The cynical side of me: accurate reporting isn’t profitable because there is very little demand for accurate reporting from the general public.
People want to read/watch news they want to believe or agree with, and instinctively they shun away from facts that causes cognitive dissonance with them. What they want is to believe their preferred news sources are objective, but they will do everything they can to avoid doing actual due diligence to verify that objectivity.
That’s why if we leave it to purely market economy, completely objective, facts based journalism will never be as profitable as sensationalism based stuff you see these days.
Even more meta, but one of the really big questions is: How to give people what they need instead of what they want?
I think it was pg who said "make something people want". If the plan is to get rich that is the way to go. If you want to improve the world, you should build something people need. Unfortunately, they often don't want it or don't want it enough to pay for it which makes the endeavor unsustainable.
But does it make sense to frame this as a statement about human beings, rather than a statement about what is logically required by the evolutionary-style process of information multiplying? Regardless of where society's starting point was, when it's really easy to transmit information, the information that gets transmitted the most is the kind that doesn't demand analysis first.
Journalists were lied to and have very little means of independent investigation. The "fake news" here was actually the lie pandered by the White House. The fact that the House and Senate went a long with it is concerning but I imagine you only have to get the House and Senate intelligence committees onboard to get the rest of them to tag along.
> Journalists were lied to and have very little means of independent investigation
Plenty of foreign journalists didn't buy what the US government was saying and refuted its claims with facts, the whole idea that Saddam Hussein had nukes or WMD was completely preposterous, it's just that US journalists were afraid of being labelled traitors if they didn't go along with the Irak war. Journalists are people after all. So they "chose" to listen to Rumsfeld instead of Hans Blix.
Journalists aren't trusted anymore and their work isn't valued by the public because things like the Covington school incident happens, where Journalists just keep using tweets as a meaningful source of information, with no serious investigative work.
Journalists don't like Facebook, Google and co because they are direct competitors to them in terms of attention and ad revenue. Ironically they somehow like Twitter and are all on Twitter even when Twitter is actually competition to them, way more than Facebook or Google. Why bother visiting the nyt when all the drama is already on Twitter?
I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This was a fact during the Iraq invasion. Anyone who got the story right got fired. Everyone who parroted the administration line, even when it was blindingly obvious it was a lie, got promotions.
>Soon after the show's cancellation, an internal MSNBC memo was leaked to the press stating that Donahue should be fired because he opposed the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq and that he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war"
People want to read/watch news they want to believe or agree with, and instinctively they shun away from facts that causes cognitive dissonance with them. What they want is to believe their preferred news sources are objective, but they will do everything they can to avoid doing actual due diligence to verify that objectivity.
That’s why if we leave it to purely market economy, completely objective, facts based journalism will never be as profitable as sensationalism based stuff you see these days.