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Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

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Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#121

Post by baby »

In their current form, medias:

1. do not care about creating panics or damaging society

2. are incentivized to provide click-baity to-the-minute reporting.

How to fix this?

Maybe regulation, even though dangerous in this freedom of speech territory.

One thing I was thinking (inspired by one of Andrew Yang's point) is to have a press tax to fund a delayed international news outlet.

It changes the incentives: the media has no funding issue and is not incentivized to attract more readers; and it changes the impact: delaying each piece of news to wait until more information is available is good.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#122

Post by papeda »

busterarm wrote: post #93
Knulp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then... I want to adress one final fact which is that it's easier to say it's the "journalists" fault if information has gotten so bad. Journalists for sure hold responsability in this but the public that doesnt value the work, isn't willing to pay for it and will click on whatever is coming up without caring about sourcing... Well, that crowd also has its share in how bad the situation has gotten. I don't think you…

All I've seen in your posts is a defense that ethics and standards don't matter because the economics don't make sense. At the end of the day you have a choice of whether or not to be a journalist or to do something else entirely. If you're doing it for the love at that point, then it's not about the money and no argument can trump ethics and standards there. I think journalists spend so much time reflecting on other…

Not parent, but I still think their point is valid: it’s hard to be a careful, ethical journalist and make decent money.

That’s not an argument for abandoning journalistic ethics, but it does illustrate why Lehrer’s rules are not the current equilibrium.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#123

Post by majos »

Knulp wrote: post #85
Knulp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'd like to take the debate here where I think it should lie: with the companies' management. The problem isn't the journalists - there's good ones, bad ones like everywhere and they can't shoulder all the trust crisis that's out there. The problem is that no one is really checking who posts what online. Medias have had a history of having an article go through 3 to 4 people before getting okayed and being publish…

Then... I want to adress one final fact which is that it's easier to say it's the "journalists" fault if information has gotten so bad. Journalists for sure hold responsability in this but the public that doesnt value the work, isn't willing to pay for it and will click on whatever is coming up without caring about sourcing... Well, that crowd also has its share in how bad the situation has gotten. I don't think you…

Thanks for the posts, they’re good context. I am similar to other people in this thread in that I am not a journalist and I fed journalism Twitter...disappointing. But your posts made me think a little more.

One question, you touched on this earlier, but do you think there is an oversupply of journalists? There seem to be many blue checkmarks on Twitter who write “analysis” for weird websites I’ve never heard of.

I donate monthly to ProPublica because they put resources into investigative journalism and apparently pay their journalists pretty well. I wonder how many ProPublicas we need for a healthy journalism industry.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#124

Post by majos »

luckylion wrote: post #94
Knulp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then... I want to adress one final fact which is that it's easier to say it's the "journalists" fault if information has gotten so bad. Journalists for sure hold responsability in this but the public that doesnt value the work, isn't willing to pay for it and will click on whatever is coming up without caring about sourcing... Well, that crowd also has its share in how bad the situation has gotten. I don't think you…

I get the feeling that you're somewhat justifying the state of journalism with "you have to make money somehow" and "people are also not valuing good journalism". Consider what would happen if you transferred that to other professions. "Oh well, people die because the house collapses, but the owners want it cheap and I have to pay the rent. Also, people don't value good craftsmanship in buildings", or, let's take it…

Your first analogy might make more sense if people loved to acquire free bad houses and then complained that good houses cost money.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#125

Post by remarkEon »

40acres wrote: post #92

For me, Twitter has been the worst thing to happen to journalism. There are a lot of downsides to strong institutions and gatekeeping, but when it comes to journalism I always felt like I was reading The New York Times or The Washington Post and not an individual reporter. The shroud of not getting an up close an personal look put the institution at the forefront. With social media, Twitter specifically, the journali…

> A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent) from the big institutions but I've totally avoided political and most opinion columns since 2016.

As I've gotten older, and become more educated on these specific topics, I've had the exact opposite reaction. Reporting on International politics in particular seems to have deteriorated to the point of being propaganda at best or outright garbage at worst. This is just recognizing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect at scale, I suppose, but to your point what Twitter has done is expose how little these people actually know about the subjects they write about. That seems like a net-good thing to me, since I'd rather we know that the people who pretend to know about the subjects they write about actually don't have at least a baseline understanding of what they're talking about. "Explainers" are probably the worst development here, since this is just advocacy journalism pretending to be "just the facts, ma'am". These "data journalists" have an explicit twitter personae that advocates a specific narrative, and then we all pretend that, for some reason, this doesn't leak into the reporting from the institution they work for.

