One of the interesting features of the "fake news" debate is the allegation by the term's proponents that true journalism from high-integrity outlets is indistinguishable from and equally as ideologically biased and tainted as poor journalism from low-integrity, tabloid, hyper-partisan or even blatantly lying ones.
That is, people want to compare the New York Times and Vox, Wall Street Journal and Infowars, the National Review and Breitbart, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post, and allege that there is no fundamental difference between them. It reasoning usually goes something along the lines of "all media is owned by corporations trying to make money, so they will all make money the same way: by spinning to a narrative they think is profitable, and ignoring things they think is not, even if this prevents them from reporting the truth."
What people forget is that while yes, many (not all) journalistic institutions are for-profit and trying to make money, they have an entirely different approach: They believe more people will pay them for their dedication to the truth, and to at least an attempt at unbiased reporting, than will pay them to push out screed. They play a longer game; one that, in fairness, isn't always as successful in the short-term as the sensationalist yellow-journalism model, but one that has persisted over time nonetheless.
To make the comparisons I made above is to ignore the fact that the entities being compared have fundamentally different ideas about what they're for and what their goals are.
> They believe more people will pay them for their dedication to the truth, and to at least an attempt at unbiased reporting, than will pay them to push out screed. They play a longer game; one that, in fairness, isn't always as successful in the short-term as the sensationalist yellow-journalism model, but one that has persisted over time nonetheless.
How can you tell the organizations playing the long game from those playing the short game? What makes you think the ones you've listed as "high-integrity" outlets are such? Is there a difference in incentives or management structure that would explain the putative difference?
All journalistic outlets have an incentive to make people think they are playing the long game. What evidence do you use to decide which are really adopting that strategy?
Criteria of Truth is an area of epistemology (the study of truth) which addresses this question. In any narrative, there are some assertions which are independently verifiable, others which are not. We also rely on credibility and reputation, and most especially, on the response of individuals and institutions to being called out on false reporting or narratives.
The full story is more complex, and ultimately boils down to the observation that drawing reliable and factual narrative is expensive, and that we employ a great many heuristics to reduce these costs. Some of these heuristics are categorised as "logical fallacies" (generally informal), though on closer examination, many of the fallacies are better considered as "shortcuts to truth assessment which sometimes, though not always, work".
It's also hugely useful to recognise that there are a number of different primary modes of communication, two in particular of which are dialectic vs. rhetorical speech. Dialectics seeks to arrive at a truth. By contrast, rhetoric seeks to persuade of a viewpoint. Rhetoric is not necessarily bad, though it is inherently suspect (an observation which dates back to Plato and his criticisms of the Sophists, from whence: sophistry).
I'm also inherently skeptical of any argument which arises from an ideological viewpoint. Truth doesn't arise out of ideology, ideology may arise out of truth. Which gives me pause to such publications (otherwise generally sound) as The Economist which is fundamentally predicated on the propogation of free-market ideology (see the paper's Prospectus).
Close observation and vigelance are required. And no source is perfect. The primary question is whether or not the organisation is responsive to its own errors.
> How can you tell the organizations playing the long game from those playing the short game? What makes you think the ones you've listed as "high-integrity" outlets are such?
Basically, you're evaluating credibility and the extent to which the organization needs it to survive. I think you can tell by looking at a few things: To what degree does the entity sensationalize their coverage? To what degree do presumably fact-based articles spend time on opinion, rather than said facts? Does this organization's reporting of events factually match those of other reputable organizations, including those that have a different alleged political bent? Does the organization indicate when it has conflicts of interest, when it corrects errors, etc., and how often does that happen? Does the reporting put conclusions before evidence? Does it make conclusions at all, and should it be?
Essentially, it's holistic. It requires reading multiple sources and spending time on your own figuring out how things line up. It also requires being willing to place a certain amount of trust in reporting of organizations that do seem legitimate, for instance, when they rely on anonymous sources or report on things that aren't yet clear-cut. I think that to a large extent, proponents of the "fake news" argument are unwilling to accept that level of personal responsibility in understanding the world around them. They want it spoon-fed, and they want it to confirm their preconceptions, and then they get mad when the outlets willing to do that for them lie.
Here's an example: When CNN reported on the Trump Russia dossier, it was attacked as fake news. However, upon actually reading the article, nothing false was said. CNN didn't report the dossier was true, they spent the whole article reporting on how Buzzfeed found it and reported it and whether they thought Buzzfeed ought to have done so. That is very different from the original Buzzfeed article, which spent a lot of time talking about how ludicrous it would be if stuff in this more-likely-than-not fake collection of documents were true.
> Is there a difference in incentives or management structure that would explain the putative difference?
I would imagine yes, or at the very least, in organizational goals. However, since I don't work for a news organization and am not a journalist, I don't know enough to be specific.
> All journalistic outlets have an incentive to make people think they are playing the long game. What evidence do you use to decide which are really adopting that strategy?
For evidence - see above. However, I don't think the entities I named before as short-game/biased really care whatsoever about whether people perceive them as honest, because their goal is not to be seen as honest. Their goal is to get attention for their message/advertisers/paywalls however they can.
Thanks for responding constructively instead of jumping on me for questioning the NYT. It is indeed hard work to find the real events.
Is your CNN example supposed to be an example of high-integrity news or fake news? My reading is that both CNN and Buzzfeed had the goal of propagating the dossier and wrote articles where everything they said was technically true so they could have a fig leaf of credibility while still getting the information out.
Given what I'd said, your question was a constructive one.
The CNN example is a useful one because it is an example of both, in that it is an example of how "fake news" can mean "stuff I don't like/don't want to hear about/that makes me feel bad about my particular political preferences," and can also mean "poor reporting with clear biases."
