[iagovar]

Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us!

I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awful job. I felt that the story they made up was only tangentially related to reality.

[lotsofpulp]

The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.

[TeMPOraL]

Ultimately, both views are true. We do not "demand" it with regular market means, but it's important to remember that free markets tend to structurally favor incrementally cutting corners. Even assuming we've demanded good journalism in the past (which is doubtful), we'd still end up where we are. As for media self-inflicting it upon itself, well, they shouldn't have started cutting corners. But since "media" is really a lot of competing actors, "not cutting corners for short-term gain" was an impossible outcome anyway - the whole thing has dynamics of a Prisoner's dilemma.

My conclusion is that it's less about demanding - the way we fund news, i.e. open and competitive market, is structurally unable to support good journalism. Usually problems like these are solved by governments setting standards and giving funding, but journalism is a special case (it's perceived by many as protection against government overreach), so with that option out, I have no idea how to even begin solving it.

[PhasmaFelis]

> Maybe not, but it's still a problem.

Of course it's still a problem. The point is that it's actually a much bigger problem than you implied. People blame the media like it's all just down to some greedy jerks making malicious decisions, and if only we could replace them with someone with integrity, everything would be okay.

The fact is that we've created an environment where it's nearly impossible for honest, non-sensationalized news to exist. Putting all the blame on the media is like blaming a starving man for stealing bread. They're culpable, certainly, but you're missing the root cause.