I formerly worked as a news editor at a metro daily newspaper, and before that I worked at various other news outlets and magazines.<p>Here's the reality: The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness. I worked with a bunch of really talented reporters and editors throughout my career, and almost without exception, they highly valued those things. Moreover, many have an anti-authoritarian bent, and that leads to a desire to expose corruption, rather than protect it.<p>But ...<p>* I've seen publishers kill stories because they thought it would make advertisers unhappy.<p>* I've seen senior execs put pressure on editors to downplay stories that painted the region in a bad light.<p>* I've seen a political campaign refuse to permit a certain reporter to attend their campaign events because they didn't like that the reporter wasn't acting like a PR tool.<p>* I've seen budgets for "watchdog journalism" become slowly starved, in favor of clickbait.<p>And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business (who are really trying to make money and exert influence).<p>Granted, there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued, and unfortunately that's where a lot of eyeballs end up these days, because so many people just want their existing biases to be re-inforced.<p>But what America really needs is more media literacy, so we can better distinguish the former from the latter. We, as a society, are SO BAD at this. Our B.S. detectors have lots of false positives and false negatives. We look to the wrong signals to determine whether a news report is trustworthy. We fail to evaluate information critically as long as it validates our pre-existing views. We have a hard time separating facts from opinions.<p>This lack of media literacy is worrisome enough, but now we've got political leaders capitalizing on the fact that we're bad at this and actively trying to delegitimize the media (as if it's a single thing) because it serves their own purposes.
There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for decades, and how exactly this works. With a mountain of examples. So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through."<p>Though of course this is the wrong reaction; it has always trickled through. Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols.<p>Every piece of information is produced with interests for audiences; objectivity is a pink unicorn Santa Claus, something you really shouldn't believe exists after you're, like, 8. But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims, and who are not organizations whose literal existence depends on state licensing as a corporation. Not to say that there is no structural pressure in the independent realm; ideology still exists, years of socialization in the country of origin with their (often folly) "self-evidence" myths exist, the need to eat and make money somehow still exists. But the pressures are much, MUCH fewer than in the case of corporate and state news.
Using this thread to yet again pound the drum of local news. I don't work in media; I've just found my local newspaper subscription to be extremely valuable.<p>Your local news organizations will be biased in some ways, yes, but it's easier to keep track of the writers who lean one way or another (smaller journalist teams). Since they're regional they can't skew too far on either end of the political spectrum or they'll anger the residents and lose subscribers. Their accountability is higher, because people in the community generally know what's going on around them and will call the bluff in op-eds or the paper's social media group. And, of course, the reporting is actually relevant to you! They don't need to rage-bait you for clicks because most of the reporting has tangible bearing on your life.<p>Subscribing to my local paper has kept me both informed and grounded, so I'm very nervous about the prospect of the medium being abandoned for declining profitability. I've yet to find a more valuable source of news.
I can remember seeing Walter Cronkite on a PBS panel discussion warning America that this would be the end result of the deregulation of media ownership.<p>If a small number of people are allowed to own the vast majority of media outlets, those media outlets are no longer going to represent the interests of the public at large.<p>Back when all television/radio was broadcast over the air, there used to be this quaint concept of broadcasters having to prove that they serve "the public interest" to receive and retain an FCC license to use the public airwaves.<p><a href="https://www.benton.org/public_interest_obligations_of_dtv_broadcasters_guide/public_standard" rel="nofollow">https://www.benton.org/public_interest_obligations_of_dtv_br...</a>
Edward L. Bernays published his book "Propaganda" in 1928. Even that only came after his earlier works in on a similar theme in the early 20s.<p>I clearly remember questioning my father at the breakfast table (where newspapers were read) about the veracity of some story I barely grasped at age 5. He explained to me that not everything you read in the papers was true, and some of it was made up from whole cloth. My 5 year-old-self was stunned, why would someone go to the effort of producing a newspaper only to make up what was in it? What I'm amazed at now is that only about half of an educated, first-world nation have figured this out.
I am not in journalism per say however as I've spent a decade in advertising I work with media companies a lot.<p>Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways. Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional to pull something like that off even if they wanted to.<p>There are however many internal and external pressures on organizations that shape narratives in a specific ways and journalists are human beings (they're biased based on their own experiences) so reporting always has a slant. That is worthy of critique and is healthy.<p>The debate on media generally has jumped the shark. IMHO it's not the answer that many folks (that tend to be conservative) want to hear, but meaningful diversity of opinion and experience would help balance this out. You want news with a working class, middle America viewpoint? Then you need to help some % of those people get into media. (This is just one such example of course).
