If "mainstream" news organisation cannot be trusted. People will go elsewhere in search of the "truth".
I am in the UK and I cannot trust any of the outlets at all. They lie by omission in many cases or simply do not cover it.
e.g. We've had massive anti-lockdown / vaccine passport protests in most of the cities in the UK this weekend. There are protests in France from what I understand around vaccine passports / health pass as well.
Not a mention of it at all on the BBC. Instead I find out about it via "Right Said Fred"'s twitter account. Who are "Right Said Fred"? A 90s one hit wonder band.
Because a media outlet that is trusted and good and has a significant following would keep people away from disinformers.
Unfortunately, we appear to have something towards the opposite - large media outlets that aren't good, aren't trusted, and are trying to manipulate the market (à la Youtube with it's now completely useless search and its nefarious recommendation algorithms) to stop people going to competitors who might actually be doing a better job.
I'm not defending the NYT, but there's a reason why most news sources have become extremely opinionated. There's lots of competition for people's attention, especially when it comes to news and people don't want to pay for news. As a result, they've tried to gain back viewership by becoming more editorialized. Sure you lose people who want a more objective source of news, but you gain a more dedicated following by picking a side in the culture wars. Highly opinionated content also gets you more of that sweet advertising revenue.
Until more people actively seek out more objective news sources and are willing to fund it with something other than ads, I don't see the situation improving.
Agreed. We point the finger at the media all the time, but the media is just a reflection of society. Why is Kim Kardashian on the front page of CNN? Why is "Iconic New York City park, featured in sitcom ‘Friends,’ trashed by urban decay" on the front page of Fox News?
Because they drive clicks.
As soon as gossip and unedited "news" blogs started appearing with rumor and unsubstantiated claims, it was a race to the bottom.
Why? Because the majority of people prefer mindless trash to the idiosyncrasies of a local county commission meeting.
I don't have a good answer because media companies have to make money to stay in business. Making them backed by the state is an even worse idea.
>Why? Because the majority of people prefer mindless trash to the idiosyncrasies of a local county commission meeting.
>I don't have a good answer because media companies have to make money to stay in business. Making them backed by the state is an even worse idea.
An excellent point. Local media outlets (in the US at least, not sure about elsewhere) are few and far between these days.
We need local news that focuses on "county commission meetings" and other happenings of local concern.
Unfortunately, unless you're in a big media market (NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Boston, etc.), odds are that your "local" news is written by folks hundreds of miles away, with no real understanding of local issues.
Here in NYC, we have dozens of local papers, blogs, independent news sites and local TV news outlets. As such, coverage of local issues is quite good.
But the days of small towns/counties having their own local newspapers and TV news are long gone in the US.
Anyone not living in a big media market will likely get only the broad-brush, zero nuance reporting that comes from national/regional news outlets.
That's a big problem for small towns, as there's no one with "skin in the game" watching the goings on of local and state government actors.
I don't have a solution (sadly) for this issue, because local news outlets in small media markets had a hard time staying in business long before the Internet, and the loss of classified ads in those small markets killed local journalism.
And so we have big national players like Fox, CNN, WSJ, NYT, USA Today, etc. that provide coverage of national issues and very limited (and inferior to real local reporting) coverage of regional/local issues.
This leads to really poor governance at the state and local levels and a lack of nuance about regional/national issues as they relate to local populations/economies.
There's a talk[1] by Anand Ghiridharadas about his book[2] - ironically, given at Google - which has many excellent insights, among them that local news has been hollowed out and destroyed by Google and the bigger fish are struggling, leading to this race to the bottom for clicks.
Is there a specific reason I should care about the local commission meeting?
I honestly care even less about local news than nation wide, which I don’t care about at all.
I can't remember when they did it but since the moment they gave old media prominence in the search results (I forget exactly when but in the last couple of years) it's been close to impossible to find any voice outside of the mainstream via search, especially when searching for news. Finding raw footage - no commentary, no cuts - via Youtube's search is impossible. It seems like that kind of thing is intentionally buried.
that is not my gripe. I could care less about NYT being slanted but real travesty is the 'omission', omission of important news stories, omission of events of consequence etc.
