[zepto]

> How it works: Media outlets can continue to report reliable facts, but that won't turn the trend around on its own. What's needed is for trusted institutions to visibly embrace the news media.

This is an extremely weird and disturbing conclusion. Orwellian even.

What’s needed is for news organizations to not only report facts, but stop telling stories in ways that only benefit their own ideological systems.

That’s unlikely to happen with existing brands that have effectively now chosen a side, because they have cultivated an audience that now expects them to keep delivering.

It might happen with something new.

[busterarm]

Journalism is pay to play anyway.

If you aren't a mainstream politician, you literally have to buy ads to get coverage. Outside of politics it works this way as well. Heck, just look at games journalism.

News channels also hate absolutely anything that takes attention away from their content and their advertisers. Thus video games, dungeons & dragons, religion or anything else that holds the attention of masses of people are to be branded as societal evils.

The best thing that literally everyone can do is stop watching and focus on what's important in your life. Build the community around you.

[bitexploder]

Journalism and journalists serve an important role in any free society. They are one of the last great checks on a government. We still need reliable journalism. But we need it to not be constant hyperbole and drama.

[busterarm]

I am saying stop watching until the journalism improves. Stop watching until it serves your interests.

If you keep supporting what it brings you now, how do you expect it to change?

Journalism and journalists are not doing their part. Under the status quo it should crash and burn and die.

[hef19898]

Couldn't agree more with your last sentence. Recently I had a discussion around that with my 12 year old about just that, in the end I compared online journalism to social media influencers. The latter do almost everything for likes, the former for clicks, because both equal revenue. This fast news cycle certainly doesn't help journalism in general. Throw in agendas and we end up where we are. Not that journalism can, or should, be unbiased. Journalism should be open about their particular biases, and definitely less aggressive and underhanded in transporting it. The US seems to be worse in that regard than other countries, this doesn't mean that it is a purely US problem.

The underlying issues with journalism also make it hard to fight back on Fake News allegations, sometimes the Fake News crowd, regardless of political leanings, actually does have a point.

[jakelazaroff]

> What’s needed is for news organizations to not only report facts, but stop telling stories in ways that only benefit their own ideological systems.

This is not a new phenomenon; it’s been happening for a looooong time. Look at the difference in how white and Black newspapers reported on the Tulsa race massacre [1]:

”More Than Two Hundred White and Colored Men, Women and Children Were Killed in the Bloody or Horrible Race Riots at Tulsa, Okla.”

vs.

“Two Whites Dead in Race Riot” and “Many More Whites Are Shot”

All factual headlines! But some of them pretty egregiously support one particular ideological position. This was a full century ago.

[1] https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/05/tulsa-race-...

[nostromo]

> white and Black

It was when the New York Times decided to start capitalizing black but not white I knew they were done being objective and had turned to activism.

Their explanation that all black people worldwide share a common culture but all white people do not is just absurd.

They’re not a serious news organization and haven’t been for some time.

[hansbo]

Here is the article I believe the parent is referring to

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...

I think it was rather nuanced. Several reasons given:

1) The capitalization of Black has already been accepted by the mainstream - NYT is catching up with the times

2) Other names on American minorities with a shared heritage is already capitalized, like Latino and Asian.

3) African-American is capitalized, but not as inclusive as Black.

At no point, except when referring to some early 20th century worldview, are they talking about all black people worldwide. I read the article as a purely American POV.

[zepto]

The problem isn’t the capitalization of Black, which as you point out has good reason behind it - it is being used as a proper name for a group. The problem is that White is being used the same way and yet isn’t being capitalized.

[ErikVandeWater]

> 2) Other names on American minorities with a shared heritage is already capitalized, like Latino and Asian.

What is the definition of "shared heritage" such that everyone but Whites have shared heritage?

[caeril]

My understanding is that:

1. Black Americans were taken away from their native specific cultures, whether it be Bantu, Hutu, Berber, etc, and unable to propagate the specifics of their cultures within communities. After emancipation, the only extant culture available was "Black".