Optimistic news - elevated degree of skepticism of any 'produced information' is fully justified, seeing as news organisations are driven certainly by commercial agenda, and frequently also by political agenda which they are - as a rule - far from being transparent with. We need citizen and independent journalism, and better yet, trust in our own direct lived experience, to balance out of 'information diet'
Because, to first approximation, this is true. Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda. I'm not sure why Americans believe that objectivity in news reporting is even possible. Other countries don't seem to have as much of an issue with this, since you typically have news sources that are either owned directly by the government or are published by political parties.
Yes I know that traditionally media has been used for propaganda, but I'm surprised by the reactions in this thread and those who find what seems like fairly objective reporting as biased.<p>Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news sites that are deliberately misleading? If this propaganda is so rampant then where is it? (Note: I'm opinion articles excluded because they are uh opinions).<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/section/world" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/section/world</a>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/section/us" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/section/us</a>
<a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10693146/cnn-settles-nick-sandmann-lawsuit-covington-catholic-kentucky/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10693146/cnn-settles-nick-sand...</a><p>>CNN settles $275million suit from MAGA hat-wearing Covington Catholic student after stand-off vid<p>I'll always remember this moment as a statement of fact that news organizations deliberately mislead us.
This is really simple. Media are now in the service of advertisers. Or more specifically of people who are willing to spend money to target particular people. For example, the NYT targets the wealthy, which is why they frequently have stories about "how much will $900,000 buy in a home"? By targeting the wealthy, the NYT and other media present a view of the world that is very much at odds with the way many if not most Americans experience the world.<p>There is another set of media that sells access to the "less well off" in America. Here's looking at you fox. It is hard to call them media because what they do is foster outrage and sell that. This audience is targeted by those with political agendas.<p>Who pays for your media determines how you see the world and what you see of the world. Period.
Correct me if I am wrong, but this is attributed to Jefferson:<p>"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers"<p>Makes you wonder who remains to be trusted, the governments are not reliable at all times either in most parts of the world.
I never watch or read any news, I'm just sick of them reporting on things that have full unedited videos without posting the full unedited video. One example is the Floyd case. The full bodycam video was available for almost half of a year before it was pushed in the media during the trial. My extended family exclusively saw it through the professional news filter, which means that those who watch bluer news organizations came to the conclusion that he was murdered, and those who watch redder news organizations came to the conclusion that he overdosed. I'm not saying that everyone should "draw their own conclusions" or "do their own research" whenever there's a new video, but it helps to keep a clearer head when you've seen the evidence and are now waiting for expert analysis, rather than seeing the evidence pushed by a relatable authority figure who's already been instructed to be in a certain mood and is only showing short clips at a time.<p>I sometimes daydream about a "grey news" organization. No hosts, just text articles with confidence intervals next to claims, all sources listed, no editorials, and all interviews and videos reported on have full transcripts next to the full unedited video.
So much bitterness here in the comments like "duh", "took them long enough", etc. So, honest question: if, you know, a pillar of democracy is by default laughed at, how can then this democracy function? If half the country thinks they are getting brainwashed, and the other half doesn't think they are getting brainwashed (while possibly getting brainwashed right in that same moment). How can such people make educated choices?
Its true, though. Pick half a dozen news articles from 2+ years ago, then find the current state of information we have on what happened. Its pretty obvious that journalists lie, embellish, misrepresent what their sources tell them, or simply never did basic fact-checking. I realized this a long time ago and its only gotten worse. No one wants to pay for news, and they certainly don't want to pay for news that consistently causes them cognitive dissonance on top of being boring. But thats exactly what the world is: uncomfortable and technical.
This is very old news. The encyclopaedia Britannica article on the subject says a good propagandist knows the mainstream news are untrusted,
and will target their audience through receptive channels, like influencing family or social groups.<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Media-of-propaganda" rel="nofollow">https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Media-of-propaga...</a>
There’s a certain subset of powerful people who would love everyone to distrust the media so they themselves can be the truth tellers.<p>I don’t think the news from major media organizations deliberately misleads people. I think people often mistake News-based entertainment shows for news as well as things like opinion and editorial for news. There is bias but that’s not necessarily the same as being misleading.