Your esteemed Main stream does not have an army of jurnos running around the world, they are throwing hissy-fits on their tweeter feeds and article about article and opinion about opinion - the circular reference of their own in group is mind boggling.
Suppression of real News and exaggeration of the mundane to make a political point is the biggest problem.
It is up to the individual to go to rich sources of information not shallow ones like news papers.
> that is not my gripe. I could care less about NYT being slanted but real travesty is the 'omission', omission of important news stories, omission of events of consequence etc.
1) The mainstream news media is under enormous economic pressure, because the internet kneecapped their economic model: people got used to getting things for free (including bread and butter stuff like classified ads), and "engaging" crap (e.g. ideological hot takes) can be produced far more cheaply than valuable journalism (and is far more "viral"). That means the media often literally doesn't have the resources to even cover the number of stories they used to, let alone everything they arguably should.
2) It's important to be specific about what stories you think are being omitted. Are they actual stories of import, or ideological smears that happen to tickle your biases? We can't know unless they're specified.
for example, if the media would report on the side effects of the vaccines, instead of pretending there are none, then there would be less room for falsehoods to spread. I've yet to see fauci asked one question about vaccine side effects.
of course I'd love to hear how you determine rush Limbaugh listeners to be uninformed, especially since 90% of his show was reading/playing and then responding to mainstream news articles.
If you want to learn about news about your country read papers of other countries about you. Though you still need some critical thinking to filter out BS.
For example Russian Today is often a great source for all non-russian news. But its a propaganda tube for russian news.
Without actually reading it, I somehow think RT will select convenient non-russian news as well. Like, underlining Le Pen or AfD declarations or the post-Brexit downsides... there's room for disinformation also when doing a simple selection.
My point is if you want to hear about BS happening in your own country you'd probably read about it from foreign papers/sources first.
Those have no incentives not to bash your homeland, as oppose to local sources that have to balance not pissing off government (for access to interviews, news, sources) and ad revenue by reporting on the sensitive topics.
I read a few sources of biased news, deliberately to see the different viewpoints, omissions and outright lies. RT is pretty bad for making unsubstantiated claims or strong insinuations that are obviously refuted by facts presented by other news sources. They spread disinformation about the US, too, not just Russia.
This is what I do as well; I would add the caveat that foreign news sites written in english are absolutely pushing propaganda on you regardless of whether it's about internal politics or foreign politics. Russia Today is even up front about this; the point is the propaganda itself is useful in order to detect what the actual arguments are. You do not get this by reading only one opinion as the only other viewpoints you will receive will be strawmans.
Although a lot of the mistrust of mainstream news is well earned, there is also an explosion of doubt and misinformation these days. (How many stories these days are a media story with a strawman? "You'll never believe what [publication] is saying!") The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least at the level of the individual story and/or writer. But people have become so cynical or mistrustful, that a NY Times article is dismissed automatically even when it shouldn't. Feel free to swap out NY Times for any other publication which performs good journalism.
There's a difference between legitimate criticism of a publication, (which nearly any publication would deserve to varying degrees) and lazy, automatic dismissals of the news as "broadly untrustworthy."
(To be clear, and at a personal level, I don't particularly like the NY Times. Their headlines are often politicized and the editorial section is completely awful. However if you get off the front page and just read some of their in depth reporting, you'd be crazy to write them off as wholly biased or untrustworthy.)
>> The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least the level of the individual story and/or writer.
> And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing?
All editing is selective, that's pretty much definitional.
I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The alternative to the NY Times (and similar publications) isn't some ideal publication that gives an accurate picture without distortion, it's talk radio and other opinionated sources that give pictures that are even more distorted.
