[FooBarWidget]

Welcome to most China news. Many "well-documented" China "facts" are in fact cases like this: the media taking rumors or straight up fabricating things for clicks, and then self-referencing (or different media referencing each other in a circle) to put up the guise of reliable news.

This is why we need to be critical of journalists nowadays. No longer are they the Fourth Column, protecting society and democracy by providing accurate information.

[chrisweekly]

Not just "China news", unfortunately.

[ethbr1]

The second (be critical of journalism as a field's accuracy) doesn't follow from the first (there are bad journalists).

Especially since the alternative is to live in a world without facts.

Which some people would probably love, but I prefer my reality to be constructed from objectivity rather than authority.

[FooBarWidget]

That sounds to me like you are excusing a bad reality based on a nonexistant ideal. Saying "there are bad journalists" is a huge understatement. There are many, perhaps even the majority. Ask yourself why society at large has stopped trusting mainstream media, it's not just because there are a "few" bad apples but because the bad apples are widespread and systemic.

The tendency to compare to a nonexistant ideal is also something I find very very weird. This tendency does not exist for many other concepts. For example when people talk about communism, and someone say "hey $COUNTRY is just one bad apple, it doesn't mean real communism is bad" then others are quick to respond with "but all countries doing communism have devolved into tyranny/dictatorship/etc, so real communism doesn't exist and what we've seen is the real deal". I am not criticizing that (common) point of view, but people ought to take responsibility and apply this principle equally to all concepts, including "journalism".

It also doesn't follow that my critique of journalists/journalism means tearing down journalism altogether. It can also mean:

- that people need to stop trusting mainstream journalists blindly on topics they're not adept in. Right now many people have stopped trusting mainstream journalists only for topics they're adept in, but as soon as those journalists write nonsense about something else (e.g. $ENEMY_STATE) then they swallow that uncritically. No. The response should be "they lied about X, what else are they lying about?" instead of letting themselves be manipulated in other areas.

- that society as a whole needs to hold journalism accountable, and demand that they return to the role of the Fourth Column.

[ethbr1]

> Ask yourself why society at large has stopped trusting mainstream media

Because certain political interests take the existence of a fact-based, independent power center as a threat to their own power?

And so engineered a multi-decade campaign to indoctrinate people against the news/media, thus removing a roadblock to imposing their own often contrary-to-fact narratives?

Pretending this happened in a vacuum or was grassroots ignores mountains of money deployed with specific intent over spans of time.

> It can also mean that society as a whole needs to hold journalism accountable, and demand that they return to the role of the Fourth Column.

I absolutely agree with this.

If I had my druthers, the US would reinstate the fairness doctrine (abolished in 1987) and specifically the components requiring large media corporations to subsidize non-profit newsrooms as a public good.

The US would be a better place if we banned 24/7 for-profit news.