How many Americans believe that news organizations deliberately mislead OTHER people?<p>If you dig a little deeper, how many people realize there are different formats like opinion, commentary, and analysis? Opinions can't be WRONG, but they sure can be BAD.<p>You can only fact check facts. You can't fact check analysis. You have to apply critique (aka critical thinking skills, or a critical framework).
Genuinely surprised its only half because Fox News viewers often think CNN is lying and CNN viewers often think the same about Fox News. Both groups can therefore answer 'Yes' if asked if they think news organisations deliberately mislead. I'm picking those two as being big news channels but I think it holds for other tv and for newspapers too.
If you’re interested in media criticism the podcast Citations Needed[0] is very well researched and covers media issues both in modern day and with a historical lens that shows how media has operated and does operate with relevant source quotes.<p>0: <a href="https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/" rel="nofollow">https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/</a>
> In one small consolation, in both cases Americans had more trust in local news.<p>This trust in "local" news is often misplaced given how many local news outlets - television stations or newspapers - have been subsumed by larger interests.<p>For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Deadspin video of dozens of local news anchors reading the same editorial content handed down by Sinclair Broadcast Group is striking:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo</a><p><a href="https://deadspin.com/how-i-made-a-dumb-video-making-fun-of-sinclair-broadcas-1825106452" rel="nofollow">https://deadspin.com/how-i-made-a-dumb-video-making-fun-of-s...</a><p>There is an awful lot of really, really good stuff put out by local newspapers and TV stations but people ought to be thoughtful about their use of any media.
Why is it that propaganda somehow has become a new idea? Is it because the phrase “fake news” dumbed it down?<p>Either way its always been a factor, and was likely worse before the age of information.<p>The big problem now is there are multiple competing false narratives, instead of just the one in the paper.
To me, "news" is different than "journalism" (and obviously way different than "opinion") but most media orgs go way out of their way to just completely blur these.<p>Every "news" article (an election, a shooting, an earthquake, a new science study) is wrapped in spin - why this is bad or good for America, why it's racist or a sign of moral decay, how you should feel, what these other people think about it, who agrees with it.<p>I gave up and just use primary sources - reading the actual ArXiv paper or gov website or watching the eyewitness video is a better use of my time.
Yes, it is very true that "news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."<p>But I contend that:<p>1. News organizations today are less biased than they have ever been.<p>2. They are better than every other alternative.<p>3. They are better than nothing.<p>1. People imagine we had a golden age of news reporting. Never happened. For example, the media sat on the juiciest of juicy stories (JFK's affairs) so that they wouldn't lose access to the White House. What other more subtle ways were they influenced?<p>2. Where else are you going to get your news from? Facebook, TikTok? People claim that independent sources on SubStack are better, but then they list examples that have obvious and massive biases...<p>3. Informed voting is a crucial aspect of democracy. If you don't explicitly seek out the news you're going to get it anyway, and those sources are things like ads or political parties that are very much trying to influence you.<p>I think we have to throw in "news organizations" with "democracy" and "market economy" in the category of "awful things with obvious massive drawbacks, but better than any other alternative".<p>Like democracy and capitalism, we should concentrate on making news organizations incrementally better rather than discarding them for a worse alternative.
Ok, I see Chomsky/Hermann and Astral Codex mentioned here, but no Martin Gurri yet.<p><i>Gurri spent years surveying the global information landscape. Around the turn of the century, he noticed a trend: As the internet gave rise to an explosion of information, there was a concurrent spike in political instability. The reason, he surmised, was that governments lost their monopoly on information and with it their ability to control the public conversation.</i><p><i>One of the many consequences of this is what Gurri calls a “crisis of authority.” As people were exposed to more information, their trust in major institutions — like the government or newspapers — began to collapse.</i><p><a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the-revolt-of-the-public-global-democracy" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the...</a><p>Blog: <a href="https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/</a><p>Book: The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium: <a href="https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public" rel="nofollow">https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public</a>
“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.” - William Randolph Hearst<p>I think it is undeniable that new organizations are deliberately misleading the public in many cases, not necessarily part of the conspiracy but simply acting as the agent of the government. There are many cases when is became obvious.<p>It is also easy to find sources that are free from government collusion usually classified either far left or far right whatever those mean.
Differing definitions of "mislead" are going to make these comments useless.<p>> Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or <i>persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view</i> through their reporting.<p>The headline defines "mislead" as including "leading via truthful reporting" aka "present opinion".
