131–140 of 168 posts
These are excellent rules, but they’re useless without sites and journalists that follow them. Does anyone here have some recommendations worth reading?
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"but if you consider all right wing people to be bizarre" Let's again define the terminology here. I'm a conservative. Many of my friends and peers are conservatives. We traditionally would be "right wing". Only what has been co-opted as the right wing are an absolutely bizarre collection of group-thinkers who have circled the wagons around the abomination that is Donald Trump and tied their ego and identity to defen…
Thank you for saying this. It was the case when I first joined HN that many posts were quite conservative. But here, and frankly across the US, there has been a shift to voices that are indeed deplorable. I admired Jim Lehrer no end. But a person can wonder if the rules alone are strong enough to withstand the assault.
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>Interesting that none of the rules of journalism include just reporting facts. Facts are not enough because in order for 'facts' to be useful they have to be embedded in a larger structure - like a theory, or ideology, or narrative, or whatever. Here's a fact: "Sun rises in the East, and sets in the West". This fact is compatible with heliocentric and geocentric models. The fact on its own doesn't tell you which is…
> This fact is compatible with heliocentric and geocentric models. The fact on its own doesn't tell you which is which. But the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun does tell you which "model" is actually a fact. That's the point. You're making an argument about which facts should be reported? The sun rising in the east? Or the phases of Venus? Or both? Or both and more? But stating that you need an ideology o…
Nobody has time to report all the facts.
Nobody knows ALL the facts.
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…
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…
> unfortunately the biases comes out as we are all human Can you point to an example of any recent article in any US paper that even tries to be objective? Only the BBC pretends to strive for that nowadays.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/health/chicago-coronaviru...
It clearly describes the spread of the disease in the US, including cited quotations from officials at the CDC and other health experts. It provides some useful additional facts about other similar diseases, and projections about how this disease could spread. Seems objective to me.
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…
Stop clicking.
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> unfortunately the biases comes out as we are all human Can you point to an example of any recent article in any US paper that even tries to be objective? Only the BBC pretends to strive for that nowadays.
Here's a pretty straightforward, factual article about the spread of coronavirus: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/health/chicago-coronaviru... It clearly describes the spread of the disease in the US, including cited quotations from officials at the CDC and other health experts. It provides some useful additional facts about other similar diseases, and projections about how this disease could spread. Seems objecti…
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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…
It'd rather seem that Jefferson really didn't have the answer either. His 'solution' probably wasn't a solution, and would probably drive said paper out of business.
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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.
It's also not that there's a lot of alternatives. If you don't want lazy, manipulative, clickbait journalism, your best bet is to not read any papers or media websites.
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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.