Submitted by ADefiniteDescription t3_115jhwb in philosophy
ShakeWeightMyDick t1_j92spit wrote
Oh, trust in news media is long gone.
Level_Quart t1_j9319m8 wrote
I don’t even watch the news anymore, absolutely nothing useful in there.
shadowromantic t1_j93954z wrote
There's tons of trust in specific sources, most of which is built on confirmation bias
ThrillSurgeon t1_j94fhcn wrote
Marketing in news and science.
VoxVocisCausa t1_j934f42 wrote
It's interesting that conservative media being caught(repeatedly) lying for political gain has somehow translated into all news media being perceived as unreliable.
VitriolicViolet t1_j93bfr7 wrote
just ignoring times 'left' media has lied for political gain? (what fucking left, whining about minorities and the environment is not 'left' if you also support corporations, private wealth and tax cuts).
all news is unreliable and virtually all of it is owned buy billionaires (media owned by 3 people is about as trustworthy as Chinese state media)
Sansa_Culotte_ t1_j93e6gk wrote
> all news is unreliable and virtually all of it is owned buy billionaires (media owned by 3 people is about as trustworthy as Chinese state media)
yes, including all the news people insist is "authentic" and "truthful", such as all the internet randos with millions of followers and sponsorships that somehow are seen as more "trustworthy" than actual for real journalists despite having literally no discernable business ethics, and their sources and methods being even less transparent
mrteapoon t1_j93h19p wrote
Well, most people going down the "all news media is bad" path didn't get there through any kind of logic or reasoning, so when they find alt media that supports their position, that alt media becomes the new truth for them. Post-fact society my dude. Welcome to the future.
zedority t1_j9407w8 wrote
> all news is unreliable
Knee-jerk rejection of all news is as intellectually lazy as uncritical acceptance of all it. It's not being critical; it's just being gullible in the opposite direction.
The empirical reality, as evidenced in this study is that American centre-right and far-right media are significantly more insular and more susceptible to pushing propaganda than centre, centre-left and far-left media. Lazy dismissal of the entire media ecosystem because "duh billionaires" is both an inaccurate understanding of how the media really works - ownership is not control in today's world - as well as being demonstrably wrong according to available empirical evidence.
theFriskyWizard t1_j94e1fx wrote
I think Elon musk would disagree with you on your last point there. As would Zuckerberg, Bloomberg and Bezos. Money, ownership, and influence are key to controlling narratives and outcomes. It's one of the key tenants of capitalism.
Here is a study on how coverage of Amazon changed after Bezos bought the WP.
News should be both accurate and challenging towards those who have power, and efforts like the Panama Papers are a shining example of what that looks like. But in a capitalist system where distribution of the news is inherently dependent on funds received via advertising and donations, conflicts of interest are constantly appearing. It's not just about whether they repeat false narratives or propaganda. It's sentiment. It's which stories they choose to cover. Are you going to focus your reporting on a commie spy balloon, which poses no real threat, or the toxic train wreck causing direct harm caused by horrendous domestic policy?
zedority t1_j94gm7s wrote
> I think Elon musk would disagree with you on your last point there.
Elon Musk is a fucking moron. He is utterly ruining the profitability of Twitter through his conviction that a "woke mind virus" needs to be combatted. Where does that fit in the belief system that capitalism and the pursuit of profit explains everything?
> Money, ownership, and influence are key to controlling narratives and outcomes.
Sure, ownership matters. But the problem I have with most Marxist-derived capitalist theory is that they reduce "influence" to nothing but money and ownership. Other things matter.
For example: the Right wing insists that media has a massive left-wing bias because most journalists identify as left-wing. And part of this is true: a majority of journalists identify as left-leaning. They also have some measure of influence over news production. It's not nearly as much as the Right claims, but it's there.
Or do you claim ownership of media mean that journalists, journalist unions, journalistic professional bodies exhibit no influence on the media whatsoever. They can't even publicly complain about failure to uphold journalistic standards? Can't strike? Can't do anything at all?
