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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

#641

Post by fidgewidge »

yamtaddle wrote: post #485
fidgewidge wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turtles all the way down, yep. At some level you have to rely on heuristics and just make a judgement call, but the checking at the prior levels still has a lot of value.

Straight news reporting has no lower level, short of your going out and talking to the same kind of people the reporter did. Commentary can have such citations. Investigative journalism might have citable passages in part , but ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself (which won't be some hyperlink you…

News can be checked in lots of ways. If there's a factual claim about some public data, check it. If someone is assigned a job title, is that actually their job title? Does it contain internal contradictions? Does it make claims that contradict knowledge you already have, or things that were previously claimed? All those types of checks are ones I've done before to news stories and found they failed them.

Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of something else and stuck his name into Google. That surfaced another news report about the murder. This is basic fact checking but the NYT didn't do it. The data was too good to check, so they didn't.

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

#642

Post by jpadkins »

pjc50 wrote: post #104
VieEnCode wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims" I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue…

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformat... (which of course will be immediately accused of bias, but he's not wrong about the facts of the extent to which those people are funded by supplements) It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/…

the nytimes link is /opinion/ which is held to a different to a different standard than standard news. I'm glad they at least label it as opinion.

I think people reading opinion as news is part of the problem.

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

#643

Post by slg »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #405
tgv wrote: 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…

Saying this is a "spin" seems like an attempt to undermine the comment. > Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations. Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying". Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind o…

>I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".

This is still too extreme. "Lying" requires intentionality and implies maliciousness. It suggests that people who work in media are mostly evil people with the primary goal of misleading you. It both ignores and shows ignorance of how the media industry actually works. It also removes any hope of actually fixing the media industry because the only solution according to this mindset is getting rid of all the lying journalists. It doesn't leave any room to understand or address the incentives that actually got us to our current situation.

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

#645

Post by rhacker »

The left/right divide is really bad for our country. The profit motives behind maintaining the divide only encourages it to get worse. CNN wants to shock you with whatever the GOP is doing to put a gun in your baby's crib. FOX wants to shock you with whatever crime is under reported.

To make things worse, the mechanisms and new types of media (YT, social media, etc...) make it so that you essentially cannot escape the media grasp any more. So we're thinking 24/7 on how the left or right is going to ruin the country.

All of it is profit motivated.

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

#646

Post by Forgeties79 »

llanowarelves wrote: post #439
Forgeties79 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue whenever we discuss punishing journalists/news organizations for "not telling the truth" is that "the truth" is often hard to identify. We also have a classic "who watches the watchmen?" problem, where we have to decide who gets determine the "real" truth. That can get real dicey really quickly. I find the lesser of two evils is to lean towards "well they can publish what they want, by and large" (obviously…

I agree and you are very correct that the "truth" is a hard problem. But that's why we go the other direction: we know what a lie looks like (even if unintentional). This works great in court, and has a method to it. Falsification is scientific. Libel and slander laws do a good job in a narrow domain (personal reputation). And that's why I use the word "truthful" (spirit of the thing) not "truth" (itself) because lik…

>we know what a lie looks like (even if unintentional)

"But do we?" is I guess my point. There's a lot of intent and, again, determining what the "truth" (or even truthful) is that stands in the way. It's a very complicated problem I feel doesn't really have a solution. To be clear I'm not knocking you, I agree with you, I just worry about how it plays out writ large.

If one person says and insists on air that "WWII began when Germany invaded Poland," but someone else insists on air that "WWII began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria," do we force them to acknowledge the other viewpoint as valid? Do we say only one is correct? It seems a bit ridiculous I admit, but just substitute the example for something more stark I guess. Do we have to decide "well this is debate and this is other thing is fact" and see where the chips fall? Feels like we're trading problems there too.

Imagine trying to say "coal and petroleum are bad for the environment and contributing to climate change." "Certain outlets" balk at the claim and say "you're wrong and lying and corrupt and bribed, it's not leading to climate change and even if it did it's not enough to matter." To me that's patently absurd, yet they downplay it all the time and throw all sorts of nasty allegations out there. Where's the line? Do we fine them? Censor them? Let them be because "it's a debate," even if their claim is incredibly fringe and lacking quality evidence? I don't know the answer to be honest. I'd love to pull the plug on them but that's a dangerous door to open.

I hope this stream of conscience makes sense. I'm enjoying this conversation!

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

#647

Post by fidgewidge »

lodi wrote: post #461
kthejoker2 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sources do you personally trust?

Not OP but for me it's not about what sources to trust (blindly? literally none of them), but what type of information you can trust. Naked facts seem to be safe for the time being, context should be assumed to be heavily biased in a particular direction, and opinions are worse than worthless.

Unfortunately I've found journalists and/or their sources often lie about basic facts too, even when those facts are easily checked.

You'd think they wouldn't do this. Probably they do it because they know most people will take factual claims at face value, or the journalists are so sloppy/confused that they themselves don't realize the claims are wrong.

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

#648

Post by javier123454321 »

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…

I mean, that's the whole argument of Chomsky's manufacturing consent. It's not that there are people at the top dictating what does and does not get published, rather that there is a system of incentives in mainstream news outlets that discourage dissent from mainstream politically favorable opinions. Sure, as an up and coming New York Times reporter, you can stick to your guns and want to report on controversial issues, but if it's really controversial and against the consensus of most of your liberal colleagues, then you might just not be up for that promotion.

If someone thinks that's not true, ask yourself: do you really think that reporting on vaccine anomaly data, or Ukraine corruption will get you more or less upward mobility than reporting on shooting hot air baloons or whatever media orchestrated distraction is happening at the moment in the NYT?

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

#649

Post by dudul »

twelve40 wrote: post #424
dudul wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you what educated choices do they have to make?

voting, which is presumably the cornerstone of the society, is done by this same mass of people, and results in electing people with the most deadly powers in the world, among other things.

Interesting how you conflate "voting" and "electing people". While voting is indeed a corner stone of democracy, as a supporter of sortition I think that elections are anti-democratic.

You're putting people "in charge" (as if people in office were actually in charge) by selecting between a very very narrow pool of pre-approved candidates.

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

#650

Post by say_it_as_it_is »

What would you call The New York Times's 1619 Project? Historians tore it apart. Non-historian and simply rational human beings did as well. The entire project is a propaganda piece with a goal that requires deliberately misleading the public.
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