Media trust hits new low
axios.com> How it works: Media outlets can continue to report reliable facts, but that won't turn the trend around on its own. What's needed is for trusted institutions to visibly embrace the news media.
This is an extremely weird and disturbing conclusion. Orwellian even.
What’s needed is for news organizations to not only report facts, but stop telling stories in ways that only benefit their own ideological systems.
That’s unlikely to happen with existing brands that have effectively now chosen a side, because they have cultivated an audience that now expects them to keep delivering.
It might happen with something new.
Journalism is pay to play anyway.
If you aren't a mainstream politician, you literally have to buy ads to get coverage. Outside of politics it works this way as well. Heck, just look at games journalism.
News channels also hate absolutely anything that takes attention away from their content and their advertisers. Thus video games, dungeons & dragons, religion or anything else that holds the attention of masses of people are to be branded as societal evils.
The best thing that literally everyone can do is stop watching and focus on what's important in your life. Build the community around you.
Journalism and journalists serve an important role in any free society. They are one of the last great checks on a government. We still need reliable journalism. But we need it to not be constant hyperbole and drama.
I am saying stop watching until the journalism improves. Stop watching until it serves your interests.
If you keep supporting what it brings you now, how do you expect it to change?
Journalism and journalists are not doing their part. Under the status quo it should crash and burn and die.
Couldn't agree more with your last sentence. Recently I had a discussion around that with my 12 year old about just that, in the end I compared online journalism to social media influencers. The latter do almost everything for likes, the former for clicks, because both equal revenue. This fast news cycle certainly doesn't help journalism in general. Throw in agendas and we end up where we are. Not that journalism can, or should, be unbiased. Journalism should be open about their particular biases, and definitely less aggressive and underhanded in transporting it. The US seems to be worse in that regard than other countries, this doesn't mean that it is a purely US problem.
The underlying issues with journalism also make it hard to fight back on Fake News allegations, sometimes the Fake News crowd, regardless of political leanings, actually does have a point.
> What’s needed is for news organizations to not only report facts, but stop telling stories in ways that only benefit their own ideological systems.
This is not a new phenomenon; it’s been happening for a looooong time. Look at the difference in how white and Black newspapers reported on the Tulsa race massacre [1]:
”More Than Two Hundred White and Colored Men, Women and Children Were Killed in the Bloody or Horrible Race Riots at Tulsa, Okla.”
vs.
“Two Whites Dead in Race Riot” and “Many More Whites Are Shot”
All factual headlines! But some of them pretty egregiously support one particular ideological position. This was a full century ago.
[1] https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/05/tulsa-race-...
> white and Black
It was when the New York Times decided to start capitalizing black but not white I knew they were done being objective and had turned to activism.
Their explanation that all black people worldwide share a common culture but all white people do not is just absurd.
They’re not a serious news organization and haven’t been for some time.
Here is the article I believe the parent is referring to
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
I think it was rather nuanced. Several reasons given:
1) The capitalization of Black has already been accepted by the mainstream - NYT is catching up with the times
2) Other names on American minorities with a shared heritage is already capitalized, like Latino and Asian.
3) African-American is capitalized, but not as inclusive as Black.
At no point, except when referring to some early 20th century worldview, are they talking about all black people worldwide. I read the article as a purely American POV.
The problem isn’t the capitalization of Black, which as you point out has good reason behind it - it is being used as a proper name for a group. The problem is that White is being used the same way and yet isn’t being capitalized.
> 2) Other names on American minorities with a shared heritage is already capitalized, like Latino and Asian.
What is the definition of "shared heritage" such that everyone but Whites have shared heritage?
My understanding is that:
1. Black Americans were taken away from their native specific cultures, whether it be Bantu, Hutu, Berber, etc, and unable to propagate the specifics of their cultures within communities. After emancipation, the only extant culture available was "Black".
2. White Americans generally settled into self-segregating Italian, Irish, German, etc communities or regions, and the original idiosyncrasies of these cultures persisted beyond relocation.
This makes a lot of sense, and I think up until the mid-late 20th century, this was fair, but I do think that sense is losing its strength as American society becomes increasingly atomized.
In 2021, it's equally valid to say that "Detroit Blacks" and "Memphis Blacks" have their own (sure, nascent, but real) disparate cultures, at the same time that it's valid to say that American "Swedish Whites" and "Italian Whites" are far more culturally similar than they were a couple generations ago.
I don't know, we'll see where history leads us, I guess. But the change is definitely visible.
> it's valid to say that American "Swedish Whites" and "Italian Whites" are far more culturally similar than they were a couple generations ago.
Ok, but if this is true [1], and it’s also necessarily true by your previous claims that Whites have different culture than Blacks in general, then why not capitalize White, since it is a name for a culture.
[1] given that Jews are usually considered ‘white’, and many Jews in fact do have distinct cultures - e.g. Brooklyn Jews, it’s hard to argue this.
“Jews” is too broad a term. Ashkenazim are generally considered white, for instance, but not Sephardim and Mizrahim.
If you substitute Ashkenazim for Jews, the logic still holds.
As the Bee Gees say regarding the New York Times:
We can try to understand
The New York Times' effect on man
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother
You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive
Agreed. It’s not new. What’s new is that it’s obvious to everyone now because of the internet.
> some
!
> What’s needed is for news organizations to not only report facts, but stop telling stories in ways that only benefit their own ideological systems.
Ironic timing considering how just earlier today we were discussing how Rolling Stone's story about gunshot victims being left waiting because of ivermectin overdoses was determined to be false. Talk about a perfect example of a credulously reported story that made it halfway around the globe, retweeted by MSNBC anchors and foreign news outlets, all because it played into the prejudices of journalists and the narrative they wanted to promote. And the whole thing was based on the commentary of one doctor, who apparently hadn't even worked at the hospital in question for months.
It's remarkable that journalists can complain about the public's declining trust while fiascos like this happen on a regular basis, and Axios and their contemporaries either downplay it or sweep it under the carpet.
Previous discussion of the ivermectin hospitalization story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421638
Perfectly said. There was even a show about this a decade ago, called The Newsroom, and on the show the network failed specifically because they reported only the news. It's actually a really good show, and in hindsight, prescient.
It also spawned the term 'American Taliban' which seems to have come into vogue recently.
Trust can't really be gained as easily as it is lost, at this point I am skeptical there is a real (nice) solution available and the only path is for these institutions to continue to further dig themselves into their hole until there is no trust left to erode.
We have to remember that the media is like this because this is apparently what people want to consume. The old, traditional way is not one that will keep the bills paid. The incentives are all out of alignment with no obvious way to fix them.
I think the worst part of this is the authoritarian tendencies that are creeping in as people try to maintain a guise of being trustworthy as others begin to look for "trust" elsewhere.
