I naïvely fantasize about how we might restore trust in quality journalism and instill critical thinking to have productive conversations and thoughtful debate. I know people who just don’t care...
I naïvely fantasize about how we might restore trust in quality journalism and instill critical thinking to have productive conversations and thoughtful debate.
I know people who just don’t care what happens in the world because it “doesn’t affect me,” which is a horribly selfish point-of-view that I can only envy. I know people who can see the facts in front of their eyes and tell me they don’t believe it; those same people will passively scroll through TikTok listening to whatever disinformation it will feed to them and, so long as it doesn’t go against their core ideology, blindly accept it as true—working its way into mutating that core ideology through reinforcement (see: Moms for Liberty).
With the advent of generative A.I., I fear an oncoming onslaught of disinformation overload where people no longer feel they can trust anything. I don’t think we’re quite at that point, but it starts with social media.
I’m in a Discord server that has nothing to do with politics or news, but has a private politics channel. A user posted a tweet containing photos of trump getting arrested. I replied linking a Microsoft commercial from 2018 about A.I.
It’s become a common occurrence for me to dispel misinformation that gets shared from social media, and I don’t think that it’s always malicious (though it can be). I think it’s, for the most part, the game of Chinese whispers. One person reads an article (or, all to often, the headline), and shares that on social media, iterably obliterating the context and truth behind the source as it gets repeated.
People’s mindsets need to change from associating the news they read on social media with the news and realize that the “fake news” is coming from inside the house. But I don’t know how we get there.
Fake news isn't the problem. I was reading Google news today and the mainstream outlets are so constant in their cherry picked headlines and out of context bullshit that I don't have much reason...
Fake news isn't the problem. I was reading Google news today and the mainstream outlets are so constant in their cherry picked headlines and out of context bullshit that I don't have much reason to trust literally anything I read.
News outlets lie to people (subtlety) and are then shocked that they lose trust and the door opens for far more explicit lies to take off.
People want genuine news. I want a news feed where the headlines inform me. Start doing that and maybe trust will start to return.
Of course, anyone who does will go out of business immidiately, so I'm not sure how this can be fixed. Is there a genuine news outlet out there? NYT tries to tell me they are trustworthy in YouTube ads and I laugh every time I see them.
Hell no at this equivalence! The mainstream media has tons of issues - I don’t read the NYT for reasons I can elaborate on if you’d like - and yes you should keep in mind the slant of any source....
Hell no at this equivalence! The mainstream media has tons of issues - I don’t read the NYT for reasons I can elaborate on if you’d like - and yes you should keep in mind the slant of any source. But the slant and bias and reputability issues of a Reuters or Associated Press isn’t even in the same universe as manufactured disinformation or propaganda.
False equivalences like this are another branch on the tree of reasons we’re drowning in bullshit and witnessing the death of expertise. Nobody has perfect reputability, but that doesn’t mean nobody has ANY. Let’s maintain that nuance and use it to guide us.
It's not an equivalence. Clearly the absolute propaganda and total misinformation is worse. Problem is, the news outlets are the ones who opened the door for it. When you can't trust the...
It's not an equivalence. Clearly the absolute propaganda and total misinformation is worse.
Problem is, the news outlets are the ones who opened the door for it. When you can't trust the mainstream you've got to find stuff out yourself and when you let people find it out themselves people will fall for all sorts of stupid crap.
I go to online personalities I can generally trust based on their credentials and read their first hand expert opinions. They're actually trustworthy.
I still have to disagree here. Highly reputable news outlets (Reuters, AP, etc), despite their biases, are going to generally be more trustworthy than "online personalities." High quality...
I still have to disagree here. Highly reputable news outlets (Reuters, AP, etc), despite their biases, are going to generally be more trustworthy than "online personalities." High quality journalism will (a) vet the credentials of the experts they consult more rigorously than you and I can and (b) publish retractions and corrections when something slips through the cracks.
I absolutely read/watch tons of analysis, perspectives, and opinions from online personalities I trust to supplement my understanding of the day-to-day news, but going straight to a SubStack/YouTube/Newsletter/etc still leaves you more susceptible to bias and misinformation than reading high quality journalism.
We all like to think we're 'above' getting misled when we absolutely aren't. Everything (including the AP!) deserves some skepticism, but the level of skepticism called for varies wildly.
News outlets are corporations. They exist for profit. They hide accountability behind blunt names while reading the people behind what they do. The only thing I trust them to report with a "known...
News outlets are corporations. They exist for profit. They hide accountability behind blunt names while reading the people behind what they do.
