[soundwave106]

One thing I'm personally tiring of in this election cycle is the very strong "media is an xyz conspiracy" narrative; a lot of the reasoning seems nothing more than, gasp, people actually have opinions and bias, and marketing spin is a thing. I don't see spin as a "conspiracy", frankly. There is no such thing as unbiased media, I've never known it ever. Connections are not surprising here either. It's rather puzzling to hear opinion and connections being treated automatically as strong conspiracy.

For the record, liberals these days will tend to say rather the same thing as the above, but substitute Fox News and Breitbart, maybe even the WSJ. There's certainly connections -- Fox News certainly has hired Republican big guns in the past, and Breitbart's executive chairman went on to manage Trump's campaign after all. There's also certainly spin in the other direction. You treat the source accordingly.

Narrative, spin, and marketing will always exist (not just for government and media, but for any organization, from big businesses all the way down to non-profit advocacy groups), it's omnipresent in life. It's a good skill in life to develop a sense for looking past the more egregious forms of marketing and spin in life (the "clickbait" of the web, as it were).

[grandalf]

Well, what makes a journalist good at their job is reporting facts and allowing the reader/viewer to understand as much as possible and formulate a decision.

When journalists are bad at their job they make it very easy to arrive at a particular opinion without really having to understand the issue. This too is the point of PR and of moralistic calls to action... to circumvent rational thought and make someone do something (vote a certain way, buy a certain product, hate a group of people, etc).

[soundwave106]

This is true -- the better journalists and papers actually give you enough facts to allow for meaningful conversation and disagreement. And this really is what we should look for, to separate good quality journalism from tabloid trash, regardless of bias.

From my viewpoint, the New York Times still has a reputation for quality journalism. Very few of the anti-New York Times viewpoints in this thread are terribly convincing to me from that perspective.