2. White Americans generally settled into self-segregating Italian, Irish, German, etc communities or regions, and the original idiosyncrasies of these cultures persisted beyond relocation.

This makes a lot of sense, and I think up until the mid-late 20th century, this was fair, but I do think that sense is losing its strength as American society becomes increasingly atomized.

In 2021, it's equally valid to say that "Detroit Blacks" and "Memphis Blacks" have their own (sure, nascent, but real) disparate cultures, at the same time that it's valid to say that American "Swedish Whites" and "Italian Whites" are far more culturally similar than they were a couple generations ago.

I don't know, we'll see where history leads us, I guess. But the change is definitely visible.

[zepto]

> it's valid to say that American "Swedish Whites" and "Italian Whites" are far more culturally similar than they were a couple generations ago.

Ok, but if this is true [1], and it’s also necessarily true by your previous claims that Whites have different culture than Blacks in general, then why not capitalize White, since it is a name for a culture.

[1] given that Jews are usually considered ‘white’, and many Jews in fact do have distinct cultures - e.g. Brooklyn Jews, it’s hard to argue this.

[peterburkimsher]

As the Bee Gees say regarding the New York Times:

We can try to understand

The New York Times' effect on man

Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother

You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive

[zepto]

Agreed. It’s not new. What’s new is that it’s obvious to everyone now because of the internet.

[seg_lol]

> some

!

[pseudo0]

> What’s needed is for news organizations to not only report facts, but stop telling stories in ways that only benefit their own ideological systems.

Ironic timing considering how just earlier today we were discussing how Rolling Stone's story about gunshot victims being left waiting because of ivermectin overdoses was determined to be false. Talk about a perfect example of a credulously reported story that made it halfway around the globe, retweeted by MSNBC anchors and foreign news outlets, all because it played into the prejudices of journalists and the narrative they wanted to promote. And the whole thing was based on the commentary of one doctor, who apparently hadn't even worked at the hospital in question for months.

It's remarkable that journalists can complain about the public's declining trust while fiascos like this happen on a regular basis, and Axios and their contemporaries either downplay it or sweep it under the carpet.

Previous discussion of the ivermectin hospitalization story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421638

[silisili]

Perfectly said. There was even a show about this a decade ago, called The Newsroom, and on the show the network failed specifically because they reported only the news. It's actually a really good show, and in hindsight, prescient.

[shadilay]

It also spawned the term 'American Taliban' which seems to have come into vogue recently.

[ayngg]

Trust can't really be gained as easily as it is lost, at this point I am skeptical there is a real (nice) solution available and the only path is for these institutions to continue to further dig themselves into their hole until there is no trust left to erode.

We have to remember that the media is like this because this is apparently what people want to consume. The old, traditional way is not one that will keep the bills paid. The incentives are all out of alignment with no obvious way to fix them.

I think the worst part of this is the authoritarian tendencies that are creeping in as people try to maintain a guise of being trustworthy as others begin to look for "trust" elsewhere.

[fallingknife]

It's also that the internet broke the local monopolies of the newspapers. It used to be that the newspapers could say to the politicians "if you want to reach the voters in our city, you have to answer questions from our journalists." But now it's more like the politicians can say "unless you put out the coverage we want, you have to provide the coverage we want. Otherwise we will not talk to your organization and people will get their news elsewhere."

[seg_lol]

Damn you Craig!

Seriously, the 4th branch was ultimately funded by ads in the local paper. That shifted faster then they could keep up and the rug got pulled out from under them. And it has flipped politics on its head. It was never stable in the first place.

[luckylion]

> We have to remember that the media is like this because this is apparently what people want to consume.

But their audience is decreasing, so I'm not sure that it's actually what people want. It seems to me that it's more of a "cashing in" thing. They built up trust for generations by mostly reporting factually with little bias, and the current generation is cashing in by abusing that trust to advance their personal politics (short-sighted as that may be), support "the system" (conspiracy!), or both.