The only thing I trust them to report with a "known bias" on are live events as they happen since they have actual staff to do around and watch stuff.
For everything else, the lack of real accountability and profit motive kills them.
The breaurocratic "fact checks" can't fix the bad incentives and disguised accountability, they just give an illusion of reason.
And I see it in practice. When every third news article is some misleading click bait I'm done with the whole thing. It's obviously corrupt.
You can't argue against that by saying they do X or Y or Z. Whatever they do, it's clearly not working.
Okay then. The entirety of my previous post still applies; organizations with journalistic principles and processes are going to, in general, be a more reliable and trustworthy source of...
Okay then. The entirety of my previous post still applies; organizations with journalistic principles and processes are going to, in general, be a more reliable and trustworthy source of information than "online personalities" whose credentials we often can't verify.
You're also wearing blinders here. Those "online personalities" often have their own profit or popularity motives, and they generally have zero accountability. No journalistic code of ethics, no oversight, nothing. Zero.
The level of skepticism you're applying to different spheres here seems pretty out of balance, and the square quotes around "fact checks" causes me to raise an eyebrow. I'm going to leave the discussion here, but I strongly encourage you to rethink your media diet. Have a great weekend.
edited to respond to your edit:
When every third news article is some misleading click bait I'm done with the whole thing. It's obviously corrupt.
The world isn't black and white like that, and neither is the reputability of the news. Rethinking this stance would be a good place to start. Cheers.
But you can verify them. They do, but your can judge those as individuals. If an individual had the same history and habits as most large media outlets, I'd stop paying attention to them as well....
"online personalities" whose credentials we often can't verify.
But you can verify them.
Those "online personalities" often have their own profit or popularity motives
They do, but your can judge those as individuals. If an individual had the same history and habits as most large media outlets, I'd stop paying attention to them as well.
I suppose my whole point is that this need to go back to individuals is the problem. There are bad individuals out there, and now that people are relying on them the door is open wide to misinformation.
The fix is to bring up the quality of the mainstream until they're at the point I'd actually be willing to trust them, and that's a near impossibility so long as they complete for clicks.
Let me preface this by saying these are just my opinions, and my biases don’t have to be yours. The NYT has had a number of issues throughout its history, but I’m only going to speak to what drove...
Let me preface this by saying these are just my opinions, and my biases don’t have to be yours. The NYT has had a number of issues throughout its history, but I’m only going to speak to what drove me away in the past decade.
A lot of it started with the 2016 election. Trump winning after the NYT gave Clinton a 99% chance in their election forecast seems to have popped their bubble really hard, and it started them on this strange quixotic quest to prove (to who? I don’t know) that they are not biased, and are not in a bubble.
They started running endless features interviewing Trump voters at random diners or whatever trying to understand, like alien anthropologists, WHY they had voted for Trump and laundering the real reasons through stupid thinkpiece euphemisms like “economic anxiety.” There was this strange tone of ‘well maybe if we try to understand these strange people and give them what they want they’ll let us move forward.’ This all made the paper feel more like a coastal elite bubble, not less.
Their political coverage started getting overrun with artificial balance, false equivalences, and stupid framing. “Democrats say purging disloyal government officials is bad for democracy; Republicans disagree” - I made that up, but that was (and is) often the vibe, bending over backwards to make things sound like two equal sides in a calm disagreement.
One specific example I remember is from 2020, when they unquestioningly ran Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed saying the military should put down protests with force on the front page. Not only was this advocating for, you know, straight up authoritarianism, it was filled with misinformation, and they ran it prominently with no disclaimer, no context, no editors notes, nothing. They then defended that decision for several days by saying it’s important to hear views from across the spectrum. What’s next? An op-ed arguing the silver lining of ethnic cleansing?
I don’t live in an ideological bubble and I don’t want my news outlets to simply play to my biases. But not all perspectives are exactly equal and important all the time and some can be actively harmful. An obsession with balance for balance’s sake is how you end up presenting climate change like an undecided issue instead of an overwhelming consensus, or teaching creationism alongside evolution, or, well, running prominent op eds advocating for putting protests down with force. While it’s valuable and important to know that those perspectives are out there, a high quality news organization needs to frame them in an honest and accurate context (e.g. 99% of climate scientists say this; 1% say this, instead of just “here are two sides”).
