[cowpig]

I'm so tired of these false equivalences

You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course.

And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university and therefore share points of view with people who went to university is the same thing as William Randolph Hearst wholly inventing a story about Spain attacking a US ship to convince the public to start a war.

And what we have today, with social media & search monopolies sucking all economic surplus completely out of journalism, plus foreign-run and profit-run influence farms, plus algorithmic custom-tailoring of propaganda, is undoubtedly the worst we have ever seen.

[ETH_start]

I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is. Otherwise it just turns into people declaring, purely subjectively, that one outlet is "biased" and another is "impartial" or "truth-seeking".

Ultimately, every editorial decision — what to publish, which story to highlight, what angle to frame it from — is a value judgment. And value judgments aren't matters of objective truth.

[throw0101c]

> I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is.

Apparantly:

* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/study-wat...

* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fox-news-study-compari...

* https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/06/19/the-most-consistent...

* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/knowless/final.pdf

* https://portal.fdu.edu/fdupoll-archive/confirmed/final.pdf

* https://www.fdu.edu/academics/centers-institutes/fdu-poll/

A simple example: who won the 2020 election? What did each organization say?

[ETH_start]

This is a correlation, so it doesn't prove a causative association, and it's only across a very tiny subset of the entire knowledge set.

While I understand that my second point might sound like a cop-out, just consider how the survey findings may have been different, if the respondents had been asked about issues more relevant to social justice narratives, e.g. the prevalence of deadly police shootings of unarmed people of color.

Actual annual figure in recent years: roughly 10 depending on dataset and year.

Median estimates among progressive respondents in several surveys: hundreds or even thousands.

Another example:

Surveys show large fractions of progressive populations believe global poverty has worsened, when the long-term trend has been a substantial decline

[trinsic2]

From my point of view journalism is or was about calling attention to points of reference that we can all agree that we are affected by in a similar way. The way you are framing this is more about agreeing with each other. IMHO that's not what journalism is about.

[ETH_start]

I don't quite follow. You're saying journalism is supposed to only cover things in which there's unanimous consent?

[trinsic2]

No consent has nothing to do with events that affect people and society. Not sure where the confusion is.

[ETH_start]

I didn't follow your original statement. Could you rephrase it?