There's probably no going back from this state, and I doubt that there will be any major changes in hiring practices at e.g. the NYT since this kind of journalism drives a lot of traffic. Cat is out of the bag, so to speak.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#126

Post by unishark »

specialist wrote: post #68
unishark wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whataboutism? The article is about a journalist so we're thinking about how other journalists compare.

Then the correct criticism of journalists is that they don't uphold their integrity in the face of the outrage tsunami. Or, more accurately, most who did are no longer employed as journalists.

> the outrage tsunami

I originally read this as "orange tsunami". Which changes the point slightly.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#127

Post by bsder »

teflodollar wrote: post #117
bsder wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think a bigger journalistic sin is: > Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story. A journalist should check whether there is another side that they missed. However, there sometimes isn't. Sometimes the other side is simply flat-out wrong. More often, the "other side" is maliciously wrong. This journalistic assumption that there are always multiple sides that are on equal footing n…

But stories do have multiple sides, even if one side is flat out wrong. I don't think anyone on the right or left would say that the present problem with Journalists is that they present both sides too well. That's not to say that there's never a correct position. Assuming there is another version is different from assuming all versions are on multiple footing.

My standard argument about this is: vax vs anti-vax.

There are NOT two equal sides. There is a correct side and an outright fraudulent side and bunch of easily swayed morons.

Journalists tend to cover this with "balance" instead of calling one side flat-out wrong. "Fair" means occasionally calling out liars and pissing people off.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#128

Post by throwawayjava »

jariel wrote: post #107
proximitysauce wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard manufacturing consent used like that. Do you have any examples of what you're talking about? Genuinely curious.

"I've never heard manufacturing consent used like that. Do you have any examples of what you're talking about? Genuinely curious." 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…

> ...we read it when we're young and naive and our eyes are opened...

First, you're projecting.

Second, it's not at all surprising that you're young enough to have first read Manufacturing Consent when you were "young".

Third, books like Manufacturing Consent and Discipline and Punishment are primarily sociological. They do have some normative content, of course, but their primary goal is to explain how the world works.

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

This is an over-simplification. Of course that's true. Manufacturing Consent is not merely pointing out the existence of politics or merely making the observation that political operatives attempt to use media to shift opinion. It's a book about ___how___ that process works in the age of mass media and in a democratic capitalist society.

The way in which cable news is used to warp people's perception of reality seems pretty obvious in 2020, with hindsight.

And so Manufacturing Consent might seem trite and obvious today. But the book wasn't written in 2019. Or 2018. Or 2008. Or even 1998. It was published in 1988.

Just to put that in context: it was written prior to 9/11. It was written almost a decade before Fox News was founded. It was written only shortly after cable television was even invented. In 1988, "Cable News" as we know it today didn't exist. CNN barely existed, and looked more like a combination of NBC Nightly News and CSPAN. And most importantly, manufacturing Consent was published at a time when most Americans really did believe that the nightly news was a mostly unbiased source of information.

You might read it today and think "yeah, that's obviously how mass media is used to influence how people think about the world". But that's very much not the reaction most people -- even, perhaps especially, hard-nosed realists -- had when reading it in 1988.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#129

Post by AnimalMuppet »

MarioMan wrote: post #120

These are excellent rules, but they’re useless without sites and journalists that follow them. Does anyone here have some recommendations worth reading?

Reuters has pretty decent coverage of the US and international news. Their coverage of the UK may or may not be objective (I don't have the knowledge to say), but as far as I can tell, their non-UK coverage is pretty solid.

Re: Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

#130

Post by throwawayjava »

baby wrote: post #121

In their current form, medias: 1. do not care about creating panics or damaging society 2. are incentivized to provide click-baity to-the-minute reporting. How to fix this? Maybe regulation, even though dangerous in this freedom of speech territory. One thing I was thinking (inspired by one of Andrew Yang's point) is to have a press tax to fund a delayed international news outlet. It changes the incentives: the media…

We already have some obscure bureaucratic infrastructure in place from the 70s called the "public broadcasting service". It's funded and everything. Could just re-purpose that I suppose.

Perhaps the public broadcasting service could have a nightly program that dedicates an entire hour of primetime to this type of reporting. And we could even name it in Lehrer's name! Of course in that case we should also give MacNeil credit as well. So perhaps the show could be called something like the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour"!

;-)

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