Every outlet has bias. No readers ever cared that the New York Times is left leaning. Of course they are - they’re from New York. They could just embrace their identity and go with what they’re good at - a New York perspective on things. But by twisting themselves into pretzels trying to prove that they have no left lean they’ve ended up eroding the value of their reporting and laundering some awful stuff. All to do…what? Attract more right wing readers? Cmon. It just makes them seem more out of touch than they already were.
I still fundamentally “trust” the NYT and enjoy some of their arts coverage, but I don’t touch their political reporting or op-eds with a 10 foot pole.
It was actually one of the ocean gate CEO interviews where the headline was like CEO hated safety and the actual quote was more like "we try to be safe but you have to take risk to do things"....
It was actually one of the ocean gate CEO interviews where the headline was like CEO hated safety and the actual quote was more like "we try to be safe but you have to take risk to do things".
There were a few others when I skimmed Google news a few days ago, but nothing I could say without going and doing it again.
I think the most infuriating part of the whole thing is that it was invented all along. There was an implosion sound on Sunday and they just happened to wait until after the sub hypothetically ran...
I think the most infuriating part of the whole thing is that it was invented all along. There was an implosion sound on Sunday and they just happened to wait until after the sub hypothetically ran out of oxygen to let us know? Gimme a break.
The media's standards are low sure but this was just an unexpectedly awful story to make up for engagement bait nonetheless. Just kind of disgusting.
If we are talking strictly about headlines, I find NPR to be a breath of fresh air compared to other mainstream news sources. I am not going to say that by any means they are perfect, but way less...
If we are talking strictly about headlines, I find NPR to be a breath of fresh air compared to other mainstream news sources. I am not going to say that by any means they are perfect, but way less click-baity/misleading and more neutral than WP, NYT, CNN, Fox News, etc.
My understanding is AP News and Reuters are both good at this too, but I can't say that I read them too much.
I have a lot to say on this issue, but am on mobile so I want to put this out there: Even “The News” is suspect. Even when mainstrem news is reporting factually, there’s often context that’s left...
I have a lot to say on this issue, but am on mobile so I want to put this out there:
Even “The News” is suspect. Even when mainstrem news is reporting factually, there’s often context that’s left out, and importantly stories that are left out altogether. That can be ok, if the people doing the leaving out can be trusted to be making thorough and thoughtful decisions. But how are we to know?
Worse, mainstream news is susceptible to all kinds of manipulation, capitulation, and downright collaboration on misinformation. See, for example, all the stuff leading up to the Iraq war, and also the Edward Bernays/chiquita/el salvador affair.
Everything you said is true, but it is not comparable to manufactured misinfo and propaganda. Both Reuters and Robert F Kennedy Jr (for example) have a slant and a bias, but their level of bias,...
Everything you said is true, but it is not comparable to manufactured misinfo and propaganda. Both Reuters and Robert F Kennedy Jr (for example) have a slant and a bias, but their level of bias, reputability, and by extension how much you should trust them is not at all comparable.
The example @NoblePath gave of US news leading up to the Iraq invasion *was* propaganda and it could be argued that it was manufactured misinformation as well (manufactured by the US government)....
The example @NoblePath gave of US news leading up to the Iraq invasion *was* propaganda and it could be argued that it was manufactured misinformation as well (manufactured by the US government).
I get that its different from fake news sites, but don't let fake news sites distract from critically looking at other news sources.
Absolutely; as I said in other posts around this topic you should always be somewhat skeptical and mindful of bias, slant, and agenda. But the extent to which you need to be skeptical for...
Absolutely; as I said in other posts around this topic you should always be somewhat skeptical and mindful of bias, slant, and agenda.
But the extent to which you need to be skeptical for reputable news organizations is a fraction of how skeptical you should be of cable news, commentators, random YouTube channels, state-run news, etc.
Yes, many mainstream media outlets totally fucked up reporting on Iraq. But if you compare the track record of, like, the AP or Reuters over the past 10 years to the likes of Robert F Kennedy Jr, or Newsmax, or Russia Today, or Joe Rogan … it’s pretty clear who you can safely trust more.
My number one rule is do not trust any person or source that wants you to be angry, upset, or scared 24/7. At least two of the four I named above already instantly fail that.
So: mainstream media perfect? lol no. AP, Reuters, PBS, etc more reputable and trustworthy than most? Yes.
I'll echo the sentiment of others in the thread: The blatantly fake news is bad, but I can hardly blame people who detach from mainstream news sources either - it's all so biased towards the...
I'll echo the sentiment of others in the thread: The blatantly fake news is bad, but I can hardly blame people who detach from mainstream news sources either - it's all so biased towards the interests of capital and full of division that I can't stand it either.