[ayngg]

I feel like the audience has been decreasing for decades, and the current state of how news is reported is sort of an attempted pivot in reporting style meant to emulate social media which has been eating their lunch. Clickbait headlines and partisanship/ bias fuel a type of engagement that seems to be much more lucrative than what they did before. In terms of cashing in, I do believe it is something that they are doing to survive.

[curation]

Yes. The problem is, the way ideology works today is not so simple. It is not that we need to realize we have ideology aka - 'we know not what we do but we keep doing it'. It is: We know fully well what we do is meaningless/oppressive and yet keep on doing it thereby perpetuating it. The cornerstone of modern ideology today is that we all think we are free of it - the surest marker of total entrenchment. The media outlets are not evil/plotting/bought - it is far worse. They think they are free of ideology and think they are very critical of it even as they perform the service of power. There is no way for them to 'stop telling stories that only benefit their own ideological systems' because they already think they are doing that. Alongside experts and scientists we need some philosophers and thinking.

[systemvoltage]

> they have cultivated an audience that now expects them to keep delivering.

Especially when their revenue depends on it.

[ssss11]

I feel like reporting facts is half of it and stopping the sensationalism is the other half. I guys I understand the sensationalism because they need to make money and it’s a tough industry.

[i5heu]

It is not Orwellian.

It is a net of trust.

[HideousKojima]

My first thought while reading your post was the head of the KGB in HBO's Chernobyl talking about a "circle of accountability."

[zepto]

It seems Orwellian to me to have CEOs in general in some arrangement to lend trust to the media. The incentives for any kind of accountability would seem to be even worse than they are today.

What do you mean by a ‘net of trust’?

[foerbert]

I suspect they are just referring to the basic social fabric, so to speak. If everybody has a variety of mostly trustworthy sources that act as implicit or explicit verifiers of each other, then everybody has a fairly robust ability to gather information about the world - including the trustworthiness of the various parts of their 'net'.

This sort of thing seems to have, however, somewhat broken down in recently years. At a minimum I think most people would say these networks are at least smaller and more insular than they were in the past.

If it's all in good faith, this might not be so terrible. If the aforementioned trusted CEOs faithfully and accurately are able to point out media they believe is trustworthy and keep an eye on those outlets, it could potentially work as a way to kick start the rejuvenation of these networks.

Now, this relies on these CEOs being both trusted and trustworthy. That is a fairly substantial assumption in my opinion.

But if it's all in good faith it's possible to read this as not Orwellian at all, but rather more informing a section of the community that there is something they can do for the community, and then asking them to do it.

[zepto]

> If the aforementioned trusted CEOs faithfully and accurately are able to point out media they believe is trustworthy and keep an eye on those outlets, it could potentially work as a way to kick start the rejuvenation of these networks.

But the media aren’t trustworthy. That’s how we got to this place. If that gets fixed, then indeed CEOs can celebrate it, but the problem is with the media right now, not the lack of people cheering them on.

[michaelmrose]

The media have never been completely without issue. Even people trying to be objective have pre-existing biases and holes in their knowledge. Importantly journalists are professional writers and information gatherers whereas accurate understanding may require expertise in many and varied fields where the journalist is a sometimes inaccurate translator for actual experts who themselves may be wrong or biased.

Americas understanding of the world could be said to be diverging because of self selection of content in people's respective echo chambers but I don't think it apt to say it's because the media is less trustworthy just because they are less trusted.

Can you provide objective criteria to suggest that the accuracy of the news has declined?

[zepto]

> The media have never been completely without issue. … > Can you provide objective criteria to suggest that the accuracy of the news has declined?

Nobody is claiming a decline in accuracy. What is being claimed that the media is not trustworthy.

Can you provide objective criteria to show that the media is trustworthy?

[luckylion]

> Now, this relies on these CEOs being both trusted and trustworthy. That is a fairly substantial assumption in my opinion.

That's true, and it might only extend the trust-issues. You get someone to embrace a not-trustworthy institution and vouch for them, the trust in them will fade away as well.

[Natsu]

I know how to fix this. Whenever you get a survey on this, tell them you completely trust them to tell you the truth no matter what.

Then the graphs will look great. Problem solved!