> But in a capitalist system where distribution of the news is inherently dependent on funds received via advertising and donations, conflicts of interest are constantly appearing.
In a capitalist system, competition is a thing. Even if just 2 people control all the news (and we have not reached that point yet), just having 2 means that media outlets can and do try to attack each other's profitability in a number of ways, one of which is to jump on another's errors or false reporting, in order to try and look better by comparison. To some extent, therefore, news media in a capitalist system is partly self-policing, if even a slight tendency towards competition exists. Perfect? Hell no. But the pressure is there.
I would strongly suggest reading the study I posted. It includes a good model for how both negative and positive pressures havehistorically shaped news content; it is also a model of news that modern right-wing media ecosystem has completely abandoned.
Both sides are not the same.
theFriskyWizard t1_j94vxer wrote
I did download the study you shared after reading the abstract, but it's over 400 pages so we'll see. Life is busy, eh?
>Elon Musk is a fucking moron. He is utterly ruining the profitability of Twitter through his conviction that a "woke mind virus" needs to be combatted. Where does that fit in the belief system that capitalism and the pursuit of profit explains everything?
Oh god, totally agree with you about Musk. Unfortunately for everyone involved wealth, not abilities, is the best indicator for a person's future success in capitalism. If you like studies, there is one from Georgetown University looks at people's socioeconomic status (SES) based off their families' starting SES. I'll put the link at the bottom.
Musk is the perfect example of how messed up capitalism is. Brainless assholes like Musk can gain power and influence - simply because their daddy was rich - and then go on to totally ruin something that is used by hundreds of millions of people. We can argue about how much power the guy actually has, but however much, it includes being able to buy a company that has a hundreds of millions of user. And you know fire 7,500 of the people who worked there. That is a LARGE amount of influence and power simply because he has money.
​
>Sure, ownership matters. But the problem I have with most Marxist-derived capitalist theory is that they reduce "influence" to nothing but money and ownership. Other things matter.
I don't claim that only money and ownership are the only influences in capitalism. I do argue they are largest and typically the most powerful.
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>For example: the Right wing insists that media has a massive left-wing bias because most journalists identify as left-wing. And part of this is true: a majority of journalists identify as left-leaning. They also have some measure of influence over news production. It's not nearly as much as the Right claims, but it's there.
I am with you here.
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>Or do you claim ownership of media mean that journalists, journalist unions, journalistic professional bodies exhibit no influence on the media whatsoever. They can't even publicly complain about failure to uphold journalistic standards? Can't strike? Can't do anything at all?
I guess what I'd say is that individual reporters who are bothered enough by issues with journalistic integrity at major news purveyors often leave for smaller ones or try and found their own. Unions on the other hand don't have anywhere near as much power as they used to. The NYT union hasn't been able to prevent their members wages from rolling backward for years. They finally went on a 24 hour strike back in December, but so far I don't think they have succeeded in getting a new contract that comes close to their demands. I hope that they step up their game and win. Considering the talks have been ongoing for almost two years, I wouldn't give them great odds.
Why would journalism be immune to the weaknesses inherent in capitalism? If you don't pay your workers enough to build up savings, if you tie their healthcare to their employment, it makes it much harder for them to stand up to being mistreated. The median wage of journalist appears to be somewhere around 50k, which is not great in today's economy.
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>In a capitalist system, competition is a thing. Even if just 2 people control all the news (and we have not reached that point yet), just having 2 means that media outlets can and do try to attack each other's profitability in a number of ways, one of which is to jump on another's errors or false reporting, in order to try and look better by comparison. To some extent, therefore, news media in a capitalist system is partly self-policing, if even a slight tendency towards competition exists. Perfect? Hell no. But the pressure is there.
