Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

This is the absolute reverse of true: twitter allows accountability of the journalists at outfits you mentioned.

> With social media, Twitter specifically, the journalist becomes the main focal point

If you put your name on reporting, you're accountable for its quality.

> and particularly how non-diverse these institutions are

Au contraire, the papers seem far more obsessed with idpol than twitter, preferring to focus on cults of personality and what their popularity (or non popularity) means than meat and potato issues.

> A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent)

I disagree, but I'll leave the question of why you consider this flavor of reporting high quality up to you to figure it out.

I subscribe to the new york times, the washington post, and the la times, RT, al jazeera, among many other smaller publications. I don't think I could make any sense of the election year, climate change, or international politics without twitter, full stop—you're only seeing half the conversation, or less. Frankly even hacker news has better "reporting" on climate change than any "journalistic outfit" I've read, mostly because it's a massive topic to cover that changes very rapidly and it doesn't sell attention nearly as well as problems that operate within our understood paradigm of how our world should work.

And, frankly, it's hard to imagine an outfit more driven to polarize and work up its base for no discernible reason than the New York Times Opinion section—I can't articulate it better than this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsWj7Q5iPus.

Finally, this entire dialogue neglects that twitter allows journalists to critique each other in public, a distinctly positive thing for journalism no matter what your opinions are about the unwashed masses.

NYT Editorial Board members do write Op-Eds of the sort I mention.

It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.

Highlighting the positive aspects of whatever you're doing, avoiding the negative aspects, discrediting opponents and most insidiously - misrepresenting their arguments is how it's done.

It's about creating the intended narrative around a specific subject.

Take any controversial issue and you'll generally see that the 'sides' are not having a debate in public, they're engaging in framing the issue in a manner. The end up talking past one another entirely.

'Manufacturing Consent' is a funny book, because we read it when we're young and naive and our eyes are opened to the reality of the world and the perennial war of ideas. Because such activities are framed as nefarious and related to questionable acts of intervention (i.e. US intervention in S. America) ... we are 'shocked and outraged'. But I think looking at it from a more mature, contextualized perspective, it doesn't seem 'shocking' it seems really normal.

Ironically the real coup of Chomsky is to misrepresent the nature of 'mass idea marketing' in a fair antagonist way that I don't think is really helpful.

Unfortunately - almost all news is narrative-driven.

Certainly the entirety of cable news.

If you watch the local news, it feels dry and mundane, because it's generally very truthful, and there isn't a lot of 'war of ideas' over the dog that called 911.

But for everything in pop culture and politics, there's a way to frame the subject in an ideological way (or in a manner that represents the interests of some group like advertisers or powerful individuals etc.) which is what happens all day long.

"Should Trump be impeached for leveraging military aid to require an investigation into local companies in a nation that was ostensibly interfering in American politics, when the target of said investigation is a political opponent, thereby creating an obvious conflict of interest"

"Should Hillary Clinton be charged for communicating sensitive information using persona devices, or deleting information requested by the FBI during the subsequent investigation"

These are really hard issues actually.

If you stand outside your hatred or love for these people, and stand outside of your own political preferences, they become considerably more nuanced and difficult than we'd care to admit.

They are not black and white enough to have easy answers, and so, we get narratives, misinformation, and polarisation.