The NY Times is like a plate of food with a fly in it. There are salesmen out there that spend a lot of time talking about the fly, reminding you how gross it is and how bad they must be for it to get there, etc. Then they'll offer a plate of dogshit as a substitute, and distressingly a lot of people will take it because they've been successfully fixated on that damn fly.
A better alternative is not trusting any of them. Realize that they're all distorting the truth, and yet also sharing a part of the truth, and dig deeper.
Uncritical acceptance of any source leads to mistakes like believing the Steele dossier and claims about collusion between Trump and Russia, whose claims even the NY Times itself now admits "have never materialized or have been proved false".[1]
That was one of the biggest pieces of disinformation in the last five years, and the NY Times pushed it wholeheartedly for many years. Their mistake here is summarized well in their own article:
> To learn from the dossier episode, news organizations would have to examine their ties to private intelligence agents, including why they so often granted them anonymity. But as long as the media allows private spies to set the rules, journalists and the public will continue to lose.
> A better alternative is not trusting any of them. Realize that they're all distorting the truth, and yet also sharing a part of the truth, and dig deeper.
I think that's kinda right, but I have some quibbles. Basically, I feel the attitude that they're not trustworthy and distorting the truth leads to a kind of paranoia, feelings of helplessness, or succumbing to the trap letting an uncritical indulgence of one's own biases dictate what's "factual." I think there's a better way to say a similar thing:
You can trust the members if the mainstream media to try their best, but realize they make mistakes for understandable reasons and have their own biases, so you need to read with those biases in mind and try to correct for them with a measure of skepticism (e.g. a grain of salt, not a boulder). Realize that they're all sharing a part of the truth, dig deeper, and withhold judgement. The news is a first draft of history, written before all the facts are in.
I think this is giving them entirely too much credit. The NY Times own editor admitted their staff was partisan:
> “What I’m saying is that our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told his staff in a town hall on Monday.[1]
No doubt some members of the media are still trying their best, but look how many of the best have left the media for Substack or other independent pursuits, because the climate in the big media organizations no longer permits the pursuit of truth over politics.
There's a lot of valid criticism to be had, but the alternative of "doing your own research"* is a little bit facile.
Real people who are actually engaged in the business of participating in society--holding down jobs, going to school, being citizens--don't have the time to effectively "research" every important issue, and, as a corollary, those who do tend to be cranks.
For sure nobody should engage in "uncritical acceptance", though to me this seems like a straw man. The test of a good newspaper isn't whether you can read it uncritically, but whether reading it critically leaves you more or less well informed.
* A distinctive phraseology which, as detailed in "Pale Horse Rider" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQS4DYQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...), goes back to at least William Cooper and the 1990s, but has recently come to be used for things like vaccine skepticism and QAnon.
A phrase that I didn't use. If you're going to put words in my mouth, don't try to overanalyze what they might have meant had I said them.
As you said "there's a lot of valid criticism to be had". All I'm saying is to be aware of that and seek out that criticism. And don't believe everything you read, even in the NYT.
Not having time for in depth critical reading is understandable, but if that's the case, recognize it and adjust your confidence level appropriately.
In my experience, people just want their biases confirmed and their prejudices reinforced. Moving away from mainstream media gives the people what they really want: white supremacy and conspiracy theories.
Why though? What is it that has changed their business model or people’s minds? Ask yourself that. What is it that is particularly biased? Opinion pieces and ‘advertorials’ etc. that they are forced to adopt because of falling revenues and fragmented attentions are bound to be biased.
The NYT is actually doing great financially. They lost their credibility because they did the one thing that a journalist can never do, lost their neutrality. They let Trump get under their skin, lost all skepticism, and started printing anything negative about him even if it was only a rumor. It's basically an organ of the Democratic party now.
Oh for the love of Buttigeig, if the Democratic Party had an organ, I would hope it would do a better job of stating policy and sticking to it. If The Times is your idea of a lefty boogie man, life must be pretty easy.
Please distinguish between Democratic Party and actual leftism. I don't like NYT because they keep lying us into stupid wars, which isn't leftist at all.
