The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their ideas were good and some were bad, but every single day, this consensus influenced which stories made it to the front page and how they were framed.
Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.
But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.
The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and eventually torn to shreds.
The newspaper industry has never been neutral. It has always been on the side of its owners. Whether that surfaced as warmongering, real estate hucksterism, flogging migration, reforming the entire nation to accommodate the car, or inventing white flight, newspapers always stood on the side of their owners' profits, not from the newspaper itself but from the owners' actual lines of business.
It's very cable-news-brained to believe there always have to be two sides that are equally viable and that the only respectable unbiased stance is in the middle, dragged by the Overton window wherever it happens to go.
Journalists have always pretended to be some sort of righteous class. Upon closer examination you'll find they always are focused on conveying certain facts and steering the conversation. This is mostly a self perpetuated mythological construction that is not related to reality.
they just can't help themselves as they see themselves above the regular public that needs to be educated. same can be said about the modern science community that has been thoroughly ideologically captured.
Fox News seems to be going strong, so I don't think this holds - we see the rise of the right wing shady and sloppy news dominating the market because its cheap, fast, and appeals to the public's basal natures. No tug of war there, they do not care about integrity or reporting and thus make bank.
Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.
If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.
The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.
> Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.
I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part. I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather than pushing an agenda.
> If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly.
Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth.
But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a direction you happen to like today.
If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their thumbs on the scale.
Truth or not, newspapers fund themselves by flattering their readers' opinions.
Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y.
Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support X.
The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad things, and always take the opportunity to fuck each other over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the partisan journals, who just don't bother reporting all the skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.
I guess the hope is that, in a healthy media ecosystem, anything important enough to have a constituency gets reported truthfully and legally fact-checked by somebody.
The public are still free to care which truthful things they care about (or want to pay attention to)—and part of the job of politics is still to try to direct attention toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of truth-finding gets done.
> They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore! I suppose that’s the final humiliation.
While there were always problems with bias (esp. to the ownership) of outlets, there were stronger social-mores or collective beliefs that still helped curb things.
Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is usually yes. There's not enough info coming in.
The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.")
Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.
"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago.
So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.
>n the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds milking them dry, or by billionaires
I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.
I don't see how the fairness doctrine will help. It feels like a brutal disgusting tool Carr whips out to censor perfectly reasonable talks.
"Fair & balanced" Fox News has had token left people on (and good left people every now and then), but these people are there to look week, to flail and suck, to not portray well or strongly, to be heels. Attacked disineguinely. Meanwhile when Steven Miller comes on he's an aggressive lying weasel, spewing disgusting rhetoric and not answering any questions.
The idea that just having equal airtime will somehow make journalism good again is a joke to me. Trying to satisfy a technical obligation like this will allow disinformation to spread, will be manipulated by the wiley vicious forces that be. It's not gonna help .
I agree about limiting the number of media companies. Consolidation such as we have seen is an absolute horror how, is ghastly evil, and directly robs democracy of a vital independent 4th estate that is essential to democracy's health.
Don't forget the people who voted for "Get the Government off the [rich] people's back". Ronald Reagan and every subsequent government since. Neoliberalism. The rest of the Anglosphere followed suit.
It (Neoliberalism) was supposed to re-energize American Capitalism. Instead it gave birth to Rentier-Capitalism. See Brett Christophers for a more detailed analysis.
So, it's a term of art, and i'll even agree that it's got a bit of a tech-y pejorative lean to it, but it's in wide use, and Jarvis certainly isn't solely a person who comes from tech.
The last section heading about “Old media as a cultural construct and colloquialism” is pretty relevant to the parent post. Lots of theorists claim that the binary between new and old media is inaccurate.
Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.
But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.
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