about every time a tree falls in the forest. Selection bias is unavoidable, and any expectation of a publisher to avoid it is one borne from intellectual dishonesty, because you can only shift the bias, not remove it.

The most objective way to read the news is to read all of it. Unfortunately that's not usually possible. So the next best thing you can do (short of ignoring it) is to read the most divergent sources, and fill in the blanks yourself. I've seen this referred to as "triangulating the truth" - is there a story on Fox but not CNN? That editorial selection bias is itself additional information that you can use to infer the motives of the publishers, and over time, based on observed bias, the motives of the subjects in the article. And then you can think from there about why they have those motives and what their agenda might be.

...but that's all a lot of work, which is why I'm also an advocate for deliberately ignoring the news for weeks at a time. Don't fall for the "informed citizen" trap - that's how they keep you hooked to the propaganda.

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