I read a book called "The Fourth Turning"(published 1996) quite awhile ago. It ended up predicting many of these recent events and generally tries to bring awareness of the eternal recurrence of "turnings" in one's life.<p>> If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026.<p>> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas, killing some. Congress enacts mandatory quarantine measures. The president orders the National Guard to throw prophylactic cordons around unsafe neighborhoods. Mayors resist. Urban gangs battle suburban militias. Calls mount for the president to declare martial law.<p>Civic virtue tends to get lost in the daily news cycles during the climax of a crisis, but it is frequently regained. Moral and cultural standards are increasing and thus the news will have to adapt to it as it always has. People are slowly returning to classic virtues.
They are deliberately misleading. Not outright lying usually [1], but very, very misleading, both in their coverage and what they don't cover.<p>[1] <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-061" rel="nofollow">https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...</a>
I recall in elementary school being tested on whether a sentence was a fact or an opinion. It seems to me that most people now would fail such a test, as journalism has become little more than upsold editorials. Any type of conclusion drawing or motivation attribution is highly subjective opinion, yet taken as gospel by viewers.
I mean, talk about delusions --believing your lies so much you don't believe you're lying or believing it's necessary because people are too stupid to figure things out for themselves.<p>They want to be able to set agendas but also want to be known as authoritative and uhhh unbiased. Both cannot be true simultaneously. Cry me a river!
I noticed there's a lot of affirmation of this belief but very little citations. So I'm going to ask HN: What is the news journalism or reporting you rely on to believe that other news organizations mislead you, and why did you believe the first over the second?<p>[This is also a way for me to discern news I should be listening to!]
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”<p>― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
Only half?<p>That might actually be correct though. I have friends who are republicans who just think that MSNBC are elite-class shills; and democrats who just think that Fox News are elite-class shills. Only some people I know have reached understanding that any corporate news media has serious propaganda agendas.
Only takes me one minute and thirty six seconds to convince anyone I meet of this point:<p>"This is Extremely Dangerous to our Democracy" - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE</a>
Propaganda is not something that happens to other people. It is happening to you now. It is in the movies, tv, and mass media. CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, OANN. They Are their own palatable version to their own captured audience. Each viewer believe the opposing political network is the one with crazy propagandized viewers. They are emotional manipulators. The music, colors, graphics, tone and speech are to mislead. Try watching the news on mute and think what you are not feeling and supposed to feel. Do it for a week. 9 hours of news on mute see the opposite side from your believes too. You will be surprised what you will find.
I would really like to know more about the half that don't believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them. Anyone who has had personal experience with an event and then reads the news coverage of it knows this is true. And it's not a new thing. I was traveling in the Middle East back in the mid-90s. I was eyewitness to an event. When I got back to the states I checked what various newspapers had to say and was shocked at how they misrepresented it (though, I found that news sources from Europe were accurate, I'm not sure if that still holds). I guess I'm fortunate I learned that lesson early in my life.
I have believed this since 1993.<p>I was a student in high school and did interviews for both a local newspaper and television station.<p>In both instances they misrepresented what I said, editing or rearranging my words to construct a different narrative, or in the case of the newspaper they just made up things.<p>The stories weren't even about anything serious, just local hometown feel-good filler stories and the actual, literal, lies that the journalists willfully constructed were inconsequential and actually made me look good.<p>But I figured if are willing to lie about something so trivial as what they lied about, then it was highly likely the entire system is a sham.
Reminds me of a Richard Pryor joke: “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?”<p>There’s been many times when news articles have been easily discredited by simply looking at the original source(video, image, research papers).
The left/right divide is really bad for our country. The profit motives behind maintaining the divide only encourages it to get worse. CNN wants to shock you with whatever the GOP is doing to put a gun in your baby's crib. FOX wants to shock you with whatever crime is under reported.<p>To make things worse, the mechanisms and new types of media (YT, social media, etc...) make it so that you essentially cannot escape the media grasp any more. So we're thinking 24/7 on how the left or right is going to ruin the country.<p>All of it is profit motivated.
There are good and bad parts about the media, just like everything else. Unfortunately the current political landscape just accentuates the bad and just hammers it down into people's minds. The perception that media is biased is more important for politics than nuanced observation and we are here because of that. People should always be skeptical about what is fed to them but taking these kind of blanket mind alterations are just bad for society. Not sure how to fix it though once someone is on that slope.
