Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

>And programmers get taught to write documentation

That isn't an ethics issue, it's disingenuous to compare the two (not trying to ascribe malice to you). I do recognize the point you're trying to make in terms of quality being sacrificed to business concerns, and I'll touch on that (a bit indirectly) in a moment.

>Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech

Two things here. 1.) You (presumably) aren't and have never been a journalist or tried to be one. I assure you that this is a thing that sits at the heart of American Journalist philosophy, at least as I experienced it. I probably shouldn't have phrased it in a way that let you have an opinion. Also, sorry for the appeal to authority :) 2.) The first amendment specifically calls out religion, press and assembly. There was a vision for the role of press in government; they aren't within a country mile of living up to that but still enjoy the freedom. 2a.) We can agree on rabid amounts of free speech at least, and despite press failings I don't want to take away their freedom to print whatever.

>We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening.

Yeah, that would just be a diversion. Let's leave it, as I imagine we agree anyway.

>You seem to want to ascribe agency to it

Well, to cheat and be a jerk: All people have agency. To be more honest, I think there's a mix of business concerns and ideology. As I was trying to point out, Trump has made them a shitload of money. He's probably the best thing that's ever happened to print and cable news, at least in the last decade. Even were they to report on him honestly, he would make them a shitload of money. He's controversial without them needing to help.

This might just be something that I will fail to convey to you, but my experience from a (kind of) insider's view, is that most journalists are partisan. Nobody has to love that, it's an acknowledged reality, and uncontroversial (for any journalist with credibility). The trouble is that the effort or even pretense of trying to mitigate bias has gone away, which I don't think you disagree with. Something that might be less known to you is that most credible news outlets try to make it a point to separate the business concerns from editorial concerns for just this reason. At least publicly that is certainly the case. Theoretically there's a publicist and an executive editor, and the two manage their respective departments without consultation. We're probably both cynical enough to realize they're full of shit, but that rule didn't come out of a vacuum and was adhered to in the one paper I wrote for (though I was freelancing / interning so obviously my insight was limited). Additionally, you might be familiar with the idea of an ombudsman. Theoretically, this is a person who is paid by the paper to shit all over it when it fucks up. It's painful but necessary. Clearly these people aren't doing their jobs.

My point is that, at least historically, and recently at that, papers have acknowledged bias and at least made a reasonable effort to counter it. In another comment, maybe from you, business concerns have taken a toll. Consolidation mixed with adopting modern, short-sighted executive level business decisions have had a deleterious effect on quality. C-levels aren't trained in, and don't care about, the ethics training journalists get, and anyone given free reign to indulge their bias is going to struggle to resist that. I guess I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but rather that there's been a decay in journalism (caused by your opinion) that's resulted in the present conditions (caused by my opinion).

This is already so long 90% of people aren't going to read it, so I'll leave it here: Because of my previous passion for journalism, the current failures deeply pain me, and have been more of my focus than the candidates. The failure is not caused just by business concerns, but people gleefully letting their bias loose and enjoying their ethical lapse. We can probably both agree it's a disservice to the country and will hasten the demise of print and cable news. But in the meantime they will reap the seductive gains of short term thinking. I'll save predictions for the future for another time.

I hope you're stuck on a bus or something where this screed is a welcome diversion :)

As some one coming to US from mainland China, I find this collusion between the media and the Democratic party familiar, yet the case with US is much more disturbing. Because in China, the relationship between CCP and the press is out in the open, people knew the press is the mouthpiece of the party and treat the information they receive from the press accordingly. Here in US, people do not know. This is truly frightening.

For any one email, it's easy to check and dispute a discrepancy.

Checking thousands of emails takes time but you have to take that time to avoid the chance of validating a forgery. During that time, they're in the news a lot and someone may confirm a legitimate email in the dump, which will be taken by many as proof that the entire thing is valid. Many people will never change their memory of that. If you do find anything tampered with, it may be hard or impossible to prove to a level which will satisfy critics. It doesn't need to be provable to the level needed for a court case to be damaging politically – just look at how much mileage the GOP got from birtherism based on repetition and incredibly clumsy forgeries even with contradictory evidence available.

So if you compromise a political target's account, you could get the most damage from real dirt but you can get almost as much from a clever forgery among all of the normal office chatter as long as you don't do something like adding a Russian name to the Office metadata or claim something happened when it was unquestionably impossible (e.g. claiming a secret meeting when someone was giving a speech nowhere near the purported location).