>"Please distinguish between Democratic Party and actual leftism."
I am so tired of this trope. Nothing is ever 'true leftism' and yet everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, *-ist, etc.
...everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, -ist, etc.*
Yes that happens, in the New York Times. It's wonderful for a center-right organization like Democrats to pose as leftist in their party organ. Rational people, including rational actual leftists, are less likely to try to "de-platform" anyone.
You should read more. Everything fallingknife said is backed up by statements from insiders. As one wrote:
> Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.
...
> But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.
> What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.
This resignation letter was also heavily refuted by other insiders, most specifically that Weiss was actively insulting her co-workers in the middle of meetings. Who should I be believing?
Claiming that she was also insulting them is not a refutation. It's quite possible for both statements to be true, but whatever insults she may have used wouldn't excuse behavior like this:
> They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
Quoth your link "The shift coincided with the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, when trust in the media was often juxtaposed with trust in Trump’s presidency."
The problem the media has is that it can't please everyone's biases. If it's appropriately skeptical of Trump, the people who hate to see Trump criticized will be unhappy (and in that case there's an ideological media alternate universe willing to capitalize on that unhappiness and turn it into mistrust). If it becomes a Trump love-fest with either muted skepticism (e.g. Fox News) or hardly any at all (e.g. OANN), then a lot of people with mistrust it (because it's arguably not doing its job).
It's a lot like Congress, actually. People mistrust "Congress" but usually like their Congressman. That's because their Congressmen likely to be ideologically similar, while "Congress" as a whole has people who are very different ideologically (and it may be controlled by those people). And to top that off, the electoral strategies of both parties often play up fear and mistrust of the other side in order to drum up votes (which unarguably helps the candidates most of the time, but hurts the institution).
No, more than that. The problem the media has is that it wasn't enough to merely be sceptical of Trump or to oppose him based on what he actually did; in order to be sufficiently anti-Trump you needed to believe an endless cavalcade of things that weren't true.
Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server. This made no sense on any level; neither Trump nor anyone in his circles controlled the mail server or its DNS, they were behind so many levels of subcontracting he'd have to involve a bunch of people he had no reason to trust and who all denied any such thing happened, all to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need some other, undetected, much better communication channel to get any meaning out of it and that was tied to the Trump brand for no good reason. And this was supposed to be a better explanation than other mail systems which had received promotional hotel e-mails merely doing automated DNS requests as a result, like many e-mail systems do.
So naturally, the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate this in a way that implied they were somehow supporting Trump if they didn't, and went massively viral on social media with this demand. The New York Times pushed back against this in the mildest way possible, by saying that the FBI had looked into these claims and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal email systems doing ordinary things in response to marketing emails. (This was also what nearly every technical expert seems to have concluded regardless of party.) Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.
> Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server.
Do you have an actual link to that?
Another problem is that some people have the mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that was timely.
> Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.
Maybe, to make my point more explicitly: the main issue with the media nowadays seems to be many of the people who consume it. And frankly, most criticism of the media's trustworthiness that I see online is the kind that will only make whatever problem that's being complained about worse.
The number one news source in the USA is also the one most likely to make viewers less informed, or even ill informed.
I personally lost the last of my faith in the USA over the pandemic and the Trump era. We needed a vaccine agains News Corp about twenty years ago. What we got instead was normalization of “alternative facts,” and now everyone is worried about cancel culture or some other b.s. while I’m over here watching the end of the age of reason.
You'll note that the current VP and various MSNBC & CNN hosts & contributors casted major doubts on the vaccine when it seemed it would be released in time for Trump's reelection cycle.
It really is turtles all the way down with the media and political parties. It's time to remove the artificial divides in your mind and fight these issues from a more party-agnostic position. We need your help.
What is the relationship between more trust in a mainstream source and susceptibility to disinformation you are implying here?
For example, IIRC Rush Limbaugh's audience gave him a lot of credibility and was less informed because of that.