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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

#781

Post by yesco »

Zxian wrote: post #715
no-dr-onboard wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. "Lying" is objectively deceit, or intending to deceive. It can be, and often is, malicious, but to ascribe all lying as malicious is a step too far.

I lie to my children when I say that the TV needs to recharge after their morning shows. A way to divert their attention elsewhere, but not out of malice.

So the news organizations aren't malicious, but simply treating their viewers as children when they are lying to them to divert their attention.

Certainly makes me feel warm and fuzzy that our news orgs are looking out for us! :)

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

#782

Post by TomSwirly »

tgv wrote: post #295
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…

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…

I was living in the US but spending considerable time in Europe in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.

Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.

At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.

It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)

> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.

It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.

Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.

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

#783

Post by TomSwirly »

Zxian wrote: post #715
no-dr-onboard wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. "Lying" is objectively deceit, or intending to deceive. It can be, and often is, malicious, but to ascribe all lying as malicious is a step too far.

I lie to my children when I say that the TV needs to recharge after their morning shows. A way to divert their attention elsewhere, but not out of malice.

You're comparing this to the news media lying about things like the Iraq War that kill hundreds of thousands of people and cost trillions of dollars.

Do you not understand how horrifying a comparison this is?

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

#784

Post by TomSwirly »

slg wrote: post #675
xupybd wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"You're talking about my stealing as a crime, when in fact it was a reluctant response to the incentive of my needing money!"

It's dishonest. End of story.

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

#785

Post by fidgewidge »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #714
fidgewidge wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That murder victim in the C-19 data was only exposed because he was #6 in the list. Imagine if his name+age were buried on page 23/45. Checking each and every name in a list that long is beyond a reasonable standard for fact-checking for an individual journalist.

It was because he was the first non-elderly person in the list, which is an obvious thing to double check because COVID basically never kills people below a fairly high age. That was already well known at the time.

If journalists can't check the claims they're making, they shouldn't make them. The fact that the NYT wanted to make 1000 factual claims on the front page doesn't suddenly mean they don't have to check them. It means they shouldn't pull that sort of stunt. The loss of trust is clearly deserved.

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

#786

Post by fidgewidge »

duckmysick wrote: post #755
blululu wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but this is a leading question that goes in the wrong direction. You can't really trust any source 100%. You need to do your own research and be humble about it. Journalists are good at this kind of work but they make plenty of mistakes (and as the child of Journalists I will also add that they can be total idiots who are more focused on emotional stories than facts). Basic media literacy with a healthy d…

> You need to do your own research and be humble about it. It takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to research a short news article in a topic that I'm familiar with. For topics I'm not an expert in it's multiple hours. I simply don't have time for it. Family, work, and sleep already occupy much of my day.

That's a common objection, yeah, and it's a problem.

One solution is to recognize that, unfortunately, in that case you don't have much reliable knowledge about the world and therefore your default position should be to not try to influence it. Practically that means things like not judging other people, not voting, or alternatively voting for libertarians who don't believe in imposing rules on other people (because if you voted for specific rules, you'd be doing so based on unreliable information).

Luckily you don't have to actually research every single article. It's OK to generalize over time. Rules can also be shared. Here's some of mine: ignore any story about Russia because they're always unreliable especially since the war, ignore any study about science or public health, ignore any claims made by (ex)-intelligence agents, ignore any claims that appear to support woke narratives, ignore any statistical claims about China, ignore economic predictions or really anything that depends on academically developed statistical models.

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

#787

Post by fidgewidge »

jawns wrote: post #710
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…

I think your response represent a common trap that people fall into, where we treat "the media" as if it's one entity, whereas in fact it's many distinct entities with very different attributes. When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.

Yes there are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. A lot of the problems with "the media" are really problems with standard journalistic practices and those are uniform.

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

#788

Post by yesco »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #717
llanowarelves wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need better media literacy, but that's still a type of "victim blaming" and there's a reason why in law we tend to go after producers more than consumers of a thing, due to effects of scale. What the (not all, and not all the time..) media does when they bait people into moral hazard could easily be categorized as a crime (harming the informational commons) in some cases. How do we know? Imagine if the news ha…

Much of the nihilistic cynicism towards news media is specifically because of half-baked media literacy. No media literacy means you blindly trust the consensus reality; fully-baked literacy recognizes that while all publications have some spin, some are more accurate than others AND that finding the common elements of stories with opposite spin is a decently reliable method to find truth; half-baked literacy says "t…

True media literacy is recognizing that even with you picking up pieces from multiple news orgs, you are still being shepherd to the desired narrative.

For example, if every news org is pro-coca-cola, then the omission of a report on it's harms causes people to inversely assume it's harmless. In other words the low coverage is a signal so called "full-baked" media literates often fall into the trap of listening too. This is worse than the half baked because they actually believe they are informed and somehow end up less skeptical of what's presented.

At least this has been my observation of people who think its not about the garbage dump you get your garbage from, but the variety you get when picking up junk from a multiple garbage dumps.

The answer is to treat all outlets as radioactive and to by default trust none of them. Only direct overwhelming evidence from primary sources should be your guiding light.

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

#789

Post by talkingtab »

talkingtab wrote: post #161

This is really simple. Media are now in the service of advertisers. Or more specifically of people who are willing to spend money to target particular people. For example, the NYT targets the wealthy, which is why they frequently have stories about "how much will $900,000 buy in a home"? By targeting the wealthy, the NYT and other media present a view of the world that is very much at odds with the way many if not mo…

The point is not the culture wars (see comments below). The point is that having media that is based on targeted advertising causes our society to fracture. QED.
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