[LAC-Tech]

Fairly widespread is undercutting it. It's universal practice.

People hold journalists to crazy high standards of integrity and soothsaying, and the older I get the more it boggles the mind that grown adults still cling on to this.

Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.

[denton-scratch]

> Journalists work for private corporations

Indeed - that's the drift of Manufacturing Consensus.

To add to that: TV journalism is a form of entertainment, especially sofa-chat news-lite and vox-pop. Vox-pop, especially, is always manipulative. Interviewees always seem to be idiots, because audiences don't want to feel more stupid than the "man on the street". The information content of a vox-pop segment is zero.

[jlawson]

It's not just about money for the journalists themselves. Visit a journalism school and you'll find very few students there looking to maximize their earnings.

It's a lot like other fields such as science or arts. People entering these careers knowlingly accept low pay and/or difficult working conditions in exchange for other kinds of satisfaction. For some it's intellectual curiosity; for others its artistic ambition or applause.

For journalists, it's the psychological satisfication of using political influence to spread their beliefs to others.

The actions of journalists cannot be understood according to a simple profit model. (The actions of their bosses can - they hire journos who will accept low pay, with the implicit exchange that those journos can use the position to satisfy their activist impulses. Fanatics work for cheap.)

[Cthulhu_]

> Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.

Not universally true. There's some big corporations like News Corp that from a top level are in it to make money and push a right-wing narrative, but lower down there's a lot of journalists that do things for the public good. Think about the journalists that handled Snowden and Manning's revelations, think Wikileaks, think the journalists that got footage from Gitmo proving the US is committing war crimes, think those that reported on the Panama and Paradise Papers, on Epstein and 'the elite's pedophile rings, the list goes on.

These people have risked and sometimes lost their freedoms and their lives. Would you do that if it was just about money? Or are you just projecting your own motivators in life?

[ekianjo]

> Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money.

Sure, but let's not pretend that stuff like NPR is devoid of bias. They are clearly choosing their teams as well, even if they don't do it for money.

[dmix]

Not sure why you put private in front of corporations. You should try watching the political stuff the public networks put out in Canada.