[eduction]

Defense contractors don’t buy ad space in regular media outlets. In Aviation Week and maybe Foreign Policy and some trade journals, sure. When was the last time you saw an ad for an F-35 on nytimes.com? Why would they advertise defense systems there?

Anyway I actually agree that traditional media fails to put the truth first. But the reasons are way more complicated than your post indicates. Raytheon is not buying ads in the Condé Nast magazines, the WSJ, CNN etc.

There are a number of reasons these media orgs fail the truth. Certainly money is part of it. But I think the biggest single reason is how they source their stories. It is rooted in history and inertia and laziness and a certain awe of power. They are very comfortable talking to institutions and way less comfortable dealing with individual actors. Workers, dissidents, whistleblowers, the disgruntled, call them what you will. Finding a real human experience is so much harder than being spoon fed by people paid to make you swallow easy truths.

I mean, it’s 1000x easier now than it was 25 years ago. But learning how to listen to and vet that information is still hard, and digging on it is hard, and it’s all incredibly risky. No one ever got fired for printing an Apple statement. No one ever got dragged on Twitter because their corporate PR source got exposed and arrested.

[endominus]

How about amending the statement to "It is difficult to critique a war when your access to extremely lucrative war coverage is determined by your relationship with the Department of Defense"?

[yucky]

>Defense contractors don’t buy ad space in regular media outlets. In Aviation Week and maybe Foreign Policy and some trade journals, sure. When was the last time you saw an ad for an F-35 on nytimes.com? Why would they advertise defense systems there?

When you're one of the only companies in the world that makes something like the F-35, you don't need to advertise the F-35, you need to advertise the need for the F-35. NYTimes is great for that..

[Retric]

I have seen lots of pro F-35 and defense contractor advertising on busses etc not just trade journals.

I can’t find references to the US advertising campaigns, but here’s some that ran in Canada. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/f-35-ads-on-oc-transpo...

[eduction]

Sure on the sides of buses in Ottawa during “Ottawa's Cansec, the largest defence trade show in Canada.”

And I’ve seen blogs writing about f35s and I have no doubt defense contractors are tied to that somehow, whether through ads or putting the journalist in a simulator or whatever.

But when CNN puts a pro f35 ex general slash Lockheed board member on air, or the nytimes writes a story suggesting Taiwan needs more advanced jets, the reporter or producer isn’t being pushed to help sell ads. They are making a choice that’s easier and more logical for them professionally given incentive structures that go way beyond ads.

[Godel_unicode]

And in sports broadcasts and on all the radio stations (including NPR) and on a ton of tech news blogs and in all the major US newspapers…

You’re not advertising Northrop Grumman or Lockheed or the F35 like the new iPhone, you’re advertising them like coke. If you live in the DC area their ads are everywhere.

[throwaway6734]

It also costs a lot of money. So many people love to complain about the news but refuse to pay a dollar a day for it

[origin_path]

Yes, that's a big part of it. That is in turn due to the differing approaches to the press in public and private sectors, which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Lack of trust in media is split strongly along partisan lines, at least in the USA. This is IMHO a result of the heavily reliance of the media on public sector / government / university / NGO employees as a source of quotes. Journalists like to present themselves as neutral voices but want their stories to sound informed, so almost every story must come with a quote from someone. Public sector orgs rarely punish people for speaking to journalists and often actively encourage it, as long as they promote the organization's goals and ideologies. Even when theoretically forbidden e.g. intelligence, military, what you see is a massive culture of leaks and off-the-record briefings that's tolerated and encouraged from the top. Universities meanwhile are pretty much quote factories for the press, with the result that in the media "expertise" is now synonymous with academia - journalists love the fact that academics are perceived as independent from their host institutions, can turn up on the phone or in a studio at the drop of a hat and there's an unlimited number of them to pick from.

By contrast in the private sector it's standard for communication with journalists of any form to be forbidden and penalized with the sack, regardless of the message being given. Employees are not perceived as independent of their institution, even when talking off the record or as an individual. It may not even be easy to find the right person to talk to.

This leads to a self-reinforcing problem in which journalists get repeatedly exposed to the ways of thinking found in the largest public sector organizations that have a well funded press operation, without getting any balance from other areas of society, making them sympathetic to those ways, which in turn discourages other kinds of people from talking to them because they correctly perceive the journalists as biased. The journalists shift ever further towards the views of the people who talk to them until they basically become arms of the state. As time passes this feedback loop has become so extreme that the media aren't content to merely repeat whatever public sector workers tell them, but actively persecute anyone who tells them anything in disagreement. The bias becomes ever more visible and trust collapses.

There doesn't seem to be any easy way to break this feedback loop. You can't tackle it from the supply or demand side. Trying to restrict who can talk to the press is probably hard or impossible, especially in the USA with the First Amendment. Trying to increase the supply of people outside the public sector willing to talk to journalists, also hard. The most obvious way forward is to support and encourage a different style of journalism that doesn't try to present a fake view-from-above, in which bias is injected via quotes from hand-picked pseudo-experts, but rather a more analytical and data oriented form of news in which the only allowed quotes are things people said to other people, in public. This is the style of journalism found on Substack.

[eduction]

>The most obvious way forward is to support and encourage a different style of journalism that doesn't try to present a fake view-from-above, in which bias is injected via quotes from hand-picked pseudo-experts, but rather a more analytical and data oriented form of news in which the only allowed quotes are things people said to other people, in public. This is the style of journalism found on Substack.

Your whole comment blew my mind but this part at the end is especially fascinating. Wow.

I would love to see more of that approach you outline. At the same time, don't you think any journalists who goes that route will get slammed for not having the requisite expertise? Or maybe the data will "speak for itself."

[origin_path]

They will certainly get slammed as such by other journalists, but whether readers care or not is an open question. There are some very successful writers on Substack who are successfully monetizing blogging-oriented journalism, that rejects the classical style in favor of "here's what I think and my biases, here's facts and data to back it up". It works well for analysis and data journalism, perhaps less so for original reporting of the "earthquake in Indonesia" type.