It's also that the internet broke the local monopolies of the newspapers. It used to be that the newspapers could say to the politicians "if you want to reach the voters in our city, you have to answer questions from our journalists." But now it's more like the politicians can say "unless you put out the coverage we want, you have to provide the coverage we want. Otherwise we will not talk to your organization and people will get their news elsewhere."
Damn you Craig!
Seriously, the 4th branch was ultimately funded by ads in the local paper. That shifted faster then they could keep up and the rug got pulled out from under them. And it has flipped politics on its head. It was never stable in the first place.
> We have to remember that the media is like this because this is apparently what people want to consume.
But their audience is decreasing, so I'm not sure that it's actually what people want. It seems to me that it's more of a "cashing in" thing. They built up trust for generations by mostly reporting factually with little bias, and the current generation is cashing in by abusing that trust to advance their personal politics (short-sighted as that may be), support "the system" (conspiracy!), or both.
I feel like the audience has been decreasing for decades, and the current state of how news is reported is sort of an attempted pivot in reporting style meant to emulate social media which has been eating their lunch. Clickbait headlines and partisanship/ bias fuel a type of engagement that seems to be much more lucrative than what they did before. In terms of cashing in, I do believe it is something that they are doing to survive.
Yes. The problem is, the way ideology works today is not so simple. It is not that we need to realize we have ideology aka - 'we know not what we do but we keep doing it'. It is: We know fully well what we do is meaningless/oppressive and yet keep on doing it thereby perpetuating it. The cornerstone of modern ideology today is that we all think we are free of it - the surest marker of total entrenchment. The media outlets are not evil/plotting/bought - it is far worse. They think they are free of ideology and think they are very critical of it even as they perform the service of power. There is no way for them to 'stop telling stories that only benefit their own ideological systems' because they already think they are doing that. Alongside experts and scientists we need some philosophers and thinking.
> they have cultivated an audience that now expects them to keep delivering.
Especially when their revenue depends on it.
I feel like reporting facts is half of it and stopping the sensationalism is the other half. I guys I understand the sensationalism because they need to make money and it’s a tough industry.
It is not Orwellian.
It is a net of trust.
My first thought while reading your post was the head of the KGB in HBO's Chernobyl talking about a "circle of accountability."
It seems Orwellian to me to have CEOs in general in some arrangement to lend trust to the media. The incentives for any kind of accountability would seem to be even worse than they are today.
What do you mean by a ‘net of trust’?
I suspect they are just referring to the basic social fabric, so to speak. If everybody has a variety of mostly trustworthy sources that act as implicit or explicit verifiers of each other, then everybody has a fairly robust ability to gather information about the world - including the trustworthiness of the various parts of their 'net'.
This sort of thing seems to have, however, somewhat broken down in recently years. At a minimum I think most people would say these networks are at least smaller and more insular than they were in the past.
If it's all in good faith, this might not be so terrible. If the aforementioned trusted CEOs faithfully and accurately are able to point out media they believe is trustworthy and keep an eye on those outlets, it could potentially work as a way to kick start the rejuvenation of these networks.
Now, this relies on these CEOs being both trusted and trustworthy. That is a fairly substantial assumption in my opinion.
But if it's all in good faith it's possible to read this as not Orwellian at all, but rather more informing a section of the community that there is something they can do for the community, and then asking them to do it.
> If the aforementioned trusted CEOs faithfully and accurately are able to point out media they believe is trustworthy and keep an eye on those outlets, it could potentially work as a way to kick start the rejuvenation of these networks.
But the media aren’t trustworthy. That’s how we got to this place. If that gets fixed, then indeed CEOs can celebrate it, but the problem is with the media right now, not the lack of people cheering them on.
The media have never been completely without issue. Even people trying to be objective have pre-existing biases and holes in their knowledge. Importantly journalists are professional writers and information gatherers whereas accurate understanding may require expertise in many and varied fields where the journalist is a sometimes inaccurate translator for actual experts who themselves may be wrong or biased.
Americas understanding of the world could be said to be diverging because of self selection of content in people's respective echo chambers but I don't think it apt to say it's because the media is less trustworthy just because they are less trusted.
Can you provide objective criteria to suggest that the accuracy of the news has declined?
> The media have never been completely without issue. … > Can you provide objective criteria to suggest that the accuracy of the news has declined?
Nobody is claiming a decline in accuracy. What is being claimed that the media is not trustworthy.
Can you provide objective criteria to show that the media is trustworthy?
The question is a bit broad to give you a precise answer. I often cross check multiple sources for a given topic and I find the sources most frequently identified dismissively as the mainstream media does a pretty good job of getting the facts of the situation correct and complete. I have not in my personal experience noted this being meaningfully different in the 22 years of being an adult whereas I have noted in that same time frame the explosive growth of social media and person to person sharing of made up news and fake takes that used to proceed far more inefficiently via email and subsequent radicalization of America.
Keep in mind that I don't just mean right wing kooks. Crazy people come in all stripes and while different camps may not agree on much what they all share is a pride in being in the know. Of being more plugged in by virtue of knowing about for example conspiracies that are somehow simultaneously secret and available via the feed of people you wouldn't trust to watch a hamster.
It used to be that merely being available say on TV or in a widely distributed newspaper was a good first pass filter because it filtered out most obvious malarkey. At the dawn of the internet this increasingly ceased to be so as it became easy for anyone with an increasingly broadly available skill set to reach a wide audience if what they want to say resonates with what people want or worse fear is true.
At least however because making a nice website was harder it was at least SOMEWHAT easy to pick up on the bunkum because it looked like junk and was hosted on geocities. Now one can really and in fact be plugged into a lot of really high quality and up to the minute data on social media and in fact it all looks the same whether on twitter or on slick easy to make websites and we are relying on people with no usable first pass filter to pick out the garbage based on critical thinking skills they in fact lack.
I think its well established without further need of proof that people trust the media less. I suggest its because a lot of people are building their world view on complete nonsense not because the media is any better or worse. This seems trivially true from observation but I don't know how to go about proving it to you in the large.
> Now, this relies on these CEOs being both trusted and trustworthy. That is a fairly substantial assumption in my opinion.
That's true, and it might only extend the trust-issues. You get someone to embrace a not-trustworthy institution and vouch for them, the trust in them will fade away as well.
I know how to fix this. Whenever you get a survey on this, tell them you completely trust them to tell you the truth no matter what.
Then the graphs will look great. Problem solved!
> Reversing the decline is a monster task — and one that some journalists and news organizations have taken upon themselves. They're going to need help — perhaps from America's CEOs.
Is this a bad joke? Distrust of media is largely brought about because it is (mostly) in the private sector and therefore always puts the sustainability of its business model above objective reporting. We've known for a while now that negative news sells, clickbait sells, and media organizations are all too happy to push it out there if it helps their struggling bottom line.
France has a public agency, AFP, being the news arbiter (it’s the Reuters competitor). Yet, information is bullshit. They choose to report on some topics and not others, and they choose to publish extremely biased news without quoting the opposing side to interview their defense. Happens with the wage gap, happens with the Traoré, happens with Sarkozysm, happens with Fillion... It sways elections.
