Live data from Hacker News

Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

fortune.com

631–640 of 844 posts

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

#631
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…

You don't have to be deliberately misleading. You can intentionally omit certain stories or pieces of stories, and focus the bulk of your coverage one way or another to the omission of perhaps the wider truth. You can find expert opinions going every which way on every topic, so who you bring in as an expert to give an opinion also has weight to the narrative you are creating. In fact you have to do these things in many cases, because you have a finite amount of journalists you can hire or experts opinions you can reasonably draw on to cover a limited set of stories; news orgs don't scale to infinity. Perhaps in some cases, good access to sources depends on maintaining a friendly relationship toward these sources in terms of what you are publishing about them. Maybe you also don't want to jeopardize your relationship with your advertisers.

Herman and Chomsky have written about this phenomenon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

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

#632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's one from an actual dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lying

Google pulls from the OED. Anyway, have fun with ridiculous semantic nonsense - I'm going to go find people who bother to interact in good faith.

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

#633
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, it's clear demand for Christian stuff in America is huge. Yet the media avoids this like crazy. One of the biggest movies of all time is "The passion of the christ" there.Yet most media in America is highly liberal and arguably anti-christian. It's not about the money clearly, its not about the money. American Corporations have undergone idealogical capture. There is no other reason Disney risked and lost…

Disney also employs a lot of LGBTQ employees who were quite understandably really pissed at DeSantis. There's a line to be toed between "public liberal good boy points" for PR and the benefits of self governance, and I think Disney made a decent compromise.

Its certainly an interesting case study (as someone being trained for an executive position), I think about it a lot.

You are really fucked as an Executive here. You're social activists employees will undermine and subvert you. Florida will use State power against you. Maybe the Federal government might intervene in your space, but they probably won't care.

My conclusion and many executives at my firm is target the social activists for layoffs. I've combed thru so many social media profiles in preparation for next restructuring/layoffs at my firm.

Just can't risk it in the current economy. The general feeling is the economy is going to get worse before it gets better.

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

#634
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

> QAnon nuts don't represent all conservatives

They represent all conservatives who vote republican. Literally, in congress and as our last president. If you vote for a qanoner you can't say they don't represent you.

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

#635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even understand, if the guy was able to leave and create a new channel to serve this audience how is that an example of what you call ideological capture. An important part of business is targeting your offering to the intended market -- it sounds like the intended market for Hallmark is not the same as the intended market for Great American Channel. If Hallmark content is so objectionable to its viewership t…

I agree you don't understand. Hallmark is a traditionally conservative channel, this is extremely well known to marketing arms of other firms. It's rapid switch to LGBT content was idealogical capture because a large amount of its executives,employees,and target market did not want such things. Hallmark is a company that was ideologically captured. Imagine a meat company, that forces its president out, to become a ve…

I guess I figured there was some import to the idea of ideological capture. If by that you mean leaders can set direction of their company, some can disagree and leave and found a competitor, and the winner can prevail in the market, then, that’s what I call market capitalism and what you call ideological capture I suppose.

(You’re spelling “ideological” incorrectly)

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

#636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s spin, not lie.

Your source is spinning the definition of lie, for some reason.

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

#637
post #45

Because, to first approximation, this is true. Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda. I'm not sure why Americans believe that objectivity in news reporting is even possible. Other countries don't seem to have as much of an issue with this, since you typically have news sources that are either owned directly by the government or are published by political parties.

>> Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda 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. Most of the skewed stories come from organizations that don't employ trained editors, don't have a clear editorial workflow, don't have a corrections policy, and don't have fact-checkers. I would argue…

These orgs are notoriously political, though. LA times in particular has an axe to grind against cal HSR:

https://cal.streetsblog.org/2021/07/26/l-a-times-needs-to-st...

and usually these days when you find an LA city councilmember with an FBI indictment for corruption, they had an LA times editorial board endorsement.

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

#638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Here's the thing though, the top level comment isn't citing any sources, isn't giving studies that can be criticized on its merits to determine if it's a correct conclusion, particularly if you yourself have explicitly said "Most conclusions may be wrong". There's no reason for you to upvote this if you believe the above poster is most likely relying on a false authority. I'm merely pointing out this broad inconsiste…

Nothing he says relies on sociology. It's just a random interesting anecdote from his background. He's not appealing to the studies or any authority, but simply rejoicing in the fact that society at large is coming around to a conclusion that's been somewhat evident for him to years. And society's not coming around because of some study or whatever, but because of lived experience.

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

#639
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…

Given enough time - NYT will generally correct a deliberately misleading story - so tracking down these sorts of changes requires use of internet archive. Here is one! On a story about Joe Rogan and his covid treatment - the NYT said "he was treated with a series of medications including ivermectin, a deworming veterinary drug" https://web.archive.org/web/20210901220929/https://www.nytim... Later this was changed to…

> Luckily, the NYT changed it to be less misleading - but the point stands. They intentionally misled their readers.

It's telling that even when they issue a correction, the corrected language is always quite clearly still misleading.

They did the same thing with the 1619 project. One of the original articles stated:

>"...one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."

Many prominent historians evicerated them for this fabrication.[0] The NYT responded in a manner scarcely discernable from lying[0 again], after which they were subject to a second eviceration[1], and only then did they issue a (weaselly) correction[2], which was presumably the smallest change they could manage.

>"...one of the primary reasons *some of* the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."

Which, of course, is clearly intended to suggest the very same lie.

[0]https://archive.is/OC7xu [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-proje... [2]https://archive.is/oHWLR

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

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah they're pandering to people who value the truth. /s Your comment makes no sense with Matt Taibbi's statements. I'm not sure you understand what he said and corrected.

Not those that value truth. They are pandering to contrarians and people who need the world to make sense and have order hence all the nefarious plots behind everything. Do you mean when he apologized for adamantly saying that Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and it was only 'dishonest types' that were pushing the narrative that Russia was going to invade? I mean, when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wron…

> when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong

I see. So, when he retracts and apologizes for a mistake, he can't be listened to anymore. If he doesn't retract a mistake, he's one of the Bad Guy independent media who never corrects a mistake. The requirement then is to be 100% right about every take in his career.

I wonder how that standard holds up to the corporate media who, just as a single example, told everyone the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian op, likely changing the result of our Presidential election, whereas Hunter years later admits the story was real and the laptop was his?

> nefarious plots behind everything

The "nefarious plot behind everything" is that our government is corrupt. Just like most governments around the world, and just as has been largely the case within empires for millennia. To frame government corruption as a wild conspiracy theory requires ignorance to much of human history.

Post reply on HN