If your goal is to lead people than you end up misleading them.<p>I understand that it's probably impossible to simply report the news ; that the very act of picking what you're reporting is an editorial act. That said, I also think that most of the people who go to work in news do that because they have an agenda they want to flog; the only distinction is that some of them admit it to themselves and the rest don't even understand that they're trying to do just that.
I can't get past this ever: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI</a>
I (live in the US) started reading a lot of BBC. At least their agenda isn't to promote some kind of ideology within my own country.<p>What's frustrating is that almost all news sources I come across have agendas. I used to watch a lot of the Daily Show in the 2000s, but when it was a slow news day, just make fun of Bush.<p>Later I used to watch the Nightly show with Colbert, but a year into the Trump presidency they got so hyper-focused on Trump that they didn't talk about anything else. I stopped watching.<p>Now that I commute occasionally, I sometimes listen to NPR. Sometimes they offer news, but most of the time their point of view is just promoting a narrative that I either find uninteresting, or irrelevant. I lean pretty left, but I don't need to listen to a story about a fringe group every time I sit in the car.
What makes it hard for me to trust online news nowadays is click-bait. As advertising dollars going the way of polar ice caps it's gonna get worse, not better.
Seems it will be an ever rotating 50%, lol. During the war in Iraq, it was primarily leftists distrusting the mainstream media. Now ~20 years later it seems to have completely flipped.<p>IMO, they simply mislead when it works in their favor. That makes it a minefield though and the best way to handle it I've found is to simply turn it off. If something is important, somehow that information will filter up to you.
Good, we need to stop being naive.<p>Obvoiusly they do.<p>They are clickbait and narrative drive, almost all of them.<p>Even those with high journalistic standards can be heavily misleading.<p>MSNBC has high journalistic standards (and some brilliant minds, with great researchers) and some of their taalking heads have pretty heavy bias and FYI I'm not 'taking sides' here.<p>The most interesting thing about the 'news' is trying to determine where the bias comes from.
Including Fortune.com? I think we are learning that the more communication we have the more manipulation we have and it's dark . Unity and common purpose require a sence of naivety and lack/assymetry of information. When most people have the facts , it matters more who is promoting something than what it is, and it s full of partisanship from then on.
What's to "believe" about it? It's what they are, what they always existed for: shape public opinion in a way beneficial for its sponsors. I can see nothing wrong about it, read both a left-leaning and a right-leaning source and you will be able to figure out what really happened, more or less.
Only half?<p>Title is editorialised however, its mislead or adopt a particular view.<p>But making readers adopt a particular view is basically their purpose.
Albert Einstein alluded to the issue in 1949.<p>"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, >>private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education)<<. It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/" rel="nofollow">https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/</a>
I never thought it was malice. I thought it was greed. They'd say whatever made the most money. People talk about news agencies trying to brainwash people to a particular world view, but I don't think that has some kind of left/right bias. It has a "most money" bias.
I don't see how someone could not conclude that at the very least some major news organizations mislead by spinning things to fit their agenda. If that wasn't the case, then you wouldn't see such radically different takes between, for example, Fox News and MSNBC on the same issue.
The bombardment had a funny effect, though: instead of outraged, most of the audience is just desensitized to unchecked bias, fake news, twisted citations and the like. It becomes case of "believing this lie until someone i like with more viewers says a different lie".<p>Feels very demoralizing.
That's why I started <a href="https://rational.app" rel="nofollow">https://rational.app</a><p>We are currently building it and will be rolling it out to our 10 million users around the world in a few months.<p>If anyone wants to be involved, you can contact me by filling out the form on the bottom.
I'm not sure if it's "deliberate" though. I think the biases of the reporters just comes through. There's no big conspiracy.<p>Still, to cite a recent example, the reporting from most news outlets on things like the Kenosha shootings and trials were outrageously bad.
I remember being in an after school philosophy club and we were discussing truth. My teacher popped out of his office, blurted out then returned to his office: “all objectivity moves through subjectivity”.<p>We never discussed it in the context of new media but it feels quite relevant.
Written in fortune.com where they sell their brand to anyone to publish their scam articles<p>Gee, I wonder why ppl don't trust the news. I would say ppl don't trust anything anymore, because most businesses are about scamming and gaslighting their customers these days.
Eh, most of it is IMHO due to optimising for entertainment value, i.e for ratings. More of a commercial agenda than a political one.<p>Is that "deliberately mislead"? It depends on what exactly you mean by that. Don't agree and shift the meaning.
