[0xy]

Fox, Breitbart, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post. All of them.

Which of the names that I've just mentioned hasn't made huge, glaring journalistic errors repeatedly?

Even throw in the self-described 'neutral' outlets like NPR, Associated Press and others and you see the same thing. Repeated lies, walkbacks and egregious errors.

I don't know why any person would apologize for corporate media.

[anthony_romeo]

You make it sound like you expect people to be infallible.

[0xy]

Not at all, but the nature of mistakes is revealing of the journalistic bias of those working for those organizations.

When Washington Post falsely claims the Russians hacked into critical US energy infrastructure, this isn't a harmless typo or a flubbed detail.

When the New York Times repeatedly lies about WMDs in Iraq and tens of thousands of people die, this isn't a harmless typo or a flubbed detail.

Those are the obvious ones, the most egregious behavior is what they don't report on or cover up.

If the internet wasn't around to fact check the lies of mainstream media in real-time, imagine what they'd be getting away with.

Why do you think they're deserving of your defense? Their actions are neither harmless nor accidental. These aren't innocent mistakes.

These are recent examples. If you go back further, the same news outlets were repeating CIA propaganda via Operation Mockingbird and other efforts.

[anthony_romeo]

All news organizations lie and mislead. This is because all people lie or mislead or misrepresent or exaggerate or fuck up or whathaveyou. I contend that it's not enough to merely establish that certain news organizations have lied, or misled, or made mistakes, or colluded in the past to wholesale reject information from these news sources. Rather it needs to be established that they are flawed at an extraordinary degree relative to other organizations (though I concede that this is far-far-far-far-far easier said than done).

> If the internet wasn't around to fact check the lies of mainstream media in real-time, imagine what they'd be getting away with.

Wasn't there a phrase, "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet"? What if you listen to fact-checkers who themselves cherry-pick and distort? How would you know?

With all that said, there are serious flaws with how news is distributed which can make these human characteristics more pronounced (and I suspect our opinions of the so-called "mainstream media" are actually more similar than they are different), and that we generally ought to use the news to point us toward actual primary sources we can review for ourselves, rather than use the news as a source of anger-pornography (which gets tons of clicks) to bolster our misguided opinions.

As a consumer of sources of information, I'm just trying to make decisions based upon a tiny fraction of an extremely limited amount of information we know about the world around us (which I'd argue the vast majority of what we read isn't particularly helpful).

So what I'm getting at is that I feel that your tone is far too generalized to really be meaningful in any sense.

(I apologize if that sounds harsh)

[0xy]

Speaking at a personal level, if you consume news media you're more likely to be depressed. For this reason alone you shouldn't read the news. After all, do you really need to know about every single legislative and political minutiae that's the flavor of the day?

The rest of planet agrees with me. News media is very untrusted (last I read it's somewhere around 60% untrustworthy), and the industry is rapidly dying.

Faced with impending doom, the journalists at the helm of those corporate monstrosities sought to double down on lies and clickbait. Open up the Network tab on any news website these days and you'll see all the tracking and advertising garbage they've resorted to as well.

By reading news, you're supporting this behavior and also (statistically speaking) doing yourself harm in the process.

[anthony_romeo]

I disagree that one should avoid any source of depression. In some instances, relevant bad-news which is also truthful ought not be avoided simply because it may exacerbate depression. The hard part, of course, is discerning what is relevant.

Of course it's unhealthy to consume an unhealthy amount of worthless news, but that's tautological.

I'll also note that 60% of the planet is not "the rest of the planet", and I'd bet that a large chunk of the 60% you reference merely believe that their "news sources" (I'm using this term very loosely here, such as sketchy blog posts, so-called alt-news sources, and 4-chan memes) are more reliable than the news sources they don't like. Similar to how, say... the body of Congress is the least popular branch of the U.S. government year after year, yet people reelect their Congressperson year after year because they don't necessarily hold the same opinion of their Congressperson. It's hard for me to really tease anything meaningful out of your second paragraph.

The journalism industry is not "rapidly dying", it's rapidly changing, as with most industries over the past few decades. Unfortunately it's going down the path of shitty clickbait, but shitty clickbait isn't exclusive to the mainstream media.

I believe the real tragedy isn't the existence/worsening of so-called mainstream media, but rather the growing focus on national/international news at the expense of strong impactful local journalism.

I'm curious to hear about your solutions to these problems, as well as where you go to get informed.

[belorn]

We are not talking about fallible human beings when news coverage follows the same patter of the companies massive political campaign contributions. When media companies give away millions in order to influence the political environment, they loose the plausible deniability of being a political neutral entity which just happened to create news that follows a specific political direction.

There exist study (I would guess multiple) on the media landscape and which news company leans where and how. Some media companies are explicitly leaning in one direction, others less so. Some claim neutrality, and the study do support the existence of a very small minority that seems to achieve it. It is a subject I would like to see a meta study on in order to get a good estimate on how small the narrow band are of news sources that supply political neutral news.