Owned 56% by the state.
That doesn't rule out public ownership as a necessary condition - only as a sufficient one.
State ownership is just one small step above private ownership. A far more interesting organization would be a news co-op, preferably one not backed by ads. Unfortunately there are massive hurdles in front of such an organization existing. Not least of which, they might actually report things that it does not do to worry the public over.
> happens with Sarkozysm, happens with Fillion... It sways elections.
In which sense did it happen? They didn't report on it or they did without "quoting the opposing side"? Specifically in the case of Fillon, the guy was caught stealing from the state in a pretty obvious manner ( his wife was receiving a salary for being his parliamentary assistant for like 15 years, while never having received a pass to actually get in the parliament). There was little of substance he could say, and when he did say it, it was obviously complete bullshit. Yes, it swayed the elections ( he was the favourite to win) and thankfully, that's not the type of person anyone should want running the country.
The judge admitted she received pressure to investigate this affair.
All deputees use the assistant salary evasive mission loophole, only candidates who are potent competitors are found out by journalists. Meanwhile Macron’s assistant had 6 diplomatic passports and a gun after being fired for mugging political opponents (!), yet journalists uniformly said that it probably was a honest mistake by the passport department.
State-owned AFP and most journals being >1/3rd sponsored by the government is clearly helping the mugging of political opponents in France, whether through the use of media, judges or by simple private thugs armed with guns and diplomatic passports.
> Is this a bad joke? Distrust of media is largely brought about because it is (mostly) in the private sector
You think the 82% of Republicans who distrust the media is due to being in the private sector? And that they would trust it more if it was government run?
The thing is, trust isn't universal.
Do I trust CEOs to run businesses? Yes (at least, more than I trust either the government or the media).
Do I trust CEOs to tell me whether the media is trustworthy? Very much no. (What reason would I have to trust them on such a topic? None.)
> sustainability of its business model above objective reporting
Wouldn't publicly-funded media be the same? if a conservative govt wanted to cut the media budget would we not see one-sided negative reporting targeting conservatives?
It's a very valid question. My personal opinion is that public media isn't by default better due to its ability to operate at a loss - in fact it could be argued that the only reason an administration would allow it to run at a loss is if it saw the operation as advantageous to its political objectives.
I think the real answer that nobody wants to hear is that media at this scale cannot exist without bad actors trying to manipulate it. There is no "web of trust" at the scale of millions.
Um, no. You gain people's trust by being consistently worthy of trust.
This article seems to think that trust is it's own fungible but inconvertible substance (the media has lost theirs, so someone else needs to give them some), rather than something that derives from an objective reality.
> You gain people's trust by being consistently worthy of trust.
People trust repeated liers all the time. And truth telling institutions are rarely most trusted popular ones.
Indeed. It seems like the path to getting a lot of people to trust you is to tell lies so big that many can't believe someone would come up with a lie like that.
Whenever people complain about the state of their society, I can’t help but think they still really desire the current situation.
Why don’t people trust the media? Exactly this type of consistent ham fisted reasoning that any intelligent person can see right through which obviously demonstrates an agenda.
Intellectuals already see how news corporations are too busy serving their echo-chambers. Thus, the trust got eroded over the years and it has just gotten worse.
In order to be effective news source, you need to separate truth and opinion. Reporting stories even if they're uncomfortable for their own customer base goes directly against their business interest (revenue, clickrate, etc.). So echo chambers get louder. Trust is earned by consistently confronting difficult facts.
This article doesn't even remotely go where you think it would if you're going off the headline and your preconceptions.
Ends up as
> CEOs have long put themselves forward as the people able to upgrade America's physical infrastructure. Now it's time for them to use the trust they've built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure.
Who's trusting most CEOs?
Being charitable, I guess people are trusting people who are actually able to put money into their hands and food on their table, rather than people who make promises or give abstract benefits or who take money from them?
Bear in mind this article's primary source (data, interpretation, calls to action, etc.) is Edelman, a global PR firm. Quoting from the tagline on Edelman's own website, its mission is to "partner with businesses and organizations to evolve, promote and protect their brands and reputations. "
The survey data itself sounds plausible, and I've got no immediate reason to question the numbers. But when it comes to interpretation and next steps, Edelman very much has a point of view that predates whatever the data has found.
Food catch.
In other words: This article itself contributes more to increase mistrust in the media than it increases the trust in the media.
Especially considering this quote from the article: Axios has a stated mission to "help restore trust in fact-based news".
Even if people do trust CEOs, there is no actionable request here.
There is no explanation given for why trust is diminishing or what CEOs are supposed to do to fix it.
As far as I can see the problem is that media really has always been ideologically biased, but the advent of social media and the ease of getting news online has made this obvious.
We can’t ‘fix’ the problem because it’s not broken. The only solution is a kind of upgrade that current media organizations simply aren’t built to deliver.
The discussion here is what I'm interested in. Pure gold the sheer insight you get from a wide range of minds. That is what the media should be: access and transmission of deep insight by really smart individuals, backed by non-cherry-picked and objective facts.
So their solution to the declining trust in government and media is to leverage the trust that employees still have in their CEOs. If they can convince CEOs to push their false narratives, then trust will evaporate there as well. How about instead: be more trustworthy.
TIL people trust their CEOs.
"Be more trustworthy" isn't a particularly simple notion. What could CNN or Fox do to do that?
Stopping to treat politics like entertainment and actively spreading false facts would be a good start, IMHO. Not that I expect any of that so. Same goes for other countries, maybe a tad less extreme.
I agree with you on the entertainment aspect.
What's an example of a false fact that's been reported? All the major news players are really careful on this front. They'll report accurately that someone said something that was false, for example.
> Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan writes that "our goal should go beyond merely putting truthful information in front of the public. We should also do our best to make sure it’s widely accepted."
This attitude here, is a source of the problem by itself. If traditional media outlets would just put truthful information out without trying to get it "accepted," that would go a long way in rebuilding trust.
When you are aware of the ground situation and see articles in the Washington Post that are clearly completely false, misleading, and spinning facts with a clear purpose of advancing a narrative, (and trying to be "accepted"? by whom?) that completely destroys any remaining trust that you might have built up over the years.
No it wouldn't lol, majority of people when given the facts simply refuse them. You have facts about vaccines working yet how many are still refusing them?
Could that might be caused by one major network gaslighting their viewers for the last 4 years?
Along with the opposing major network for reacting and obviously being biased in order to re-inforce the views that the other network questioned?
