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From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

thejournal.ie

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Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#41

Post by 9dev »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #19
akimbostrawman wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they just can't help themselves as they see themselves above the regular public that needs to be educated. same can be said about the modern science community that has been thoroughly ideologically captured.

I feel nothing but schadenfreude.

I don’t understand this sentiment. Journalists are humans too, with their own opinions that invariably shape their work. That doesn’t invalidate all their work though, and it’s vital for a democracy to have a spectrum of opinions floating around, and citizens getting in contact with that spectrum.

Big newspapers and media outlets are the only institutions able and persistent enough to dig through things like the Epstein files. With them going down, we loose yet another guardrail, some more checks and balances.

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#42

Post by laughing_man »

jmclnx wrote: post #2

>n the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds milking them dry, or by billionaires I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.

Jarvis is off the reservation here. Newspapers aren't being "milked dry" by anyone, since they don't make money. The billionaires are there because they want their own views in the public discourse, and they can afford to lose money every year making it happen.

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#43

Post by gdwatson »

jmclnx wrote: post #2

>n the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds milking them dry, or by billionaires I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.

> I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine.

There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to enforce it? I don’t trust my own “side” to do so, and I sure as heck don’t trust the other side.

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#44

Post by 9dev »

toolazytologin wrote: post #32
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very cable-news-brained to believe there always have to be two sides that are equally viable and that the only respectable unbiased stance is in the middle, dragged by the Overton window wherever it happens to go.

It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.

So, facts, huh.

Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?

Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible experience of the Shoah?

Is Russia freeing the upstanding people of Ukraine from a tyrannical Nazi regime, or attacking a foreign country out of imperialistic greed?

You will find many groups of people are absolutely certain that one side of these examples is the objective truth.

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#45

Post by edot »

laughing_man wrote: post #38
toolazytologin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.

I would love a paper like that. Don't tell me what to think -- just tell me what happened yesterday.

Thousands of newsworthy things happened yesterday. Which ones do you put on the front page?

You don’t have to put a spin on the news to bias it. You just report or fail to report the news that goes or doesn’t go with your agenda.

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#46

Post by themafia »

the_fall wrote: post #28

The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their idea…

> the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking.

It's constantly been with us since the beginning of the republic. Several of our founding fathers were actually publishers.

> this consensus

Consensus doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a product of an interest in profiting off the news. It seems obvious from this vantage what the fundamental problem is and why "journalists" are not a homogeneous group with identical outputs and why terms like "main stream" even exist.

> it helped with social cohesion and national identity

Which is why the FBI and CIA target it for manipulation so relentlessly.

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#47

Post by bigstrat2003 »

9dev wrote: post #44
toolazytologin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.

So, facts, huh. Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election? Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible expe…

> Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?

Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an exact quote to hand), and that a group of people were protesting and then went past the security barrier to enter the Capitol. You can interpret those facts in different ways (as your question shows), but either interpretation admits the same facts.

As one of my favorite youtube creators, Feral Historian, put it: "Most of the time, people equate the facts and their particular way of connecting them. Most political arguments are about the lines, not the dots. We think our opponents are ignoring the facts when they're just seeing different relationships between them". I think he's spot on with this observation, and one must be extremely careful to delineate between objective fact and the conclusions one draws based on facts. The latter are not objective, even if we feel very strongly that they are obviously correct.

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#48

Post by 9dev »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #47
9dev wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, facts, huh. Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election? Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible expe…

> Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election? Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an e…

That’s exactly my point: You present yet another alternative view as facts, which would get debated by the former two groups. There is no authority to establish which of the three views is the canonical truth, regardless of how much you think your own is obviously and objectively true.

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#49

Post by [deleted] »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #25
MarkusQ wrote: post #7

The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and eventually torn to shreds.

It's very cable-news-brained to believe there always have to be two sides that are equally viable and that the only respectable unbiased stance is in the middle, dragged by the Overton window wherever it happens to go.

[deleted]

Re: From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media

#50

Post by bigstrat2003 »

9dev wrote: post #48
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election? Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an e…

That’s exactly my point: You present yet another alternative view as facts, which would get debated by the former two groups. There is no authority to establish which of the three views is the canonical truth, regardless of how much you think your own is obviously and objectively true.

I deliberately tried as hard as possible to phrase the things I said in such a way that either of the groups you proposed would find no objection to my saying those things were true. Perhaps I failed in some way, but I don't think I did. My point is that we can indeed agree upon some facts as to what happened, but that those are not what people argue over. They argue over an interpretation of the facts that tells some story about who is the "good guy" and the "bad guy", but not the facts themselves. And in my experience, that is generally the form of all disputes over "facts": they are very rarely actual disagreements on what events happened, but rather disagreements about why they happened or if it was acceptable for those things to happen.
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