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Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

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

#231
post #129

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…

> With a mountain of examples It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.

Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky is a great start. Messengers of the Right and Dark Money are also great.

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

#234

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…

I think it's interesting that this is a highly upvoted comment considering it leans on sociology as an academic study as a source of truth for its claim. The social sciences have long been harangued by HN for not being "real science", but I've seen exceptionally little pushback to the claim above. Why is this?

[To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of what forces influence media that influence people. I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.]

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

This is mostly due to local news stations being lazy and regurgitating copy without doing any work on their own. The way news works involves stories and information being piped from party to party. Much of it comes from the AP or major national news bodies. Having seen how the sausage is made for these small local outfits, they are often run on a low budget with limited staff, old equipment and little bandwidth for t…

No it’s not due to laziness. Most local news is now owned by conglomerates or hedge funds that are “streamlining” them, removing their journalists and circulating non-local stories from other sources they own. The vast majority of “local” news - print or television, has been bought up. Sinclair, digital first media, Gannett, Tribune, etc. all own vast swaths of the “local” news media landscape.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he wrong about this particular issue though? I know broken clocks and all, but just because you disagree with someone most of the time it doesn't mean that they are wrong about everything.

[flagged]

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-polls-fake-news-fox-brett-bai...

Actually, he did call Fox News fake news at one point, although yes it was due to them running a story about polls that were unflattering to him.

However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.

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

#238

Well, you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that pretty much all of American MSM is highly partisan, some worse than others. I grew up in the UK and 70s-80s BBC seemed a lot more neutral, but of course every news organization has their own implicit world view, relative to which they report the news. There is no such thing as an unbiased news source, although there are those that try to brainwash you a…

I've always thought about having one news agency/aggregator that are strictly opinions verboten , i.e. just report the fact and nothing else, use as little adjective or subjective wording as possible. Something happened here at date involving these people. Done. No opinion, no analysis, no conjectures or sarcasm, no calling people with words that either accurately describe them or inaccurately, only official titles a…

>just report the fact and nothing else, use as little adjective or subjective wording as possible

Wouldn't work. There are too many facts and it is possible to build a narrative just by choosing which facts to show or not show.

Easy example, pick some demographic. Now report just the facts about all violent crime that demographic is involved in. Add in the most news worthy violent crimes of other demographics (the ones other news channels are carrying) to help create the image of impartial coverage, but always ensure an abundance of violent crime reports from the targeted demographic.

Thanks to the size of the total US population, you'll always have a new story to cover even without having to add in any opinion. The US, with 300,000,000+ people, will have a few new leads every single day. The disproportionate coverage, even while sticking to just facts, will be feeding a false narrative just as much as any opinionated coverage would.

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

#239
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare Seymour Hersh's codswallop on the Skripal affair with the excellent work done by Bellingcat. It's clear that in this case the mainstream media got it mostly right and Hersh made a dog's breakfast of it. This colours my attitude to his Nordstream "revelations".

https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113 Funny you say that...

It's not unthinkable that they'd move the transponders for a secret mission, no?

Also Hersh's point about the NATO head being an asset in his late teens is definitely feasible, as that was exactly what the Norwegian government did at the time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lund_Report

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