Well, you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that pretty much all of American MSM is <i>highly</i> partisan, some worse than others.<p>I grew up in the UK and 70s-80s BBC seemed a lot more neutral, but of course every news organization has their own implicit world view, relative to which they report the news. There is no such thing as an unbiased news source, although there are those that try to brainwash you and those that at least <i>try</i> to keep it factual.
When one looks objectively at media reporting and takes that objective viewpoint on a sliding scale backwards through various reports, it becomes obvious that their mission is not to report news, but to shape public opinion.
They do. (deliberately mislead)<p>The days of subjectivity are over.<p>It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for Large corporations to have self interest and to highlight stories that benefit them and minimize/ignore things that would negatively effect them.
It's not unique to America or to the present day, "There's no news in <i>The Truth</i> and there's no truth in <i>The News</i>" was a saying in some regions of the world not all that long ago.
Shouldn't the number be closer to 100 percent?<p>Who the hell doesn't understand profit motive, advertising sponsors? You don't have to be Noam Chomsky to have a hunch that something is off.
Dualism is a form of misleading, and many news organizations aren't explicitly seeking to be nondualist sources, so that's a form of deliberate misleading flying covertly under the rest of this.
After being in a story that was reported on and being misquoted even if it's not deliberate they still get things wrong.<p>Also:<p>><i>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”</i><p>― Michael Crichton
One must only take a glance at the ownership breakdown of any major story on Ground News and it will be rather clear they may be onto something.<p>3 or 4 conglomerates are often 85%+ of the news sources.
Such a shame that this is our state of affairs. If half the public don't trust the establishment, then how stable is that establishment? Last time I checked, chaos is not fun.
Cronkite, Murrow, and Russert have been spinning in their graves for years.<p>As soon as the fairness doctrine died, real journalism was crushed by corporate greed.
Are there any journalism democratization efforts we should be aware of?<p>An organization who has incentives aligned with providing journalism for the people?
On why only half of Americans believe this in 2023:<p>It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled. -Mark Twain
Has global warming been systematically suppressed by pro corporate media for 50 years?<p>Yes.<p>So really, the news is that it isn't 100% of Americans.
The "respectable" ones don't lie, but they do choose what to not cover and what to draw attention to.<p>For example, the lack of coverage of the train derailment in Ohio. And zero articles since the government said the UFOs they shot down were benign asking "Hey, government, that's it? No explanation as to why you wasted millions of dollars shooting down benign objects? With all your capabilities you really can't find the debris?"
Is anyone else concerned that this sentiment may ultimately lead to unshakable seeds of doubt in the general populace? That would be a real thread to our democratic institutions. We see this with all the attacks on voters, voting, and election results.<p>News, while not a direct wing of the government (usually), is an important core to the social and political well being of a nation, yet in the US it seems there is no counter balance to this trend.<p>I can't even say I blame people either, its not just "right wing nut jobs" or "out of touch leftists" that feel news organizations are untrustworthy or mislead the public. Its starting to become more common among moderate to slightly left leaning political normals. IE, the average population (in aggregate).<p>That should really bother people more I feel like. This is a pretty serious problem in the modern age and there's no good answer on how to move forward to get real trust back. Having a government sponsored non partisan news source will immediately get rejected by pretty significant portion of the US citizenry, and private corporations and non profit foundations have their own issues, namely around how they get funded.<p>Seems there is honestly scant little we can do here, I honestly don't see how you roll this back
There is a simple reason for this. The necessary ingredient in a news story is a conflict of some kind, and the people who feel misled recognize that the conflicts that news orgs present, decorated by mostly real facts, are synthetic, the product of an ideology. In a story, there's a figure-ground relationship between facts and the tension between them, and the people very-concerned about "alternative facts" don't get that others don't believe them not because of the disinformation on the internet, but because they register to us as liars who sprinkle some facts as palatable icing over an underlying lie derived from an ideology designed to produce cheap conflict. In a moral sense, news that uses synthetic conflict sourced from ideology is in effect, false witness.<p>To me, anything problematic or anti-problematic is a synthetic conflict generated from underlying pre-problematizations. One doesn't have to agree with this assessment to understand it, but pretending to be mystified as to why a majority of Americans don't agree with them only makes the divide irreconcilable, imo.
