[cbondurant]

I think the biggest thing that makes me distrust the news as it stands is that I feel like news reporting is far too prone to overly leveling debates. And by that I mean making both sides come across as equally credible, even when that could not be further from the truth.

The most common way I see it happen is like this: you have a situation some group says that some totally safe thing is actually super dangerous. There's a large body of scientific literature that really clearly shows its totally safe. the news reports on it as such: "While many within the scientific community state that there is no harm with X, anti-X proponents respond that the current studies are not substantial enough, and that they are simply asking questions." This framing, does not point out that the anti-X proponents are just a group of 10 people, nor does it describe how much evidence there exists in the scientific literature showing the thing is safe. Both sides are made to sound equally reasonable, which in my mind is practically a lie by omission. Because they aren't equally reasonable.

Edit: One additional thought. I still will read news articles if they get shared to me, and I try to evaluate based off of what the source is. but another reason I don't actively keep a news subscription is because news orgs love reporting on tragedy. Because its more noteworthy. I'm just not interested in reading yet another article about how crime is on the rise. Or about the most recent fatal car crash. Etc.

I stare into the void enough as it is. I don't want another.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Strong agree. There seem to be a lot of people who think that being in the middle without taking a side is virtuous in itself, as if there's a law of equilibrium keeping both sides equally crazy or competent or corrupt at any time. In reality they're just getting dragged by the Overton window as other, richer people slide it around.

[Aunche]

You're overestimating the number of people who trust scientific concensus. More people believe in creationism than evolution by purely natural selection. What's your alternative to treating both sides with equal weight without making the unscientific side feel disenfranchised?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/647594/majority-credits-god-hum...

[BeFlatXIII]

Make them disenfranchised write-offs.

[naIak]

And when they outvote you, cry "how did this happen"

[BobaFloutist]

News isn't supposed to be a democracy, it's supposed to be a hunt for truth and accuracy. If news is intentionally subjecting itself to systemic bias in the hopes of attracting people with firmly held patently absurd beliefs, they shouldn't cry "how did this happen" when people who financially supported them in the hunt for truth and accuracy stop doing so.

[Aunche]

The news is democratic in the sense that news targeted towards the general public needs to be catered towards the general public, just like any other product. What good does framing an issue as one sided if nobody is going to watch it except people who agree with it already?

[BobaFloutist]

It sounds like we're talking about different products. I want to buy information, not reassurance. Maybe the purchasing power of people like me has gone down relative to the general population, but news organizations shouldn't be surprised then when people like me are less interested in the product they modified to be more palatable for a different target audience.

[BeFlatXIII]

I've never had much respect for democracy in the first place. Teachers letting the class vote in elementary school made sure of that.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Its a long-standing criticism, where if the president suddenly announced that he thought the earth was flat, the New York Times headline the next day would be "Shape of the Earth; Views Differ".

[gdulli]

Dems Retreat to Round Earth Bubble, Succumb to Flat Earth Derangement Syndrome

[MangoToupe]

Not to mention problems often have many causes and many possible solutions—even framing the reporting having merely two sides is crippling to news quality

[ZeroGravitas]

"crime is on the rise" is a strange example to give as it's been trending down most places for decades.

So it's a perfect example of, assuming they're not knowingly lying, focusing on random noise in the signal to generate misleading stories

[giardini]

ZeroGravitas says>" it's been trending down most places for decades."<

The problem is that reported crime is a political number: those in power want the number to go down on their watch and they have control of the reporting mechanism. Pressure exists at every level, from patrolmen filling out incident reports to statisticians collating the numbers for the mayor, to move the numbers downward.

There is every reason to be skeptical of reported criminal statistical trends in USA cities today.

[jonway]

Where is the alternative "true" numbers?

Police have every incentive to do the opposite of what you say. Why else fund them?

[LexiMax]

The police have bosses, and the bosses want to have careers. From The Wire: S04E09.

    Pryzbylewski: I don't get it. All this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?
    Sampson: Nothing. It assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.
    Pryzbylewski: Juking the stats.
    Sampson: Excuse me?
    Pryzbylewski: Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels. I've been here before.
    Sampson: Wherever you go, there you are.

It's unfortunate that the "crime is higher than reported" narrative has been hijacked by bootlickers who are chomping at the bit for a pretext to sic the military on large cities, but the underlying idea that crime statistics can be gamed for the sake of self-interest isn't wrong.

[jonway]

How is a patrolman lying about a helping himself?

It seems nuts to claim the year over year national drops in crime are all gaming stats comp. I’m positive there is some of this going on, but an effort like that to suppress crime statistics on a national level doesn’t pass the sniff test, you’re saying no cops retired and then blow the whistle? That everywhere in America is doing this and nobody notices(enough)?

Similarly some cops are actual criminals and totally corrupt. Like Taglione, or the Baltimore gun trace task force, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean everyone is.

Do you think police are systematically underreporting crime to the tune of like multiple decades lows?

[itbeho]

I hear this "crime is down" theme a lot. But I see with my own eyes, in my own neighborhood, that the opposite is happening. Other people do as well and that is a big reason why the news media is viewed negatively.

[tanjtanjtanj]

Crime is certainly down, assuming you live in a developed country that isn’t one of a couple massively regressing ones.

You are displaying a bias here. Unless there is a “itbeho’s neighborhood gazette” reporting exclusively on what you see through your front window and THEY’RE saying there is no increase in crime then your complaint doesn’t hold.

My grandfather, in the US, was waylaid by actual bandits operating openly on a major US highway in the 1970s. In some cities you couldn’t take public transport without almost surely being victimized.

Crime is very much down and that’s especially true for large cities. Maybe you’ve become overly fixated on the topic or maybe your neighborhood is an outlier but that doesn’t make the statistics “wrong”.

[watwut]

One problem is that the most distrust toward "traditional media" is from people who completely trust to even more dishonest resources. It is not that traditional media would be perfect, but their faults are not the actual reason for the fall of trust.

Instead, it is well paid grifters for whom the issue with traditional media is that they do not lie enough.

[jasonlotito]

I've heard this referred to as sanewashing. You really started noticing this with Trump. Compare what he literally says to what he's quoted as saying. He likes to rail against MSM, but man, they do a lot of heavy lifting, making it seem like what he says is remotely sane.

[noir_lord]

They often edit his speeches for brevity because they don't have time in a news report to post the full hour long ramble of tangents off tangents off tangents even doing that makes his speeches seem considerably more coherent than they actually are if you watch the whole thing.

[kcplate]

You mean like the BBC? I mean that brevity edit removed 35 minutes between two sentences? This is the latest but not the only example media creating quotes that were never said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzkyk7knzo

Frankly, I’d greatly refer media to leave the speeches unedited. Media does not need to be crafting narratives. Whatever Trump is, if you are selectively editing his words or pulling quotes out context intentionally to create the appearance that he said something that he didn’t…you are worse than he is.

[jasonlotito]

That's sanewashing. It makes a rapist sound much smarter than he really is for the sake of his cult.