For a long time my model of the world assumed a certain level of corruption to exist in the West, but I assumed it was generally local, and that any large-scale corruption would become a national scandal, like the Church Committee, or Watergate. Basically I had expected an equal balance of justice to match the crime. I no longer hold that. There is deep corruption everywhere - through the media, to government, academia, tech, and finance, and seemingly nobody to hold institutions and individuals accountable. Were we expected to just forget Jeffrey Epstein, for example, and all the relationships and lack of investigation? It seems so. You either close your eyes to it, or you're forced down some dark rabbit holes just to form a cohesive worldview. The few beacons of light today are now all brave individuals - podcasters, twitter accounts, leakers, writers - and their very existence feels fragile. So this article strikes me as extremely shallow. We're not operating in business-as-usual, where just a few tweaks and the metrics will look good again.
Well said. Deep corruption everywhere and it is spreading. I think empires in decline are unavoidably this way.
I think this Ivermectin debate has nothing to do with Ivermectin, but about big pharma attempting to usurp power via several government agencies who also want power as they are now being put in charge of things they were never designed for and are not well constituted to handle (things your doctor should be in charge of).
I think this Afghanistan withdrawal was intentionally botched in order to try to get American support for going back in, by sick-minded money-hungry monsters.
You have to listen to many people and then figure out who you trust and on what topics. The most trustworthy and intelligent voices are podcasters. But each has their failings and none should be held up on a pedestal. I trust Glenn Greenwald, but not on topics regarding Socialism. I trust Bret Weinstein, but I don't trust his judgement of other people (he seems far too forgiving and trusting of others) [I took the vaccine and don't take Ivermectin]. Those are just examples.
People have lost trust in the media. Let’s trick them by having completely out of touch CEOs talk it up.
Perfection.
I audibly exclaimed "what the actual fuck?!" when I reached that part of the article.
We're in quite a pickle, and I don't know what to do, but I now know to be extremely suspect of axios.
Pushing narratives instead of reporting the truth has a corrosive effect on reputation, who knew? ;-)
There are many small teams on YouTube and other places that are building up a community of patrons to sponsor their efforts, both in news and other areas.
It is through these efforts that I see a replacement for the mass media emerging. Their dedicated non-advertiser driven source of support allows them to take risks that are simply not possible otherwise. They can tell the truth without worry of offending corporate overlords, or other institutions.
I agree, but I'm concerned that any internet news reporter can be easily shut down or marginalized with little to no recourse. Payment processers are also able blacklist with impunity. A large organization with multiple channels to get their story out would be much more resistant to such attacks.
At the same time, YouTube has been detrimental to trust, like facebook. It takes paying customers away and at the same time pushes “counter narratives.” I don't see how a bunch of small teams with very limited investigation resources can buck that trend. Even if they’d cooperate, trust in them would depend on the weakest link.
Edit: mobile typos
How do I know which of the many small teams is telling the truth?
Well, the same way you know if the big guys are telling the truth - you listen without trust until you can check enough verifiable claims to make up your mind.
The difference is that when a big guy lies/misrepesents/is mistaken and gets caught, it causes quite a commotion even if you personally didn't catch that particular wrong fact/report. With the little guy, much less attention is paid so if they are mistaken, or change their ways, or w/e, you can easily miss it.
Do you have examples of these teams please?
Wow this list got long... sorry
Beau of the Fifth Column has a pretty interesting take on events, a strong interest in community networks, and deep insight into what holds society together - https://www.youtube.com/c/BeauoftheFifthColumn
Breaking Points - Krystal Ball is a liberal, Saagar Enjeti is a conservative, and together they seek to cover the important stories that would otherwise go unnoticed - https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints
Knowing Better is an ex soldier who offers long insightful views on a variety of topics - https://www.youtube.com/c/KnowingBetter
Lex Fridman was born in the Soviet Union, worked at MIT in AI, and does interesting interviews with a wide variety of people - https://www.youtube.com/c/lexfridman
MKBHD reviews technology in a fairly credible way - https://www.youtube.com/c/mkbhd
MrPete222 is the shop teacher you never had - fascinating lessons and stories about machining - https://www.youtube.com/c/mrpete222
Phil DeDranco does a daily rundown of the stories that you might get in the media, with a fairly balanced view - https://www.youtube.com/c/PhilipDeFranco
Practical Engineering is an explainer channel about most things infrastructure - https://www.youtube.com/c/PracticalEngineeringChannel
Rebecca Watson provides a welcome skeptical view and calls out quite a lot of BS related to science - https://www.youtube.com/skepchicks
Rebel Wisdom is a project that is actively trying to figure out collective sense making in the modern era - https://www.youtube.com/c/RebelWisdom
Sabine Hossenfelder is a commenter on all things physics - https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder
Scott Manley provides commentary on all things space and rocket related - https://www.youtube.com/c/szyzyg
Smarter Every Day is an engineer who provides interesting explainers about various subjects. He got permission to film and interview inside an active US nuclear attack sub... pretty cool - https://www.youtube.com/c/smartereveryday
Technology connections does in depth explainers of everyday stuff you didn't realize you wanted to know more about, like how heat pumps or lanterns work. - https://www.youtube.com/c/TechnologyConnections
Veritasium was founded by Derek Muller, who was looking for more effective ways of teaching, when he found that traditional education has almost zero effect at removing misconceptions - https://www.youtube.com/c/veritasium
ZDogg is an MD who gives strong personal opinions on all things medical - https://www.youtube.com/c/ZDoggMD
Update: I've made public my list of channels I subscribe to on Youtube, for better or worse
wow. Thank you
Edit: Walking through a couple of these I would just pass them by had you not mentioned them. A fair few have that awful youtube, block caps, latest news headlines, must have someone's face etc etc.
After decades of mainstream media abusing their position instead of being an actual balancing fourth power, the chicken are coming home to roost.
For me the realization that the mainstream media was not fulfilling their role anymore was:
- following 9/11, when *none* of the mainstream outlets had the guts to question the decisions to go into Iraq and all aligned to sing 'hail to the chief' in base fear of being called anti-american.
- in 2005, when the danish mohamed cartoons crisis came and went and most the American main media cowardly caved in to pressure and refused to publish the cartoons [1] [2] [3]
What worries me is that we do indeed need some social apparatus than can speak truth to power, and there isn't anything yet that I can see that will provide that: the internet style wannabe replacement (blogs, YT pundits, etc...) are just too diluted for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_that_reprin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cartoons_that_Shook_the_Wo...
I see most takes here discussing the growing distrust in media as a problem to fix. Instead, I see it as a welcome change, a necessary but not sufficient condition to a more free society. The media has always been extremely biased, selling a particular elite consensus view of the world. Sure, some real reporting made it though once in a while, especially when it was orthogonal to the overarching narrative or when it directly served it. But major news organizations have always been run and edited by the same academic elite and political elite who make policy.
For some examples, you will not find any high-level media people (senior editors, senior reporters) at any US institution who believe the Vietnam war was an act of aggression, who believe George Bush Jr was a war criminal, who believe consumerism and economic growth are not a net good in the world, who believe the USA is most responsible for the state of the Middle East, who believe Cuba has often been a force for good in the world and the illegal embargo against it should be lifted, who believe Israel is an apartheid state performing daily acts of aggression against Palestine, who believe that its fair and good for people who don't work to be poor and miserable, and so on.