More than fairness, what news media truly needs is honesty and accountability, which will never happen because if I told you outright that my opinion was bought by the energy industry you won't believe any of the pro-oil propaganda I try to sling.
The proliferation of news aggregators with bias metrics for each source is the best thing to happen in a long time, but even that is fallible. I truly see no solution to the ongoing news crisis.
I'm increasingly finding the fake news bleeding into the 'real' news though. Journalists are careless and are letting internet rumour slip into their work and it is rarely retracted.
I'm increasingly finding the fake news bleeding into the 'real' news though. Journalists are careless and are letting internet rumour slip into their work and it is rarely retracted.
I find this to be especially true with "high hype" news sources, if that makes sense - cable news, sites with a hyperbolic slant, etc. They roll with instant hot takes now and corrections later...
I find this to be especially true with "high hype" news sources, if that makes sense - cable news, sites with a hyperbolic slant, etc. They roll with instant hot takes now and corrections later (or never).
I did a big shake up of my media diet a couple of years ago towards slow, hype-free news and it has done wonders for my mental health. I recommend everyone do the same. Don't trust any person or source who wants you to be angry, scared, or on the edge of your seat all the time. Living in that emotional zone does nothing to advance the causes we care about.
A great example happened just days ago, widespread 'real' news reporting of the banging sound heard during rescue efforts of the Titan submarine happening every 30 minutes. Appears in no official...
A great example happened just days ago, widespread 'real' news reporting of the banging sound heard during rescue efforts of the Titan submarine happening every 30 minutes. Appears in no official source yet it even made it onto BBC TV news.
I have seen no retraction of this and in a later press conference the US Navy had to specifically deny it.
Ultimately this was harmless aside from wasting a whole lot of bits as people discuss it on the internet but it is not an isolated incident, this happens almost daily around the world and it is very easy for dangerous falsehoods to slip into 'respectable' reporting.
This statement from you seems to imply that the reporting that the "banging" sounds even happened was fake news. If I'm interpreting your statement correctly, I can't help but find it nonsensical....
A great example happened just days ago, widespread 'real' news reporting of the banging sound heard during rescue efforts of the Titan submarine happening every 30 minutes. Appears in no official source yet it even made it onto BBC TV news.
This statement from you seems to imply that the reporting that the "banging" sounds even happened was fake news. If I'm interpreting your statement correctly, I can't help but find it nonsensical.
The Rolling Stone first reported about banging noises from an internal memo they obtained.
A Canadian aircraft searching for the missing Titan submersible, which failed to return Sunday from an expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic, detected “banging” in 30-minute intervals coming from the area where the divers disappeared, according to internal email updates sent by the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center obtained by Rolling Stone.
It's not a public source, but are you saying that journalists should ever only report on public and named sources of information?
However in this case, Rolling Stone corroborates with a public tweet from the Boston Coast Guard:
The Boston Coast Guard, which is leading the rescue efforts, said in a statement on Twitter early Wednesday that a Canadian surveillance aircraft searching for the missing submersible “detected underwater noises in the search area.”
The next day, The Guardian reports several publicly named officials confirming that noises were heard.
A US Coast Guard captain, Jamie Frederick, told a lunchtime briefing “several flights” of Canadian P3 aircraft had heard the noises, reported by several media outlets as “banging”, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and that the focus of the search was relocated to that area.
Here's another from a Navy Admiral, since you said the Navy denied it later:
Navy R Adm John Mauger, who is heading the search for the Titan, confirmed earlier that an aircraft detected noise in the water picked up by sonar buoys the day before, but said: “We don’t know the source of that noise.”
I was able to find these two sources with a very quick Google search.
I also want to clarify that in none of the sources were these given to be genuine signs of life, and were all couched in terms of skepticism.
Nope, not the banging. That was widely reported and from an official source. The 30 minute interval stuff is the fake news that was spread around the internet and even managed to get onto the BBC...
Nope, not the banging. That was widely reported and from an official source.
The 30 minute interval stuff is the fake news that was spread around the internet and even managed to get onto the BBC TV news, it very specifically had to be denied in a later press conference with the US Navy and appears in no official source.
I was confused because I saw people everywhere saying stuff like "yeah but the banging is every 30 minutes, it has to be people, that can't just be random ocean noise" etc and I went to look to find out who had said this, turns out nobody.
It's right in the first source I quoted. CNN also independently obtained a memo: The importance of the noises were such that they diverted resources specifically to investigate them: I think this...
