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

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

#61

Post by ETH_start »

cowpig wrote: post #57
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…

I'm so tired of these false equivalences You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course. And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university…

I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is. Otherwise it just turns into people declaring, purely subjectively, that one outlet is "biased" and another is "impartial" or "truth-seeking".

Ultimately, every editorial decision — what to publish, which story to highlight, what angle to frame it from — is a value judgment. And value judgments aren't matters of objective truth.

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

#62

Post by ETH_start »

laughing_man wrote: post #37

The problem with modern print journalism is the business model just doesn't work anymore. In the old days everything the paper provided was bait to get you to read the classified ads. DBAs, obits, for sale, for rent, seeking someone... all that stuff was in the paper, and you had to pay a lot of money to get your ad there. The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly, but the classifides were what pa…

My view is that we need a good micropayment system to enable low-friction payments for per page access. Pay walls that can be bypassed with a $0.01-$0.05 payment effected by a single click would be much better suited to digital media consumption patterns. Building out the infrastructure for such a system is not trivial though. It requires significant development (as well as adoption and legal acceptance) across an entire stack of technologies:

• a scalable open financial system at the base. The best candidate is the blockchain, but it is still not ready in terms of being capable of providing sufficient scalability, and its privacy gaps (the activity of every account is public) are still not solved due to highly aggressive AML/KYC policies that make even decentralized protocols that provide strong financial privacy (e.g. Samourai Wallet's CoinJoin, Tornado Cash) legally suspect

• broad adoption of open e-wallets, like cryptocurrency wallets

• wide adoption of digital cash that is not confined to a proprietary platform. Stablecoins are furthest along in this category

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

#63

Post by r721 »

laughing_man wrote: post #59
edot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have the internet now, so column inches isn't a constraint. Give it all to me.

Maybe this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

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

#64

Post by xwolfi »

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…

In France, at a very young age, we're taught that journalism is not impartial: people must take sides to express interesting opinions. We simply need to read them all: the Humanite to understand the communist point of view, the Monde for the socialists, the Figaro for the conservatives, the Croix for the Christians, etc.

Once you mix all these perspectives of the same events, you get, if not "the truth", a view of the impact of the events on each sub group in the nation, what they propose to do about it, and put some water in your own wine whichever side you're on: when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.

Thinking "The Washington Post" was "impartial" and "about the truth" before is a pipe dream: they were partial, rational within the confines of their choice ideology, and disagreeing with many subgroups in your country anyway. They just shifted sides but you can find other newspapers now to counter balance.

As long as no newspaper pretend to be impartial and is clearly identified, the national debate stays healthy, no ?

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

#65

Post by laughing_man »

ETH_start wrote: post #62
laughing_man wrote: post #37

The problem with modern print journalism is the business model just doesn't work anymore. In the old days everything the paper provided was bait to get you to read the classified ads. DBAs, obits, for sale, for rent, seeking someone... all that stuff was in the paper, and you had to pay a lot of money to get your ad there. The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly, but the classifides were what pa…

My view is that we need a good micropayment system to enable low-friction payments for per page access. Pay walls that can be bypassed with a $0.01-$0.05 payment effected by a single click would be much better suited to digital media consumption patterns. Building out the infrastructure for such a system is not trivial though. It requires significant development (as well as adoption and legal acceptance) across an en…

People have been trying to make micropayment systems fly for a very long time.

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by trinsic2 »

ETH_start wrote: post #61
cowpig wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so tired of these false equivalences You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course. And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university…

I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is. Otherwise it just turns into people declaring, purely subjectively, that one outlet is "biased" and another is "impartial" or "truth-seeking". Ultimately, every editorial decision — what to publish, which story to highlight, what angle to frame it from — is a value judgment. And value judgments aren't matters of ob…

From my point of view journalism is or was about calling attention to points of reference that we can all agree that we are affected by in a similar way. The way you are framing this is more about agreeing with each other. IMHO that's not what journalism is about.

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

#68

Post by toolazytologin »

9dev wrote: post #51
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

I see your point, but don’t think it is correct: Opposing groups will absolutely debate whether and which events happened, and will attest to a different timeline. Moreover, I don’t believe you can cleanly tell facts from interpretation. Sometimes there is just no way to know (or verify) what happened, and you have to deduce. This is invariably shaped by your personal lens of opinions, then.

> Sometimes there is just no way to know (or verify) what happened, and you have to deduce.

This ties into my original point. Once you can’t verify what happened and are reporting your deductions, you are invariably introducing your opinions. I would prefer to read “we don’t know what exactly happened, but what we do know is X” rather than “we know X, therefore Y must also be true” without any way to actually verify Y.

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

#69

Post by throw0101c »

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 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.

We generally assume that there is an external reality that can be observed and understood. When someone 'consumes' journalism, how well does that reporting reflect the external reality? How well do people's perceptions match up with what physically happened?

For example: in November 2020 there was an election. Who got more votes, both in the popular vote and in the various states individually that counts towards the Electoral College? Who "won" the election?

It turns out that some news organizations—even with any biases—allow their readers/viewers to have a better picture of reality than others:

* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/study-wat...

* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...

* https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/19/the-most-consistent...

* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/knowless/final.pdf

* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/confirmed/final.pdf

* https://www.fdu.edu/academics/centers-institutes/fdu-poll/

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

#70

Post by throw0101c »

ETH_start wrote: post #61
cowpig wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so tired of these false equivalences You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course. And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university…

I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is. Otherwise it just turns into people declaring, purely subjectively, that one outlet is "biased" and another is "impartial" or "truth-seeking". Ultimately, every editorial decision — what to publish, which story to highlight, what angle to frame it from — is a value judgment. And value judgments aren't matters of ob…

> I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is.

Apparantly:

* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/study-wat...

* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...

* https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/19/the-most-consistent...

* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/knowless/final.pdf

* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/confirmed/final.pdf

* https://www.fdu.edu/academics/centers-institutes/fdu-poll/

A simple example: who won the 2020 election? What did each organization say?

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