You don't have to accept these views as true, but you should still note that CNN and The New York Times and Fox News and Breitbart all agree on the bedrock narrative of the USA's fundamentally noble role in the world, its fairness to its citizens, its desire to do good, even if they disagree on a few specifics and may or may not think there were some mistakes along the way.
To me it seems that having people distrust this media is like having people distrust Pravda in the USSR: absolutely crucial if they are to think of a better world. Now of course, some people stop trusting the NYT and move to trusting flat earth groups on FB, which is worse. But I believe that the great good that comes from realizing you shouldn't trust those in authority simply because you've been taught to will see a slow but fundamental shift in society. One that news organizations and PR firms and other propaganda machines will fight tooth and nail, as this article shows.
Very well put, agree a 100%.
We have large businesses professing to be news but utterly lacking in commitment to the truth. Channels prepared to lie knowingly, while insisting everyone else is lying.
Even a world where, say, 90% of media is impeccable, but 10% is bullshit, is like a poker game where 10% of the players are shamelessly cheating while loudly telling you the game is rigged. They are correct: they broke the game.
It's really, really hard to compete against shameless cheats and liars.
At the bottom of this rundown there is a "Bottom line: CEOs have long put themselves forward as the people able to upgrade America's physical infrastructure. Now it's time for them to use the trust they've built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure."
It's just one line but they've spent the whole post talking about how media is not trusted and then end it with a clearly opinionated bottom line.
How does this help?
Trust in government is even lower - hovering at around 24%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust...
This is the biggest problem of all, and it needs to be tackled before we can build trust in anything else.
People need to first take responsibility for the governments they elect. Then they need feel like "We the people" are in charge. Not some nefarious organization that we have no power over.
We need smaller, more local, more connected, more transparent governments.
> We need smaller, more local, more connected, more transparent governments.
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately it seems that power only ever gets more concentrated at a higher level, there's rarely a decentralization of power, so local governments have less and less influence over people's lives and matter less and less.
Not surprising: unlike the press, whose main sin is misleading their audience the US govt as it functions today is both misleading their audience, actively plundering them and mostly wasting the proceeds of said plunder.
Pew research breaks it down sharply from 2016 to 2021 by social media, local news, and national news: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/30/partisan-di...
The last 5 years is a very short time horizon, I'd love to see a longer one.
Until 2016 it seems it was assumed and the question wasn’t asked. It was only when the term “fake news” was coined that anyone thought to gauge people’s trust in media.
I would contend that 2016 was just the first time it manifested itself in a big way, and the sentiment had been building for a long time.
Anyone know of efforts to fix this space? Looking for a good excuse to quit my well paid corporate job and make a difference. News today is:
- Infotainment - Tribal reinforcement - Irrelevant - Not actionable (and thus, depressing) - Making people think the world is getting worse - Immediate and not well thought out or nuanced
In some ways it's their fault, but on the other hand, the modern reader won't pay for news. Maybe it's largely a business model problem?
It's literally killing people and needs to be disrupted, fixed.
I think is up to personal choices:
• Quit subscribing corporate media and subscribe to single reporters that are doing real reporting.
• Have zero tolerance for news that mislead you. ”Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
• Try to find reporters that are willing to give you the honest cotext even if it goes against what you expect and does not affirm your believes.
If enough people do this, those lying and misleading for profit will go out of business.
But single reporters seem even more aggressively partisan than corporate. They're often at least fairly explicit about this though - billing themselves as a journalist of the left or of the right or whatever spectrum you want - but there's still no balance.
What balance are you talking about? I've never been able to figure it out.
Are we talking just providing an equal number of sentences from the perspective of each major party? How do we decide which parties get included, here? Do we instead break it up by major ideologies? Again, which ones?
Even if we attempt to go no ideology and just raw facts, the facts you choose to report are a result of interpretation. You could easily construct an entirely factual article that contains no subjective opinions and still be majorly and intentionally deceptive. So not mentioning any perspectives is also not balanced.
What balance is everybody talking about? How is it defined? How we determine what is and is not balanced?
> What balance are you talking about?
It’s not as complicated as you’re making out.
If I read an article about how a proposed law is bad I’d also like to read an article about how it might be good.
Not rocket science is it?
You say it like it's so easy. It's not. The reality is many (maybe even most?) articles - even ones from incredibly openly biased sources - do this. It's often difficult to make many meaningful attacks on a proposed law without mentioning what the intent is.
Unless it's one of a few already highly-covered issues with fundamentally irreconcilable subjective issues where you can pretty much recall all that context with a few words... you have to say what the heck the proponents of the law say it'll do to actually attack it.
However you don't seem to find that balanced. I don't blame you. I don't either.
The problem is the arguments made cannot be equal. They are not the same thing. Even a good faith attempt to make a completely neutral article will very often fall short. Even if the author thinks they did not, others will.
The only 'balance' you can really have is a false equivalence where nothing matters because it's all the same anyway - so why even write an article? It doesn't matter what happens.
> If I read an article about how a proposed law is bad I’d also like to read an article about how it might be good.
Can you not read two articles, and do this yourself?
That’s not very efficient is it and since they’re written separately they don’t directly address each other’s points.
Corporate news aren't partisan.
Unless you count chasing the bottom line as an ideology, that is.
Fox, to take an extreme examples, isn't really partisan. They have just found a juicy business model where they've learnt to titillate the sensitivities of a certain segment of the population to maximize revenue.
I don't have problem with a biased news source, as long as I have enough news sources to dig from and can average out the bias from multiple sources.
It's quite cynical and unfair to say neither Fox nor (for example) Jacobin really believe in what they produce, but instead just serve whichever market segments profit them. In all probability, the employees of both believe deeply in their respective missions and in their reporting.
>Fox, to take an extreme examples, isn't really partisan. They have just found a juicy business model where they've learnt to titillate the sensitivities of a certain segment of the population to maximize revenue.
That just describes their motivations as not being partisan. Their product is still highly partisan.
> Their product is still highly partisan.
Fair enough, but they're not really a news source.
I agree with you there.
> Corporate news aren't partisan.
You’ve got to be joking?
For example in the UK newspapers, even the best ones, literally declare their support for a particular party at the start of each election.
I think one of the foremost solutions to this problem set is Substack. There are a non-trivial number of journalists on there who's pitch is "hey, I don't want to be part of an institution that has bias/that I don't believe in, give me money and I'll deliver long form 'pure' essays to you."
The potential pitfall is that one can end up only subscribing to journalists that agree with ones point of view. I personally think this is offset by the kinds of view points that are attracted to or do well on a space like Substack, but that might just be me.
Your impression of "news today" lacks nuance and does not give me confidence in your ability to "make a difference" in the journalism industry.
Seems pretty accurate to me. What part did you disagree with?