It's right in the first source I quoted.
A Canadian aircraft searching for the missing Titan submersible, which failed to return Sunday from an expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic, detected “banging” in 30-minute intervals coming from the area where the divers disappeared, according to internal email updates sent by the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center obtained by Rolling Stone.
Crews detected banging sounds every 30 minutes – and four hours later, after additional sonar devices were deployed, banging was still heard, according to the memo. It was unclear when on Tuesday the banging was heard or for how long, based on the memo obtained by CNN.
The importance of the noises were such that they diverted resources specifically to investigate them:
A Canadian P3 aircraft also located a white rectangular object in the water, according to that update, but another ship set to investigate was diverted to help research the acoustic feedback instead, according to that update.
I think this is actually an interesting exercise in what people consider fake news and how we detect it. I will take what you said how "I went to look to find out who had said this, turns out nobody" in good faith, but given that the above sources were pretty easy to find with a quick Google search, I'm really curious as to your methods. I've found that a large part of the problem around fake news is not only disreputable sources churning out misleading (at best, blatantly made up at worst) information, but also folks not believing official sources when presented with them. Or they might believe the refutation upon the presentation of evidence, but it won't trigger any sort of re-examination of base premises. "That's just one example," they might say. "There's plenty more out there."
This kind of vague feeling is impossible to combat, which is why I've been asking for direct examples in this thread.
There is plenty to criticize mainstream media for, but I treat the accusation of them reporting 'fake news' regularly without retraction with skepticism.
That is not an official source, it was nonsense and had to be quashed during a press conference the next day. You're mixing up the widely reported, officially confirmed news of banging having been...
That is not an official source, it was nonsense and had to be quashed during a press conference the next day.
You're mixing up the widely reported, officially confirmed news of banging having been heard with a rumour about it being every 30 minutes - which was not the case.
I doubt ‘twas ever thus. Maybe a few high brow efforts on cspan and pbs, maybe, but news has always been susceptible to money and influence. I mentioned the bernays/chiquita/el salvador issue...
I'm old enough to remember when media was more of a public service instead of entertainment
I doubt ‘twas ever thus. Maybe a few high brow efforts on cspan and pbs, maybe, but news has always been susceptible to money and influence. I mentioned the bernays/chiquita/el salvador issue (50s), and Hearst publishing had sooo many issues.
That said, at least the fairness doctrine pushed the populace, however slightly, to a place of unity and cooperation. Thanks Reagan (and probably the council for national
Policy).
I naïvely fantasize about how we might restore trust in quality journalism and instill critical thinking to have productive conversations and thoughtful debate.
I know people who just don’t care what happens in the world because it “doesn’t affect me,” which is a horribly selfish point-of-view that I can only envy. I know people who can see the facts in front of their eyes and tell me they don’t believe it; those same people will passively scroll through TikTok listening to whatever disinformation it will feed to them and, so long as it doesn’t go against their core ideology, blindly accept it as true—working its way into mutating that core ideology through reinforcement (see: Moms for Liberty).
With the advent of generative A.I., I fear an oncoming onslaught of disinformation overload where people no longer feel they can trust anything. I don’t think we’re quite at that point, but it starts with social media.
I’m in a Discord server that has nothing to do with politics or news, but has a private politics channel. A user posted a tweet containing photos of trump getting arrested. I replied linking a Microsoft commercial from 2018 about A.I.
The next morning, I saw the headlines: AI-faked images of Donald Trump’s imagined arrest swirl on Twitter. It hadn’t occurred to me that people might actually believe the photos.
It’s become a common occurrence for me to dispel misinformation that gets shared from social media, and I don’t think that it’s always malicious (though it can be). I think it’s, for the most part, the game of Chinese whispers. One person reads an article (or, all to often, the headline), and shares that on social media, iterably obliterating the context and truth behind the source as it gets repeated.
People’s mindsets need to change from associating the news they read on social media with the news and realize that the “fake news” is coming from inside the house. But I don’t know how we get there.
Fake news isn't the problem. I was reading Google news today and the mainstream outlets are so constant in their cherry picked headlines and out of context bullshit that I don't have much reason to trust literally anything I read.
News outlets lie to people (subtlety) and are then shocked that they lose trust and the door opens for far more explicit lies to take off.
People want genuine news. I want a news feed where the headlines inform me. Start doing that and maybe trust will start to return.
Of course, anyone who does will go out of business immidiately, so I'm not sure how this can be fixed. Is there a genuine news outlet out there? NYT tries to tell me they are trustworthy in YouTube ads and I laugh every time I see them.
