[JeremyMorgan]

The problem lies in the motive. News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit. Breaking even is not enough. Doing well is not enough. Improving profit drastically quarter over quarter is the goal.

To do that, you cannot simply "provide news" anymore. You need conflict. You need confirmation bias. You need to create a wild, screaming echo chamber that induces panic and fear. You need conflict, even if you have to fudge the details to get it. You need to focus on some things and ignore others to increase it.

It's no longer a partisan issue. I'm 40 years old. I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news. Do this yourself: go back and look at newsreels from the 80s and 90s. It's almost surreal. They were still biased, but presented information in a factual manner and then tossed in some emotional stuff. Many of them even... showed both sides of the argument. It's weird to watch now.

A news network simply cannot run with this format in 2018. Fox News was the leader, they were using bias, fearmongering, and propaganda almost from the start. They enjoyed very high ratings because of it. Now the other side has caught up. Because they had to.

It's a mess, but one thing is for sure: we can't trust any of them anymore. Not 100%.

[Spellman]

Go back even further and pretty much every news source was a propaganda machine. Most of the major "trusted" new sources today started primarily in yellow journalism and political attack ads. Pulitzer was not a particularly nice man. Neither was Hearst.

It was a brief modern period when news sources decided to take themselves seriously and rise up ethically and appear "unbiased" to the public. It made the landscape more consolidated and monolithic, but it also drove sources to present relatively whole stories with what limited bandwidth they had to the largest population possible.

That being said, at the same time, radio hosts quite willingly went into the base-pandering and echo chambers. Conservative Talk Radio didn't crop up in the 2000s. They arrived after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine from the FCC in 1987.

TV and print news only later realized if you insert just enough bias to make their viewers feel comfortable and to differentiate from their peers, they could make a WHOLE lot more money. And with the creation of a lot more time to sell news via 24hr channels and the Internet, you had to room to add in fluff, opinion, and other material.

[colordrops]

> News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit.

That's an over-simplication.

Sure, Jeff Bezos probably wants to make a profit with his purchase of the Washington Post. But the profits there are probably not his main objective as they are too small to make much of a difference to a person of Bezo's wealth.

Bezo's goal is to have a mouthpiece to push his agendas, such as pushing Amazon and trashing Musk properties. So you say that the purpose in doing that is to make more money. But the problem with that line of thinking is that you could reduce almost any action to "profit". You could reach further back and go a level lower and say that making profit is motivated by reproductive fitness, and thus "News organizations are entirely motivated by sex". But at some point you have to let go of the circuitous route from action to final motivation and focus on the immediate drivers of an action.

Politics, money, sex, job security, prestige, etc all all motivations for news organizations, as well as many other organizations.

[ggg9990]

Thinking that Bezos wanted WaPo to advocate for Amazon and trash Musk is to treat him as a rich person, not the wealthy person that he actually is.

[kelnos]

Could you explain what you mean by the difference in a person who is "rich" vs. "wealthy"? I don't think that's coming through in your comment.

[ggg9990]

It’s a question of mindset, but often correlated with scale. A rich person is a successful car dealership owner who has a net worth of $50 million, drives a Lamborghini on the weekends, lives in an 10,000 square foot mansion, has a sweet private movie theater, and owns a 60 foot powerboat. His economic activity is focused on consumption. He wants to leave his kids enough money to be rich for life. I can’t give many examples because these people are soon forgotten, but Donald Trump was almost one of these guys until he got some new ideas late in life.

A wealthy person has a net worth of $100 billion, is driven around in a Mercedes S600, has a 120 foot sailboat, goes to private parties at Sundance, values their time above everything else, and is focused on his legacy and place in history. His economic activity is focused on investment. He wants to leave his kids with enough money, connections, and capabilities to become among the great American families, shaping policy and public life for centuries. Think Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates.

[vollmond]

As a political radio host I used to listen to once said (on air, paraphrased from a memory from the early 2000s): "You should doubt and check everything I say. My job is not to inform you or tell you the truth. My job is to keep you listening so advertisers will pay my employer to run their ads."

[otakucode]

Turning 40 this year, so I remember the same media you do. As the Internet grew and options proliferated, I always wanted a particular kind of news that I haven't seen crop up yet. Just a feed. No commentary, no talking heads discussing what something might mean. Just a network which shows video of news events happening. If something is happening in the legislature, I want to watch the legislators doing it. I can get the interpretation and more information about what's going on somewhere else. But the bare "this is what happened" without the fluff just isn't something you can really get. And sure, there's still editorial influence in what they would choose to show and how its shown and other such things, but a countless number of times I've just wanted to see the thing that actually happened.

We have known for centuries that who says a thing cannot influence its truth. How a thing is expressed can't affect it either. An untreated schizophrenic hobo screaming into the street can be telling the truth, and an esteemed professor reporting on new findings in his field can be a liar. It has always been inadvisable to do anything other than analyze claims critically, and I suppose if deepfaking becomes widespread, that will have to be relied upon more than ever.

[adamrezich]

Instead of your hypothetical ideal online news feed, we get the opposite: headlines which now attempt to directly program the reader's attitude about the thesis of the article, because nobody reads the article anyways these days (in this information economy), just the headlines. Thus, the body of the article is increasingly useless as a persuasion tool, especially compared to the headline, so the result--the headline which tells you the thesis of the article and how to feel about it in the same breath--is only the logical conclusion to what social media is doing to our brains, and to society.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=and+that%27s+a+good+thing

https://www.bing.com/search?q=and+that%27s+a+bad+thing

[Uhhrrr]

> I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news.

I wonder about this. Part of the reason you had to pay attention was that there were far fewer information sources to check against. No one was reporting on Martin Luther King's affairs, and no one was reporting on the FBI's attempts to get MLK to commit suicide over them either.

[s_m_t]

That strikes me as some sort of backwards reasoning, people had to literally break into FBI offices and steal documents so that those things would come to be known. You can't really fault the news for not reporting on something they had, unless I'm mistaken, absolutely no way of knowing unless they were to, y'know, infiltrate the FBI.

[Uhhrrr]

The burglary was in 1971, and the MLK letter didn't get published until much later. These days the documents would get uploaded to Mega or sent to Wikileaks, and dozens of people would pore over them.

[philwelch]

It's not even a question of partisan bias; it's a question of sensationalism. It doesn't begin and end with how news organizations cover events; it begins with what events they choose to cover.