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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

#671

Post by PartiallyTyped »

kneebonian wrote: post #57
mc32 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's right in that they don't often feed you with provably false stuff --at least not at the time of publication (such as Hunter's Laptop being Russian misinfo but now owned up to by Hunter himself) but yes, they lie by omission, innuendo/leading and half truths. Similar to how quite a few social programs are based on small unreplicated studies that sound good on paper --the intent matters more than the results or re…

Don't forget the talking about how one thing now could lead to something else down the road.

Slippery slope arguments that don’t allow for a middle ground solution by painting one side as insane.

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

#672

Post by l3mure »

xyzzyz wrote: post #609
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…

> So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through." But most sociologists are totally in on the game. It used to be that the mainstream media narrative was opposite of what the sociologists preferred people to believe, and at the time you had academics talk about Manufactured Consent, and False Consciousness etc. These days, the press is more aligned with academics, so they…

> Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.

There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study.

> The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.

Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this.

[1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/d...

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

#673

Post by adolph »

mlindner wrote: post #569
adolph wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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/poli…

Yes there's any number of sources one can dig up to support either argument that come from well trusted sources. Russia's known to want to disrupt elections anywhere they can however. They'll even spread in the media the _appearance_ that elections were distorted to muddy the waters further even if no election interference took place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://www.rand.org/pubs/persp…

I don’t doubt that many foreign entities have interests at stake and ongoing efforts to influence US elections and vice versa. These efforts will take many forms with some appearing less legitimate than others.

If you see the world as indecipherably muddy other than Russia has some otherworldly electoral propaganda power, well then it isn’t clear why you comment.

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

#674

Post by HybridCurve »

This is a known problem with cable news, relevant info from the FCC: https://www.fcc.gov/broadcast-news-distortion

Spreading disinformation from politically aligned media sources is a fundamental authoritarian strategy. Politicized news is used to generate outrage which excites the electorate into participating in elections.

There was a good episode of Freakonomics on NPR concerning negative bias in the media and why people respond to it. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-u-s-media-so-negativ...

You can't fix negativity, but you can better regulate media to be accountable without infringing on free speech. There has been a very sharp downturn in factual quality and impartiality of information provided by news organizations over the past two decades in the US and we are overdue for a course correction.

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

#675

Post by slg »

xupybd wrote: post #661
slg wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

One form of obvious lying is the modern headline. Now that clicks drive revenue many story's don't even come close to what the headline suggests. I do think this is maliciousness, they're telling a lie to draw you in to make money off of you.

This is an example of what I'm talking about. Journalist by and large are not in favor of editors slapping misleading headlines on their work. You are ascribing this practice to maliciousness when it is actually a reluctant response to incentives.

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

#676

Post by kodah »

karpierz wrote: post #160
kodah wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In news there's journalism and there's reporting. This story is reporting, it doesn't use many adjectives and doesn't have much of a point beyond the statistics represented. It allows people to form their own opinions based on their own experiences around the details of this story. Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative,…

Well let's steelman journalism a bit; journalism provides context. Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this morning." Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government is looking to roll back more regulations, which are expected to…

In your steelmanned journalist example I think the discerning reader would be saying, "Is the agency themselves saying more fatalities are expected, is it the opposition, etc" The choice to omit is part of the narrative, because if people pick up that you're casually and selectively quoting opposition but making it sound pre-determined and official then they start viewing you as a folk singer.

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

#677

Post by krapp »

BurningFrog wrote: post #562
krapp wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you believe that a youtube video necessarily shows reality?

That's a good question, that you should also ask about the news.

I do, but I also wouldn't trust Youtube to fact-check the news.

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

#678

Post by nostromo »

rhcom2 wrote: post #555
nostromo wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The basis for the entire piece is false, as many historians have said. People within the Times have admitted as much, and have even silently edited the piece without issuing corrections to remove some of the most blatant falsehoods as an attempt to save face.

The Times has lots of good journalism still, but is a propaganda laundering outlet. Falsehoods are published there so that other journalists, lawmakers, and academics can reference falsehoods in the Times as truth. This has happened in the past, just reference how they were used to launder misinformation with regards to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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

#679

Post by blue_pants »

bilekas wrote: post #380
pas wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two words: evidence where? > Many credible books on that topic to read. Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!

Seymour Hersh is the Journalist/Investigative Reporter and he does not mess around. Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger outlets would not publish it without source information etc and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking to his word of "Not revealing sources".

It may be interesting to read this[0] OSINT analysis of Hersh's claims.

[0] https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113

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

#680

Post by jahsome »

latchkey wrote: post #486
jahsome wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former journalist. I have ranted to friends and family for decades about the lack of media literacy and the lack of understanding for the newsgathering and reporting processes. I'm glad to see others continuing those rants because I gave up shortly after j school and transitioning careers. Media literacy should be mandated in school.

> Media literacy should be mandated in school. Just try for basic literacy first. A Gallup analysis published in March 2020 looked at data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, 2014, and 2017. It found that 130 million adults in the country have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according…

I don't disagree but it doesn't matter in this case. In fact, this is _precisely_ why (especially local) newspapers targeted "5th grade level" vocab and syntax, or lower. It's been the unofficial standard since long before the study cited.
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