Hell no at this equivalence! The mainstream media has tons of issues - I don’t read the NYT for reasons I can elaborate on if you’d like - and yes you should keep in mind the slant of any source. But the slant and bias and reputability issues of a Reuters or Associated Press isn’t even in the same universe as manufactured disinformation or propaganda.
False equivalences like this are another branch on the tree of reasons we’re drowning in bullshit and witnessing the death of expertise. Nobody has perfect reputability, but that doesn’t mean nobody has ANY. Let’s maintain that nuance and use it to guide us.
It's not an equivalence. Clearly the absolute propaganda and total misinformation is worse.
Problem is, the news outlets are the ones who opened the door for it. When you can't trust the mainstream you've got to find stuff out yourself and when you let people find it out themselves people will fall for all sorts of stupid crap.
I go to online personalities I can generally trust based on their credentials and read their first hand expert opinions. They're actually trustworthy.
Your uncle Joe watches MTG on Facebook.
I still have to disagree here. Highly reputable news outlets (Reuters, AP, etc), despite their biases, are going to generally be more trustworthy than "online personalities." High quality journalism will (a) vet the credentials of the experts they consult more rigorously than you and I can and (b) publish retractions and corrections when something slips through the cracks.
I absolutely read/watch tons of analysis, perspectives, and opinions from online personalities I trust to supplement my understanding of the day-to-day news, but going straight to a SubStack/YouTube/Newsletter/etc still leaves you more susceptible to bias and misinformation than reading high quality journalism.
We all like to think we're 'above' getting misled when we absolutely aren't. Everything (including the AP!) deserves some skepticism, but the level of skepticism called for varies wildly.
News outlets are corporations. They exist for profit. They hide accountability behind blunt names while reading the people behind what they do.
The only thing I trust them to report with a "known bias" on are live events as they happen since they have actual staff to do around and watch stuff.
For everything else, the lack of real accountability and profit motive kills them.
The breaurocratic "fact checks" can't fix the bad incentives and disguised accountability, they just give an illusion of reason.
And I see it in practice. When every third news article is some misleading click bait I'm done with the whole thing. It's obviously corrupt.
You can't argue against that by saying they do X or Y or Z. Whatever they do, it's clearly not working.
Okay then. The entirety of my previous post still applies; organizations with journalistic principles and processes are going to, in general, be a more reliable and trustworthy source of information than "online personalities" whose credentials we often can't verify.
You're also wearing blinders here. Those "online personalities" often have their own profit or popularity motives, and they generally have zero accountability. No journalistic code of ethics, no oversight, nothing. Zero.
The level of skepticism you're applying to different spheres here seems pretty out of balance, and the square quotes around "fact checks" causes me to raise an eyebrow. I'm going to leave the discussion here, but I strongly encourage you to rethink your media diet. Have a great weekend.
edited to respond to your edit:
The world isn't black and white like that, and neither is the reputability of the news. Rethinking this stance would be a good place to start. Cheers.
But you can verify them.
They do, but your can judge those as individuals. If an individual had the same history and habits as most large media outlets, I'd stop paying attention to them as well.
I suppose my whole point is that this need to go back to individuals is the problem. There are bad individuals out there, and now that people are relying on them the door is open wide to misinformation.
The fix is to bring up the quality of the mainstream until they're at the point I'd actually be willing to trust them, and that's a near impossibility so long as they complete for clicks.
What are your issues with NYT? Is it the political leaning, or general factual errors?
Let me preface this by saying these are just my opinions, and my biases don’t have to be yours. The NYT has had a number of issues throughout its history, but I’m only going to speak to what drove me away in the past decade.
A lot of it started with the 2016 election. Trump winning after the NYT gave Clinton a 99% chance in their election forecast seems to have popped their bubble really hard, and it started them on this strange quixotic quest to prove (to who? I don’t know) that they are not biased, and are not in a bubble.
They started running endless features interviewing Trump voters at random diners or whatever trying to understand, like alien anthropologists, WHY they had voted for Trump and laundering the real reasons through stupid thinkpiece euphemisms like “economic anxiety.” There was this strange tone of ‘well maybe if we try to understand these strange people and give them what they want they’ll let us move forward.’ This all made the paper feel more like a coastal elite bubble, not less.
Their political coverage started getting overrun with artificial balance, false equivalences, and stupid framing. “Democrats say purging disloyal government officials is bad for democracy; Republicans disagree” - I made that up, but that was (and is) often the vibe, bending over backwards to make things sound like two equal sides in a calm disagreement.