This is a known problem with cable news, relevant info from the FCC:
<a href="https://www.fcc.gov/broadcast-news-distortion" rel="nofollow">https://www.fcc.gov/broadcast-news-distortion</a><p>Spreading disinformation from politically aligned media sources is a fundamental authoritarian strategy. Politicized news is used to generate outrage which excites the electorate into participating in elections.<p>There was a good episode of Freakonomics on NPR concerning negative bias in the media and why people respond to it.
<a href="https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-u-s-media-so-negative/" rel="nofollow">https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-u-s-media-so-negativ...</a><p>You can't fix negativity, but you can better regulate media to be accountable without infringing on free speech. There has been a very sharp downturn in factual quality and impartiality of information provided by news organizations over the past two decades in the US and we are overdue for a course correction.
99% of what we see in the news is editorial content. We are being informed of where partisans stand on issues. The actual event is tertiary. The narrative surrounding it is secondary. The primary item is the partisan goal.<p>"Joe Biden fell off his bicycle", we can believe that much. The other 99% of the content is partisan posturing. Maybe if I were there, I could have further insights, "His aides should have given him platform pedals instead of cages". Thankfully I wasn't there. Even if I had been there, my observation would have still been subjective.<p>However, there are some narratives and editorial positions which are trivially self-refuting. We can evaluate them from first principles. "A misinformation czar is required to protect democracy" or "We need censorship to preserve a free and open society" If we trust people to vote, then we must trust people to consume and evaluate information independent of state institutions.<p>Ultimately these discussions revolve around our premises. Our first principles inform us. The specific event can be almost irrelevant in many cases.<p>There are other crank ideas like those advanced by David Icke. I cannot prove that world leaders are not lizard people, but I'm naturally skeptical. Even if I watched Biden fall, I couldn't prove it. Crank theories don't threaten me, they amuse. Hopefully this is something which isn't controversial for partisans on this site. We could substitute other news items and theories.<p>I'm more troubled by the users shouting down these delightful absurdities. "My truth is bigger than yours"<p>From my side they have my deepest sympathy for wherever the disagreement injured them. However, moving forward perhaps it would be best if they didn't identify so closely with editorialized content or specific news outlets? "9 out of 10 HN users chose Brand-X Truth and here's why..."
I don't know about the "deliberate" part, but on "mislead" this is good news. Gell-Mann amnesia[1] is wearing off.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...</a>
I fully recognize that media is a business like any other, subject to pressures and the biases of its participants. (It’s a product, said a CNN producer friend.)<p>With that said, is it any wonder, with certain politicians demonizing media at every opportunity, and certain outlets actively seeking to misinform, that confidence has fallen?<p>I wish I knew the answer. We’re at a dangerous point in the US and also the world where we need to be able to discern the truth and act to pull back from what feels like a precipice.
A relevant idea I stumbled across recently: Gell-Mann Amenesia:<p>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.<p>In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Almost certainly true. Just look at how they dealt with the Epstein story, for example. So many high-profile rapists and child abusers, and it was all swept under the rug. The news organizations are captured by these abusive elites.
50% isn't much. If you ask people if they believe something obviously false (is Obama lizard?) 5% people will tell you they believe it. If you ask them something that COULD happen (did Biden tried to cover up New Hampshire docks shooting (I just made it up)) 30% will tell you they believe it.
There is an infinite amount of things to report on. Every preference is politics. Most news organizations in the US are left leaning white collar interest groups, half the country is right leaning. Hence the results here.
I certainly agree with that sentiment. It is my belief that the modern American press is the enemy of the people, as they rarely do anything but cause strife.
"It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day."<p>-Thomas Jefferson
Obligatory: <i>Media Bias Chart</i><p><a href="https://adfontesmedia.com/" rel="nofollow">https://adfontesmedia.com/</a><p>Arguably the best place to help you pick better media outlets.
