[ComradePhil]

Somehow people seem to believe that media became worse over time. No, that didn't happen. It's just that people found out exactly how the media works because they had access to the source material.

I remember the Trump election cycle when they kept coming up with "the beginning of the end" for Trump by mis-reporting what he said in rallies, debates, speeches... only to find out that the supporters kept growing... because turns out, considerable number of people actually looked for the source video (out of curiosity than suspicion, I imagine) and found that the media were either manipulating the videos or clipping out the context to misrepresent what he was talking about.

They have always been doing this but the masses didn't have access to the source material so they could report anything and get away with it. What has changed is that a lots of people can now see things for themselves (lots of people still choose not to, but I think it is out of habit than anything). The post-internet media has to take this into consideration and only lie about things that is difficult to document in video. Had they considered this during the campaign, "news" like "Russiagate" would have been much more effective.

https://youtu.be/YZ46I3kMOr0

[StreamBright]

I think both of these are true.

People figured out that the media is lying by checking the source.

Media become worse and worse over time.

[lordloki]

The media has become worse again. That doesn't mean that it was never this bad before. We're in a new age of yellow journalism.

[hackerfromthefu]

Yeah, the parallels to the history of the McCarthyism era are worrying.

[hackerfromthefu]

The always on nature of online has made it worse, in the sense that the medium is the message and feedback algorithms can influence/control peoples state of mind, ala FB etc.

[somenameforme]

"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood.

nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

general facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1]

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His words may correspond to your own, but the fact that such views were generally widespread contradicts them. I think what has happened is modern times is not that the media becoming worse than ever, but rather that for some very brief window in time we actually had a media with integrity and ethics, even if completely serendipitously. So all we're doing is, seemingly like many things in modern society, is simply returning to how things were for nearly all of society's existence.

[1] - https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-5...

[ComradePhil]

> that for some very brief window in time we actually had a media with integrity and ethics, even if completely serendipitously

I would like to request you to entertain the possibility that the media became so powerful and influencial for a brief period that they convinced everyone of that idea... the information revolution just helped break the facade by democratising access to information... because of which their model of story-telling which was based on large uninformed masses (or masses homogenously disinformed with biased story-telling) no longer worked.

[somenameforme]

I'm always open the consideration of any reasonable idea, but you need evidence. I can provide plenty to the contrary. For instance in the 1970s the media, spearheaded by the NYTimes no less, published the Pentagon Papers which (predictably) put the paper in direct confrontation with the government and the endlessly influential military industrial complex in particular.

And that led to a high stakes confrontation with the paper itself facing government pressure and lawsuits that went all the way to the Supreme Court with what would have been devastating consequences had they lost. Of course by 2013 when the Snowden leaks hit this had all changed. The NYTimes had already long since turned into the sort of agency that chose to more regularly run with headlines like "British Intelligence Chiefs Say Leaks by Snowden Hurt Security", "Leaker's Flight Raises Tension", and such other tripe - frequently engaging in a mixture of ignoring, misrepresenting, or defending what Snowden had revealed.

But the in the heyday of media, I do not see any reason to believe that people's judgement of the media was flawed. I'm certainly interested to see why you think so though!