I've been impressed with what News Literacy Project is doing, particularly in terms of helping high school students recognize the hallmarks of carefully researched material vs. the opposite. https://newslit.org/
Some very important work happening at the centre for investigative journalism, there are opportunities to help for example developing programs to teach digital safety to journalists and sources. https://tcij.org
I don't have an answer but these two YouTube channels look like what I hope the answer looks like:
Exploiting psychology on a mass scale like this means that the only solution will be government regulation.
create a better alternative to Parler, more robust against de-platforming by Bigtech, half the country will thank you
"The natural bodies of administration which are traditionally either elected by people at large or appointed by elected leaders of society are being actively substituted by artificial bodies. Groups of people that nobody elected. As a matter of fact most of the people do not like them at all, yet they exist.
One such group is media - who elected them? How come they have so much monopolistic power over your mind? How come they have the nerve to decide what is good or bad for the elected president and his administration? Who are they?...
... Power structure slowly is eroded by groups of people who do not have neither qualifications nor will of people to keep them in power. Yet they do have power."
-Yuri Bezmenov, describing how to slowly infiltrate the culture of a targeted society [0]
That's a very naive look. The term Fourth Estate / Power ( after the three executive, judiciary and legislative) traces its origins from 1787:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
Media, since it's mass existence, has always had an outsized, unelected influence. And it has never been a monopoly ( baring wartime censorship and control) because there have always been more than one institutions, which have an interest in competing, at least to some extent.
What's the story with "Yuri Bezmenov" in general? I'd really like to get a take on him from the HN crowd.
Edelman, which creates the Trust Barometer, is a public relations firm which has a particular view of the world. It would be interesting to see the full list of questions they asked people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edelman_(firm)#Controversies
I would argue that it's the divisive political environment and style of reporting that Axios does (see below) that creates an "uninformed public" which creates that distrust. Note in places like Finland (where there is more consensus politics and more people read newspapers) media trust has increased https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finland_has_highest_trust....
"VandeHei said he wanted Axios to be a "mix between The Economist and Twitter"..."Axios's articles are typically brief and matter-of-fact: most are shorter than 300 words and use bullet points so they are easier to scan"
Today's example of the media pushing a false story without bothering to do the least bit of fact checking first:
https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1434591443855753220
I have been trying to imagine a kind of template for news commentary that could attempt to award productive discourse. I don't think there's an easy way around it being gamed but it's fun to think about. Something like:
* Here are several basic facts
* Here is our best interpretation of the facts given the context.
* here are interpretations that the other side(s) are putting forth, stated in their strongest form such that they would agree with it as stated
* here is our analysis of why those other interpretations are not as strong as our own.
You could maybe rank or sort these based on how many 'other siders' agree with (upvote) their presentation of the other side mixed with how much you agree with the basis of their analysis to choose your favorite sources of commentary.
I remember reading a Singapore newspaper and thinking it was the epitome of a one-sided one-party dictatorsh… democracy. After several articles, I noticed what was wrong with it.
Every article was made of the 4 exact parts you quoted, but used in bad faith. Especially “the opposing side, in their strongest argument” all relies on subjective interpretation. Words can always be twisted.
that why I want the oppositions approval/upvote of the description of their position to be a key part of this.
> Faith in society's central institutions, especially in government and the media, is the glue that holds society together.
Perhaps people are starting to think that having media as a “central institution” is not actually good for society.
“Journalism is essential to Democracy! Trust us, we tell you the truth and you need us. ” -Journalists.
Even George Washington had trouble with the press and lamented how often he was maligned and misrepresented in the papers.
“He regarded the press as a disuniting, "diabolical" force of falsehoods, sentiments that he expressed in his Farewell Address.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington and the citation is from a book.
I'm not sure how you can have a healthy democracy without an informed populace (i.e. journalism).
I'm struggling to draw a link between journalism and the population being informed.
I’d go a step further and declare that “informed” really just means that they’ve been presented with certain information. I myself have had a quote of mine published in a news article and it was used in a way that was the complete opposite of what I was intending to convey to the interviewer. I experienced the Gell-Mann effect first hand.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
“In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect, after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding”
In other words, when people read articles about something in their own field of expertise, they are able to pick the misrepresentations out easily. But they assume the rest of the news is straightforward because they don’t know any better and trust the journalist’s reporting as an accurate representation of what is happening.
Edgy. What's your alternative?
A well balanced diet.
A knowledge of history, unedited video footage of actual events, common sense, scepticism (of everyone, not just the 'enemy').
I've talked to reasonably intelligent programmers who got upset at a politicians speech they'd never heard. All they did was read a paraphrase of it from their favourite media outlet (who happened to be ill-disposed towards said politician).
A lot of the `events` of 2020-2021 were captured on unedited video. Few people I've talked to bothered to watch it. They relied on journalists. Didn't stop them forming a strong opinion though.
And without a knowledge of history (and mine is admittedly basic), you have zero context.
People who get their world-model from established media are only “informed” in a very narrow literal sense.
> I'm not sure how you can have a healthy democracy without an informed populace
agree
> (i.e. journalism).
not the same thing.
This seems like a no true Scotsman kinda thing.
I suspect people who want to "make journalism better" and people who want to "inform the populace with 'not journalism'" are probably talking about the same thing.
(Not that I agree with this article, the "get CEOs to make people trust news" thing is bizarre)
“Making journalism better” implies some sort of smooth continuous transition to a new state, where (implicitly) the existing journalist class has not been liquidated and gets to keep their high-status credentialed writing jobs. This can’t really fix the core problem.
Why should MASS media be trusted? They exist to make money and they are free to use. How in the world they can be anything but a manipulation (which includes but not limited to, just simply a distraction)?
If you need real news, use Bloomberg, AP, Reuters... Yeah that's $1500 per month, and even more importantly, they are too boring to read for an average person, so they wouldn't be popular even if they were free. People who make actual decisions based on news, read them, for rest, there is this "newstainment" industry and it's no problem at all if it's not trustworthy.
Your comment makes no sense.
On the one hand you blame "MASS media" (whatever that is to you) and on the other you advocate to use AP and Reuters, where most media outlets get large chunks of their news from. AP and Reuters exist so others, often smaller, media companies don't have to do intensive research into everyday news. If something is a target for manipulation, it's AP, Reuters, and similar.
NPR, PBS, BBC, AustralianBC, CanadianBC, etc are not for profit and exist in the public interest. These are an important subset of the mass media in English.
We need to make sure these organs hold to the public interest principle, and also that they can maintain reliable funding.
Well, they're supposed to exist in the public interest, but it seems like it could be true that they're vehemently opposed by at least half of the populations they're supposed to be serving.
So are the COVID vaccines[1]. Lack of universal popularity doesn't make something bad, wrong or unworthy of enthusiastic support.
[1] I exaggerate the proportion, but maybe you did too.