The full surveys are worth reading IMHO:<p>Part 1: <a href="https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/American-Views-2022-pt1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Amer...</a>
Part 2: <a href="https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/American-Views-2022-Pt-2-Trust-Media-and-Democracy.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Amer...</a><p>Some thoughts:<p>The first part of the survey focuses on the question: who pays for news? An executive overview of the opinions is: most (3 in 4) say that news organizations are first and foremost motivated by their own financial interests. However... well over half of people say that they will never pay for news (although this summary obscures a lot of details in the PDF).<p>So, there's a bit of a contradiction here. News is usually a business first and foremost (government sponsored news organizations being the main exception), and one would postulate that the less reader subscriptions are necessary, the more news will tilt towards satisfying commercial interests (or other sources of income) above all.<p>As far as trust is concerned, online news and US cable news fairs poorly. The former despite a growing amount of people preferring to get their news online; the later despite being the most used news source currently. "Big 3" network news and (surprisingly for me considering the network decay of local news towards low-quality national-generated junk I've seen over time) local news TV fares better.<p>Low trust in national news is linked to a negative outlook in democracy and other aspects of the political process.<p>One aspect of these types of reports that I always wonder about is how much of these actually reflect issues in interpreting news in its core. The current digital era generates <i>tons</i> of articles, much of which is useless noise. So sometimes, I feel that some complaints about media in reality are an inability to sort out critical information from the noise in media (both in news and everything else).<p>So, an interesting tidbit of this survey to me is this finding: "Americans with low emotional trust in national news are much more likely to find it difficult to sort out the facts in today’s information environment."<p>Is information overload a huge part of the trust problem? I suspect this is the case. A conclusion I postulate is that (as per the above) too much of the "news" is (to equivalate with food) low-nutrition "junk food" designed merely to stimulate clicks and maybe some base emotional response, but offering nothing insightful or valuable for the long term.
In an ideal world this means people will simply start taking what they're told with a pinch of salt and are little bit more sensible about believing sensational things. However we don't live in such a world. I suspect that what's more likely is that a bunch of people will fall into believing in stupid shit like flat earth or qanon, and will end up following weird conspiracy freaks like Alex Jones or white supremacists like Nick Fuentes.
Another media post, another HN comments feed where more people are upset about Hunter Biden’s laptop than a president cheerleading an insurrection and trying to overthrow the results of an election. Less credibility than the media you despise.
They do. The only real investigative journalists these days - Edward Snowden and Julian Assange - face life in prison and exile.<p>Even Seymour Hersh has been smeared to discredit him now he dared speak against the establishment.<p>It is not journalists' role to be a mouthpiece for the government, but to challenge it.
The entire China narrative is a CIA psyop. Everywhere in the media you see China being portrayed as a massive threat, a looming threat to our national security. Every event in global politics involving China is twisted to fit this narrative by the media lapdogs of the CIA. Nothing could be further from the truth. China is extremely weak both geopolitically and in terms of leadership. It is the most geopolitically vulnerable country in the world besides Yemen et al. It has to import everything from food to intellectual goods. China poses precisely zero threat to us because China sucks.<p>The China balloon thing is a good example. It was an embarrassing mistake that was a result of disintegrating leadership structure in the cpp. It accomplished literally nothing and never could have. But these huge obvious questions were ignored by the media. Questions like “what did they stand to gain?” Nothing. “Was this deliberate?” Not on the part of ping. “What does this say about China?” That they are a joke of a country.<p>Look at mike baker on joe rogan. That’s how the CIA answered the rogan question, what are we going to do about this pesky guy who has a larger audience than cnn but isn’t a slimy media executive who would be receptive to our requests to shape the narrative around certain topics? They send in mike baker who handily fools rogan into thinking he’s just a good dude who used to be a spook. And they chit chat and once in a while, when the conversation turns to something geopolitical, mike sprinkles in some CIA narrative. Never believe anything a spook says.<p>The CIA and FBI are behind this thrust against disinformation. Where was this disinformation frenzy at when it comes to people believing in even more wild shit like the idea that the universe keeps track of your good and bad deeds and punishes you or rewards you accordingly? Or the belief that the position of the stars and planets determines what personality your baby will have or whether or not you’ll be given a promotion? If disinformation mattered as a principle then wouldn’t these things make liberals foam at the mouth too?<p>It’s so ironic that the liberal camp has become the exact opposite of what it used to be. It is the vassal of the CIA and FBI.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1589606899569377282?s=46&t=T2Hlb9tdWWjQYZxiOWPFHQ" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1589606899569377282?s=46&...</a>
When everything is fake news, the fascists win.<p>Democracy is dying and "both sides" believe the other is the "enemy".<p>It's going to get bloody, folks.
What would you call The New York Times's 1619 Project? Historians tore it apart. Non-historian and simply rational human beings did as well. The entire project is a propaganda piece with a goal that requires deliberately misleading the public.
The problem is that people look at some (relatively rare) media lie, decide mainstream media aren't trustworthy and go to "alternative" media that lie all the time.