It's not political bias. People's faith in journalism is being destroyed by the journalists themselves.<p><a href="https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-shot/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-s...</a><p>ABC faking a crime scene.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/QDU9OGE.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/QDU9OGE.jpg</a><p>Anderson Cooper faking a scene.<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04/06/clinton-questions-whether-sanders-is-qualified-to-be-president/?utm_term=.168f32c16721" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04...</a><p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/07/sanderss-incorrect-claim-that-clinton-called-him-not-qualified-for-the-presidency/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/...</a><p>Which is it Washington Post? One of these articles is FALSE.<p>We are losing faith in journalism because the journalists are WRONG.
<a href="https://vimeo.com/34419805" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/34419805</a><p>The massive corporate centralization of all media channels is the primary source of distrust in journalism now. It seeks profit by whatever controversy, fake news, or distraction that will sell ads, regardless of traditional value.<p>Being a staunch environmentalist I obviously loathe most Republicans and hate centrist-dominated Democrats almost as much.<p>But it is clear to me that the partisanship of the country is due to a flood of media desperate for clicks, overwhelming people who have not or cannot adapt to the propaganda firehose.<p>Here's a fun little experiment: where can you tune in on TV for balanced opinions on issues that will actually account for more that a single viewpoints, coming out of the same mouth? You know, things like "caveats" or saying "granted" about some aspect of the opposing side?<p>Moderation doesn't fuel emotions, and emotions and radicalization are what gets you constant viewership.<p>Like all other industries in America, the conglomerates need to be split up.
I wonder how much of it is really bias or people perceiving bias. I know people who think that if they read something negative about a political figure they like then the person and publication who wrote it are automatically biased in favor of the other side.<p>It also seems like it might be hard to write about certain political stories without being accused of bias. Is it possible to write anything about the shutdown and border wall fiasco that doesn't paint he President and GOP in a bad light? Wont many people incorrectly perceive that as biased reporting?<p>I don't mean to imply that there isn't actual bias but it just seems like a strange thing to bring up at a time when certain political figures are acting in such extreme ways. Simply reporting on those actions and their consequences if often going to be very negative.
I recently watched the "Hulk Hogan / Gawker" Netflix documentary, "Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press." It was only about the Hulk Hogan / Gawker trial at the beginning, and then it turned into a full-on propaganda piece about how journalism is good and orange man bad. Maybe I am too dumb to have understood, but my takeaway was the morals of the story were basically: (1) it's bad that rich people can influence journalism and that needs to stop and (2) people need to start believing in journalists again because journalists are fundamental to democracy and actually they're very good etc.<p>I agree with #1 to some extent, but they came up with the dumbest possible example in pointing out that the lawsuit was funded by Peter Thiel. I'm pretty sure there's a concept on the "left" that says it's not your right to "out" a person's sexuality. Gawker violated that. Not that I (or even the law) care one way or another, and not that this was the focus of the trial (it wasn't), but I get why Thiel was livid with them. Thiel (secretly) funded a lawsuit against Gawker for <i>posting a sex tape of Hulk Hogan</i>. I'm not even sure what mental backflips you have to do to presume that this was newsworthy or okay. They tried to explain it to us, and the best they got was the meta-point that Thiel funded the lawsuit. Nothing worthy of note about why they had a right (via Freedom of the Press) to make a sex tape public against the wishes of one of the participants. Maybe if it was a sex tape surrounding the impeachment of a current president, I'd understand.<p>And somehow, I'm supposed to believe that this means there's a slippery slope now, where journalists can no longer freely state the news, for fear of being sued. As if this case weren't limited to the example of, <i>maybe don't post a sex tape of some D-list celebrity as news</i>.<p>All that said, and per the article here, I am unhappy with "journalists" as a group, specifically with their sanctimonious claims that they're protecting democracy. And the conclusion of this idea, when you take it to the end, is that people simply <i>need to believe them on moral principle</i>, non-believers are against democracy.<p>They're the victims here, the perpetrators are all the people who don't believe their stories any more--as if there was nothing they did to put themselves in this place.
It's hard to take this article seriously coming from the New York Post [1], which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the owner of dozens of politically biased news organizations and Fox News, a propaganda outlet made expressly to protect the Republican party from another loss like the Nixon impeachment.<p>[1] <a href="https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-post/" rel="nofollow">https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-post/</a>
I don't even bother clicking on most news links anymore. I follow a Reuters RSS feed for business and market news and a few NPR feeds for general news. Over the past couple or years I've lost a lot of faith in most of the major news outlets. Some are little more than propaganda, and the ones that manage to remain factually correct most of the time have their reporting clouded by bias.
She’s saying journalists are becoming activists rather than seekers of facts and corroborating evidence. Today they will cherrypick data and facts to advocate for one side or the other, but because roughly 7 out of 10 journalists are registered Democrats this attitude will favor Democrat/liberal narratives over Repub/Conservative narratives.<p>One of most hilarious things happening, as others point out is the “fact checks” which should be called “gotcha on technicalities”. No, it wasn’t 200,000 gallons, it was 189,480 gallons, liar! No, unemployment isn’t down to 4.2%, it’s actually expected to be down to 3.9%, you are so wrong!
I agree. News is supposed to be presented in an unbiased way, but virtually every source now heavily injects some spin with each article.<p>It's a shame, really. But I'm very glad Lara Logan is speaking out. It will cost her, but by raising awareness of the issue maybe things can start to improve.
I've weaned myself almost entirely off of sensationalized news, especially social feeds. I try to eliminate any "colorful" (read: opinionated) news sources, be they progressive or conservative. I will only consciously consume objective reporting, from outlets which I respect for neutrality.<p>Reuters, for example, still does a great job at focusing only on the facts, without attempting to interpret or inject personal opinions. They hold their journalists to a very high degree of journalistic integrity, and it really shows.
I think the issue is instead the rush to publish. With the internet you have to put something out on a story almost immediately 24/7. Even basic fact checking is a huge time drag when you have less than hours in which to get something out.<p>Political Bias is in my mind largely a side effect: politically charged stories get lots of eyes and getting to them late means missing out on the inevitable flutter of angry and indignant retweets about the story. So loads of political stories get rushed, which means we see a lot of slanted ones (because more are written), and because they were rushed they are missing facts or have incorrect facts.
Yellow journalism is not just a thing of the past. A free press is important, that doesn't mean all press is high-quality or well-intentioned.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism</a>
This thread consists of conservatives whining about CNN and others, vs others taking shots at the post and the author of the article.<p>So yeah, bias. I'm not at all convinced this is a "both sides" issue. You can find errors in coverage and examples of bias, but the scale of the Murdoch/Mercer news empires really has no match from the center. The actual left wing is pretty well unrepresented.<p>The big problem I have is their obsession with ridiculous fact checking now. Not checking how many bodies are actually in the morgue, or whether or not a statue was removed. I mean the bullshit pedantry. Donald Trump says in the state of the union that the US has been at war in the middle east for almost 19 years. The NYT "fact checks" that as "actually it's only been almost 18 years". What does that accomplish? Is anyone more informed? Is there any story there? Is there any commentary on the state of the union, or just a summary? Does it matter at all? Is their fact check even accurate?<p>My problem with it is that this has replaced any sort of quality journalism with just a mass of worthless fact checks and the important stuff gets buried.