One specific example I remember is from 2020, when they unquestioningly ran Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed saying the military should put down protests with force on the front page. Not only was this advocating for, you know, straight up authoritarianism, it was filled with misinformation, and they ran it prominently with no disclaimer, no context, no editors notes, nothing. They then defended that decision for several days by saying it’s important to hear views from across the spectrum. What’s next? An op-ed arguing the silver lining of ethnic cleansing?
I don’t live in an ideological bubble and I don’t want my news outlets to simply play to my biases. But not all perspectives are exactly equal and important all the time and some can be actively harmful. An obsession with balance for balance’s sake is how you end up presenting climate change like an undecided issue instead of an overwhelming consensus, or teaching creationism alongside evolution, or, well, running prominent op eds advocating for putting protests down with force. While it’s valuable and important to know that those perspectives are out there, a high quality news organization needs to frame them in an honest and accurate context (e.g. 99% of climate scientists say this; 1% say this, instead of just “here are two sides”).
Every outlet has bias. No readers ever cared that the New York Times is left leaning. Of course they are - they’re from New York. They could just embrace their identity and go with what they’re good at - a New York perspective on things. But by twisting themselves into pretzels trying to prove that they have no left lean they’ve ended up eroding the value of their reporting and laundering some awful stuff. All to do…what? Attract more right wing readers? Cmon. It just makes them seem more out of touch than they already were.
I still fundamentally “trust” the NYT and enjoy some of their arts coverage, but I don’t touch their political reporting or op-eds with a 10 foot pole.
Could you give some examples of the cherry-picked headlines and out-of-context bullshit?
It was actually one of the ocean gate CEO interviews where the headline was like CEO hated safety and the actual quote was more like "we try to be safe but you have to take risk to do things".
There were a few others when I skimmed Google news a few days ago, but nothing I could say without going and doing it again.
Ah, thanks. If you find any other specific examples, I'd love to hear them in the future.
I think the most infuriating part of the whole thing is that it was invented all along. There was an implosion sound on Sunday and they just happened to wait until after the sub hypothetically ran out of oxygen to let us know? Gimme a break.
The media's standards are low sure but this was just an unexpectedly awful story to make up for engagement bait nonetheless. Just kind of disgusting.
If we are talking strictly about headlines, I find NPR to be a breath of fresh air compared to other mainstream news sources. I am not going to say that by any means they are perfect, but way less click-baity/misleading and more neutral than WP, NYT, CNN, Fox News, etc.
My understanding is AP News and Reuters are both good at this too, but I can't say that I read them too much.
I have a lot to say on this issue, but am on mobile so I want to put this out there:
Even “The News” is suspect. Even when mainstrem news is reporting factually, there’s often context that’s left out, and importantly stories that are left out altogether. That can be ok, if the people doing the leaving out can be trusted to be making thorough and thoughtful decisions. But how are we to know?
Worse, mainstream news is susceptible to all kinds of manipulation, capitulation, and downright collaboration on misinformation. See, for example, all the stuff leading up to the Iraq war, and also the Edward Bernays/chiquita/el salvador affair.
Everything you said is true, but it is not comparable to manufactured misinfo and propaganda. Both Reuters and Robert F Kennedy Jr (for example) have a slant and a bias, but their level of bias, reputability, and by extension how much you should trust them is not at all comparable.
The example @NoblePath gave of US news leading up to the Iraq invasion *was* propaganda and it could be argued that it was manufactured misinformation as well (manufactured by the US government).
I get that its different from fake news sites, but don't let fake news sites distract from critically looking at other news sources.
Absolutely; as I said in other posts around this topic you should always be somewhat skeptical and mindful of bias, slant, and agenda.
But the extent to which you need to be skeptical for reputable news organizations is a fraction of how skeptical you should be of cable news, commentators, random YouTube channels, state-run news, etc.
Yes, many mainstream media outlets totally fucked up reporting on Iraq. But if you compare the track record of, like, the AP or Reuters over the past 10 years to the likes of Robert F Kennedy Jr, or Newsmax, or Russia Today, or Joe Rogan … it’s pretty clear who you can safely trust more.
My number one rule is do not trust any person or source that wants you to be angry, upset, or scared 24/7. At least two of the four I named above already instantly fail that.
So: mainstream media perfect? lol no. AP, Reuters, PBS, etc more reputable and trustworthy than most? Yes.