Okay. Sure. But jumping on someone else's false reporting or error can't stop a paper from refusing to publish a story. Or just leaving out details. Or from weighting their coverage to skew one way or the other by surrounding it with opinion pieces. Or from having sponsored articles. Or from having a non-left leaning journalist cover a specific piece because the owners are concerned about ad revenue. Or running misleading ads for bad actors at all.
Look at the "Left-leaning" major news coverage of Steve Donzinger as an example. He's a lawyer who was sued by Chevron after he won a case against them regarding pollution in [edit: Ecuador], where they were supposed to pay out 8 billion to indigenous people there. They never mention the Judges who advanced this case against Donzinger have connections to Chevron. I wonder how many of those news sources take cash from Chevron? I know the NYT does. They have been paid by Chevron to produce ads on it's behalf.
I'm not claiming that both sides are the same. Right wing media would paint Donzinger as traitor or something. But that doesn't mean we can trust major media outlets to not be beholden to their owners.
Links:
- Georgetown study: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/
- NYT strike: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/media/new-york-times-union-walkout.html
- NYT article about Donziner: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/business/energy-environment/steven-donziger-chevron.html
- Compare with The Intercept reporting: https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-steven-donziger/
- Chevron ad produced by NYT's in house ad agency: https://twitter.com/chevron/status/1182709141669851136?lang=en
jaredgoff1022 t1_j936xgg wrote
You’re half right - they were the ones caught repeatedly lying but they were also the most successful pulling in the biggest audiences. This leads to their competitors trying to mirror what they do (queue CNN trying to be the Fox News but for liberals).
The problem is the model worked and then others copy it.
0btuseMoose t1_j935sgu wrote
--CNN has entered the chat--
FetaMight t1_j938p95 wrote
CNN isn't as bad as Fox News, but just barely.
It's still fear mongering and mind numbing stupidity that teaches its audience to be tribal and simple minded.
plssirnomore t1_j935p97 wrote
yeah its one arm of the machine that is wrong
ShakeWeightMyDick t1_j936l5u wrote
Which was the intention from the beginning
Sansa_Culotte_ t1_j93e3eu wrote
> It's interesting that conservative media being caught(repeatedly) lying for political gain has somehow translated into all news media being perceived as unreliable.
It hasn't. Non-conservative media is perceived as unreliable by conservatives because it doesn't reflect their perception of the world.
yn79AoPEm t1_j93hrdx wrote
[deleted] t1_j95wlxh wrote
[deleted]
zedority t1_j941vef wrote
Glenn Greenwald's misleading presentation of honest errors as deception is more about Greenwald's kneejerk refusal to accept Russian interference as a real news story than it is about whether any media outlets actually engaged in "making shit up".
His false portrayal hinges on accepting this falsehood: "It’s inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that’s being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories". Besides having no way to confirm whether his cherry-picked list actually included all available inaccurate stories, the real test of whether an honest error occurred has nothing whatsoever to do with the distribution of errors. The real test is as follows: did the media outlet that ran the false story issue a correction?
Greenwald not only fails to highlight the vital fact that these "false" stories got corrected, he actuallly and bizarrely complains at one point that a story was getting "diluted" by editorial corrections, as if trying to get at the truth and correct one own's errors is some sort of nefarious political trick.
It's ironic that the news outlets that actively acknowledge their fallibility and try to make up for it get this used against them to supposedly prove their nefariousness, while right-wing attack sites can routinely lie and get away with it simply by never admitting error and by leaving huge errors uncorrected, or by deleting false information without mentioning they have done so if they absolutely have to, even covertly altering information in their reporting without ever admitting to it.
yn79AoPEm t1_j94bjhu wrote
>Greenwald not only fails to highlight the vital fact that these "false" stories got corrected
> 9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)
> ...until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was false...
> 8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
> ...producing one of the longest Editor’s Note in memory appended to the top of the article...
> 3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)
> ...numerous other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however, to this date has refused to do either...
Not to mention the images provided of the original articles in which the corrections are literally highlighted.
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