Well, my point is that if we're going to make people pay for things they don't like because we know better than they do what's good for them, let's try to do that equally. That's not happening on, say, the BBC, where for a while they were paying a black transwoman to promote racial hatred against whites.
And for a much longer while - about 20 years - they ran the Black and White Minstrel show. The answer is not to represent everyone's dumb ideas equally.
https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/people-nation...
I don’t know about the international organizations but I can tell you for the US-based “publicly funded” ones they are considered just as untrustworthy, for the same reasons as fox, CNN, NYT, etc.
What are these same reasons? NPR and Fox are similarly untrustworthy because what?
The article spells it out rather nicely: 18% of republicans trust the news. While 43% of Democrats don’t.
Most of this mistrust is coming from the right, despite what many ppl like to claim, NPR isn’t objective or impartial they’re fairly solidly left. All the “institutions” that many like to think are giants in the media are really pretty much just mouth pieces for one side’s politics, the right has Fox News and the left has NPR, NYT, etc. They’re both distrusted by opposing sides for the same reason: they don’t report the news.
Here is one of those CEO's we should trust.
...who are these people that trust CEOs? How often do you even hear something that comes across as genuine, and not some fluff non-committal bs that says nothing?
Maybe the title should read: The average media consumer becomes more news literate.
In the advent of social media being a megaphone and a news source nowadays, media organizations ceased to own the monopoly of news.
It doesn't help matters that old media is busy cannibalizing the very thing that built its brand: quality journalism.
Very common to see media organizations these days report government speech as facts. Investigative journalism is nothing but an old fable now.
Ban advertising, which is paid lying, and then the trust problems that result from everyone being paid to lie and exclusively being paid to lie will go away.
That's quite an interesting idea.
I wonder what a social media landscape would look like if we managed to implement UBI. Effectively we would have any number of financially independent news sources and aggregators.
This is of course the same thing as "subsidies" but without professional ethics etc.
It's going to be interesting looking for a new news model for the coming decades.
The problem will get worse if you ban advertising. The money that went to advertising will just shift to “influencers”, which is even less authentic.
What are you talking about? Influencers are advertising, and are likewise banned.
How would you ban influencers? They are just content creators. Anyone can sponsor their work.
I can sponsor an open source project whose work I like. Likewise I can (and have) sponsored musicians.
Why couldn’t a corporation sponsor someone who for example makes youtube videos about fashion, or a tech blogger for that matter?
I don't think I would need to work very hard to show that this was paid endorsement.
For me, I 'trust' a news source if it is reporting relevant, interesting or useful information - not a bunch of hyped up garbage. I expect every legitimate news source to be factually correct about events- that doesn't make them trustworthy, however.
This article lacks any self-reflection at all. Summary: media good, public bad, trust your ruling elite.
So you're saying we don't trust the for-profit news companies that spew out 24/7 bullshit onto the working class?
That includes Axios as well.
Misinformation aside, I suspect the media lies and spins things just as much as in the past, its largely through social media that real facts come out to show how the main media is often wrong or misleading. Of course there is way to much rumor and plain wrong stuff on SM too.
English language media is dominated by a remarkably small number of organisations.
8 months old article, should be tagged as (2020) at least, I'd like to know how they collected and analyzed data for 2021 in those first 3 weeks of 2021...
maybe I'd have trust in media, if they provided balanced view from various sides and not push their agenda, also hiring any kid which can type sentence with autocorrect, but make basic logical errors doesn't fill me with trust in such media
Simple solution - look at all the other western democracies that don't have this problem (I really mean have this problem less, obviously there is going to be biased tabloid rags in every country).
Coincidentally, this seems to align pretty well with countries that don't have a bunch of media outlets owned by the Murdoch empire... curious.
> look at all the other western democracies that don't have this problem
Which one is that exactly?
The couple of western democracies I am familiar with all have similar problems with their mainstream medias.
There are obviously levels of this problem. On the worst level (I hope it's the worst) you have people consuming a completely different reality. I'd argue the US has arrived there. The test for having the problem at this level would be if you could ask a population a question with an objective easily known factual answer and have a significant fraction disagree with the answer because of their news diet.
The UK has the problem at a smaller scale. Other western countries have problems with trust in media but I'd argue they don't have the same level of invented reality as the US.
Let's be honest, the media is just giving the people what they want, people subconsciously want bias news, its not pleasent to read news that disagrees with your own views. Why do you think facebook modified their algorithms for this? This applies to both on the left and the right politically.
> As vaccine rumor hunter Heidi Larson puts it, "we don’t have a misinformation problem, we have a trust problem.”
That about sums it up. The lies are fine, the problem is that nobody believes them. But let's imagine that the media wanted to regain the trust of the public by being more trustworthy.
Here is some advice:
Acknowledge bias. Too many in the media try to portray themselves as truth-tellers, and everyone else has hopelessly biased propagandists. Just own it. Be clear about ideological positions and points of agreement and disagreement with other political actors.
Acknowledge uncertainty. The truth is out there, but we often don't know what it is. Be willing to delay judgement until the facts are in, update conclusions when new evidence surfaces, and treat some "facts" as tentative when they're based on weak or the balance of contradictory evidence.
Criticize allies. If somebody is lying to support a conclusion you agree with, call them out. The ends do not justify the means.
Praise opponents. When "the other side" says something you agree with, say so, without any caveats about the other stuff you still disagree with. When they tell the truth, acknowledge the honesty. If they argue in good faith, engage with the ideas in good faith.
In the end, this stuff is not that hard for people that actually care about the truth. It doesn't seem like the media does anymore. Instead, they're mostly engaged in tribalism: signaling loyalty to the tribe, disseminating dogma and asserting the moral superiority of the tribe. No wonder trust is so low.
That zoomed graph that shows the y axis only from 45% to 60%[1] is an oximoron that proves itself why has hit a new low.
Gaining social media trust is the job of media platforms.
And what people can do is educating themselves about news literacy, to better get the git out of the opinionated-purposeful-news (and sometime misleading).
Very good they are thinking about addressing this, but they are still labouring under a few bits of their own misinformation.
Claiming it is a central part of someone's identity, and article of faith, and that they can't be argued out of it, is dead wrong. It is the result of misinformation being spread by the news media, refusal to retract incorrect articles, clear bias and manipulation. If that behavior stopped, over a long period of time trust would be regained.
They are correct that it isn't just the US, it is all across the Anglosphere. Just today:
1. In NZ at newshub an article claimed not that the evidence supporting use of Ivermectin in cases of COVID-19 wasn't compelling but that there "is no evidence that supports the use of [Ivermectin] in the treatment of COVID-19." I know that's a lie because I have a folder of scores of research papers on this topic.
2. Fake news about a Hospital in Oklahoma backed up by Ivermectin overdose patients. Not retracted. Amplified by Rachel Maddow.