I'll echo the sentiment of others in the thread: The blatantly fake news is bad, but I can hardly blame people who detach from mainstream news sources either - it's all so biased towards the interests of capital and full of division that I can't stand it either.
More than fairness, what news media truly needs is honesty and accountability, which will never happen because if I told you outright that my opinion was bought by the energy industry you won't believe any of the pro-oil propaganda I try to sling.
The proliferation of news aggregators with bias metrics for each source is the best thing to happen in a long time, but even that is fallible. I truly see no solution to the ongoing news crisis.
I'm increasingly finding the fake news bleeding into the 'real' news though. Journalists are careless and are letting internet rumour slip into their work and it is rarely retracted.
I find this to be especially true with "high hype" news sources, if that makes sense - cable news, sites with a hyperbolic slant, etc. They roll with instant hot takes now and corrections later (or never).
I did a big shake up of my media diet a couple of years ago towards slow, hype-free news and it has done wonders for my mental health. I recommend everyone do the same. Don't trust any person or source who wants you to be angry, scared, or on the edge of your seat all the time. Living in that emotional zone does nothing to advance the causes we care about.
A great example happened just days ago, widespread 'real' news reporting of the banging sound heard during rescue efforts of the Titan submarine happening every 30 minutes. Appears in no official source yet it even made it onto BBC TV news.
I have seen no retraction of this and in a later press conference the US Navy had to specifically deny it.
Ultimately this was harmless aside from wasting a whole lot of bits as people discuss it on the internet but it is not an isolated incident, this happens almost daily around the world and it is very easy for dangerous falsehoods to slip into 'respectable' reporting.
This statement from you seems to imply that the reporting that the "banging" sounds even happened was fake news. If I'm interpreting your statement correctly, I can't help but find it nonsensical.
The Rolling Stone first reported about banging noises from an internal memo they obtained.
It's not a public source, but are you saying that journalists should ever only report on public and named sources of information?
However in this case, Rolling Stone corroborates with a public tweet from the Boston Coast Guard:
The next day, The Guardian reports several publicly named officials confirming that noises were heard.
Here's another from a Navy Admiral, since you said the Navy denied it later:
I was able to find these two sources with a very quick Google search.
I also want to clarify that in none of the sources were these given to be genuine signs of life, and were all couched in terms of skepticism.
Nope, not the banging. That was widely reported and from an official source.
The 30 minute interval stuff is the fake news that was spread around the internet and even managed to get onto the BBC TV news, it very specifically had to be denied in a later press conference with the US Navy and appears in no official source.
I was confused because I saw people everywhere saying stuff like "yeah but the banging is every 30 minutes, it has to be people, that can't just be random ocean noise" etc and I went to look to find out who had said this, turns out nobody.
It's right in the first source I quoted.
CNN also independently obtained a memo:
The importance of the noises were such that they diverted resources specifically to investigate them:
I think this is actually an interesting exercise in what people consider fake news and how we detect it. I will take what you said how "I went to look to find out who had said this, turns out nobody" in good faith, but given that the above sources were pretty easy to find with a quick Google search, I'm really curious as to your methods. I've found that a large part of the problem around fake news is not only disreputable sources churning out misleading (at best, blatantly made up at worst) information, but also folks not believing official sources when presented with them. Or they might believe the refutation upon the presentation of evidence, but it won't trigger any sort of re-examination of base premises. "That's just one example," they might say. "There's plenty more out there."
This kind of vague feeling is impossible to combat, which is why I've been asking for direct examples in this thread.
There is plenty to criticize mainstream media for, but I treat the accusation of them reporting 'fake news' regularly without retraction with skepticism.
That is not an official source, it was nonsense and had to be quashed during a press conference the next day.
You're mixing up the widely reported, officially confirmed news of banging having been heard with a rumour about it being every 30 minutes - which was not the case.
Can you give me a source of it being "quashed"?
Can you elaborate on how the above is a "rumor"? It was written on a government memo.
I've been into NewsNation recently. I like them. Good story's and good people there.
I doubt ‘twas ever thus. Maybe a few high brow efforts on cspan and pbs, maybe, but news has always been susceptible to money and influence. I mentioned the bernays/chiquita/el salvador issue (50s), and Hearst publishing had sooo many issues.
That said, at least the fairness doctrine pushed the populace, however slightly, to a place of unity and cooperation. Thanks Reagan (and probably the council for national
Policy).
Here's a good ted talk from Eric Bischoff of WCW about how the media has stolen the ideas from wrestling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2RCT6Li4UQ