3. Same newshub (and other outlets) posted about a backlash against David Seymour. That's true, but they took an ideological position against David Seymour. They could have taken an inverse ideological position arguing that David was fighting against institutional racism on behalf of underrepresented people in need that happen to not be Maori... or better yet remained neutral. My stomach turns every time I see this government use race as the determining factor in who gets special treatment, instead of "poverty" or "low vaccine uptake" or any other property... I don't argue this point for myself (I'm highly privileged) but for countless underprivileged of other races like Indonesian or Malaysian or Palestinean who need help but get turned away because they aren't Maori.
That's just today. This shit has been going on for years now.
At this point, most people will never again trust the media for the rest of their lives.
So this is from a very right-wing perspective, but it's a pretty compelling explainer as to why many people have no trust in media...
I read that (worth it sort of) and there are a few takeaways, but for me the big one is realising that the author seems to think that there is "an answer" out there, that "everyone else" knows it and that he (the author) ought to be told it upfront. And any indication that people change their minds, get things wrong or otherwise screw up is an indication that people are not just lying but hiding the truth.
It took a while to realise this. Am glad I read it.
That's not the impression that I got from the thread. Rather, the problem seems to be the aggression and utter certainty that the media assumes when it conveys it's narratives. There is no room for nuance or doubt, no impression of the other side except as racists or impressionable fools. The author's point isn't that the media shouldn't be allowed to change their minds, it's that the media should exhibit even a modicum of accountability, honesty, and humility in it's reporting.
And two people take different views from the same source ... that's the problem in a nutshell :-)
But yes, I find certainty puts me off. Its the big axiom for every superhero movie out there. (IF we are certain that that guy there is a bad evil person about to do bad evil things then, hell, yes, Hulk can smash, or shoot him with an arrow / laser / Hammer). All good.
Any possibility that he is not evil ... or that he has a valid agenda. Well we are back in the real world again.
I find it strange that anyone still trusts the media.
A bizarre take on the media, that somehow transitions into a barely related conclusion about infrastructure.
Just seems poorly thought out.
The media’s handling of the Covid crisis has been dismal, no wonder, the public is turning away
Of course trust in media is low.
Look at this thread describing all the politically-motivated media spinners caught in a blatant lie.
I don’t think this is related to the media directly but is more related to the information during the pandemic.
Unfortunately science has said a lot of controversial things, not because it has failed but because it’s a new “thing” and must be studied and examined. So media have reported correct everything but the infos, at the beginning, were a bit misleading, like for the UNHCR with “no mask, then yes mask” or the story with AstraZeneca vaccine or the third shot etc…
Plus the “Afghanistan gate” where all media were reporting “Kabul can resists 3 months” and 7 days after it was in the Taliban’s hands.
And don’t forget all the infos on Facebook and other media, people are getting their infos on socials unfortunately, not because they’re more reliable but because they can confirm they’re theories. I mean a no-vax on FB will receive more no-vax infos due to the algorithm biases, so he will keep getting infos and trust in FB.
That’s not good by the way, we need more great journalists and newspapers!
Journalists have evolved into an enemy of the people as they promote their personal, and corporate political beliefs on the rest of us, while passing it off as “just the facts.” I think journalism lost its “inform the public” mantle many years ago as journalists saw the power they had. As another commentor said, burn it to the ground, the media and journalism in general is forever poisoned against the people.
They might start with cutting the opinion section, and go from their.
"Qui?!"
https://ground.news tries to solve this problem in an interesting way. It has a bunch of articles, where it shows how many left- and right-wing sources it was compiled from.
We need a Howard Beale… except in this day and age I’m pretty sure they would be silently cut off by the station manager from the production booth and such a speech never heard by the public but here for anyone who hasn’t heard it is the speech by the character Howard Beale (a newscaster) from the 1975 movie “Network”….
————————————
We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’
Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. (shouting) You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’
I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!…You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’
————————————
The only way I see people regaining trust in established media organisations is if they were “watching them burn”. The distrust is so built in now that to be trustworthy they have to be actively engaged in blatant self sabotage before we can overcome our collective cynicism. For us to trust them they must believe the “truth” they wish to tell us so much they are willing to self-immolate in-front of their audience otherwise how can we possibly tell it isn’t yet another marketing campaign for someone pulling the strings we haven’t seen yet.
There's been a 30 year propaganda campaign to slander everything that isn't far right propaganda as untrustworthy. Are we all surprised this well funded relentless assault to lionize the rich and endlessly attack journalists has had this effect?
This is exactly the goals of their strategy
I stopped following corporate news 2 years ago and started paying for independent creators and journalists instead on Substack and Locals. I follow substack, locals and other communities of of Glenn Greenwald, Viva Frei and Robert Barnes, Kim Iverson, Steven Crowder mug club, Jimmy Dore, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Mate, Michael Tracey, Alison Morrow, Sharyl Attkinson.
I'll add Stossel to a list of good-to-follows for independent takes.
Here's a video of him directly asking politicians at a city council meeting about corruption with a local developer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99IeGqIIHj4
They have since approved a project that was competing with the corrupt developer and the corrupt developer is facing federal charges: https://apnews.com/article/f7a7fdb3057548009072601729a2dc2c
Thanks for posting this, I had forgotten this video, it's great (he has others that are really worth watching, go watch if you want "my racist bake sale" [1])
Yeah, agree, Stossel is great, and even if heavily biased, he's what journalism should be about: exposing malfeasance.
He used to be part of the media establishment, but I guess got cast out when he decided to be an actual journalist.
Seems like you have a preference for a particular type of news source.
I don't know whether it is better to lean into our political biases or to just not play the game at all.
Huh? There's clearly content on both the left and the right here.
Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Jimmy Dore, Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi might not be _your_ left but they are certainly and firmly on the left.
Yeah, and as a matter of fact, I believe it's the only way to form a proper opinion.
Yep. Viva and Barnes is also very good along with Robert Grueler for law related videos.
What preference would that be? My lists clearly consists of everyone from all sides of politics and law. So not sure where you make the claim about bias from? Seems like you aren’t a fan of non corporate anti establishment types.
I absolutely cannot fathom what would lead somebody into paying to listen to what Steven Crowder and Glenn Greenwald want to spew at them. The rest, I've never heard of so I can't comment.
I hope you manage to find whatever peace it is you're looking for in life.
So you clearly do not know anything about the vast majority of the people in my list and yet you make such sassy comments? If you knew the people, you would know that it consists of people from all across the spectrum from left to right. Greenwald is also one of the best journalists of the modern times - from Snowden and Assange disclosures for last years’ Brazilian politics where his reporting freed the former prime minister from prison.
Yeah, Greenwald has done some great things in his career, and then in the span of 3 or so years, something tripped in his brain that made him go batshit crazy and sell out the entirety of his soul and career.
If you "knew the people", you would know that about him, it's not particularly something he attempted to hide, which is why I make my comment of not being able to understand why you're paying for him. Why would you pay for somebody's outright lies?
The only think I’ve seen him do more of in the last few years is to critique the mainstream media. Is that what you are referring to?