It might be fair to say that CNN wanted to propagate the dossier, for whatever reason. It's fair to say CNN has an editorial bias. What's not fair is to say are these things:
1) The dossier's existence wasn't worth reporting on once it had been made available. Even if it was one hundred percent false (not clear, and some parts have been independently verified, but not the important ones), the leaking of a classified piece of intelligence that was provided to the President of the United States in a briefing is 100% newsworthy. The fact that that intel is regarding something which may be false does not make it not worth reporting on, because the focus is not the document itself - it's that the document exists at all, and that the Trump administration is leaky enough not to be able to protect it.
2) CNN cannot do good reporting because they are biased. A partisan bias to some degree does not make their reporting wrong, because they adhered to ethical standards when they reported. That is, the meta-level of "this exists, but we aren't gonna speculate on what would happen if it were real" that CNN used is different and restrained compared to what Buzzfeed/HuffPo/whomever else did with it. CNN didn't start crowing about the evils of Trump or use the dossier to start a partisan conversation, it took the tack of "this exists and people have a right to know."
3) The fact that the dossier 'blew up' after CNN reported on it (really, after they reported on it being reported) is CNN's fault. Really, this goes back to Buzzfeed, and the way Buzzfeed reports. That, I think, is where the discussion over ethics should be focused - did Buzzfeed do the right thing in making the decision to report it, and in the way they reported it? The case there is not, to me, nearly as clear-cut.
I think your read is not necessarily an unfair one, but what's important is not to dismiss CNN or Buzzfeed as a source of news because of it. Similarly, evidence exists that Wikileaks is a mouthpiece for the Russian intelligence complex. That might be quite true, but if it is, it doesn't make the Podesta emails not real, or change the importance of the Panama Papers, etc. That is, you can be 100% right about CNN's goals, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't know about the dossier or that the dossier is "fake news." It's real news, reported by someone who may or may not have an agenda.
> That is, people want to compare the New York Times and Vox, Wall Street Journal and Infowars, the National Review and Breitbart, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post, and allege that there is no fundamental difference between them. It reasoning usually goes something along the lines of (...)
I'd say the reasoning goes like this: all of them are for-profit ventures in a highly competitive market with dwindling margins and ad-based revenue source. In such an environment you should expect the players to go for maximizing eyeballs. Truth is boring, and hard to report on accurately. Bullshit is easy and can be made much more interesting. There's also little consequence for lying - people forget about most "mistakes" the next day.
All of that paints the picture of those news sources being fundamentally the same game, and the argument is consistent with what I see when reading them.
The reason those second class outlets started to get attention, is because high-integrity outlets have become low-integrity, biased and tainted. And nowadays people wanting to find whole story need to go through several outlets almost as if they need to do the investigation themselves.
I agree with the second sentence, but not with the first. I don't think the high-integrity outlets are now low-integrity; I don't see any evidence of that, or at least, that they are any worse now than they used to be. I also disagree fundamentally with your assertion that people would, upon noticing a lessening of quality in a source, seek out other equally low quality sources as a substitute. That doesn't make sense to me.
The claim you're making is oft-repeated, massive, and rarely seems to have evidence connected to it, other than a general feeling of partisanship and the fact that we have more news outlets now than we used to. Do you have hard evidence to present?
But even if all the news sources available acted purely out of what they thought was best for the non-partisan public, it would still be incumbent on the individual to learn to process news analytically. That responsibility doesn't change.
Do people not still believe that the best way to get a rounded perspective is to read widely? If you suspect the sources you are reading are biased you may very well add yet more sources to that list to try and compensate for the lack of integrity of those you are also reading.
Of course that only gets you so far when all of them are just reporting from the same source, which itself is a false story.
There is a technology example I often consider - the release of the 3900 series processors from Intel. I and many others read all the reviews from all the reputable (and non reputable sources) and all of them concluded confidently on release day the 3930k would overclock to 4.9+Ghz. It didn't however, in retail they topped out at 4.6 and more frequently 4.4Ghz. Intel had sent out golden samples of a stepping they never sold. Did reading widely help those purchasers make an informed decison? It didn't. Did the journalists report unfairly?! Well maybe. What shocked me was that they themselves never broke the story of the steppings, just random people buying CPUs organised on a forum worked it all out from CPU-Z and their own overclocking results.
I don't have a solution, I don't think there can ever be one when humans are so willing to lie to make money or just attributation.
> I don't see any evidence of that, or at least, that they are any worse now than they used to be.
It's just easier than ever to find out and/or challenge their shortcomings and inclinations, thanks to the web. We are also coming out of 15 years of very close relationships between power and media, which were painfully evident at various critical points in time (post-9/11, Iraq, 2008 etc). A general rise in distrust was met with new media that made it easier to disseminate and multiply such distrust (whether justified or not).
> seek out other equally low quality sources as a substitute. That doesn't make sense to me.
"Quality" is a very subjective term. You fundamentally rate journalism quality in relationship to the fundamental truths you perceive. If you believe Big Companies are up to no good and you read a detailed reportage of corporate abuses, you think it's high-quality reporting; but if you believe corporations are the economic engines of America and should be cut some slack, the same exposé can be read as scandalistic and alarmist. Most other parameters one would use to judge journalism (source quality, corroborating cross-references etc etc) are simply beyond the average person.
So you gave another thought. Maybe mass media outlets have always been dubious, but only now with technology and computer literacy we are able to escape them.
... Some will be less quality others wont but essentially they are different.
They don't all follow the same mass media tune, they can be more specialized, less bureaucratic, closer to the source, hold several articles by known independent journalists, journalists will do it out of interest and not because "we need more Trump news!". This also bring disadvantages sometimes, but diversity is key to evolution.
I'm no investigative journalist and this is a comment section. But you can Google "mass media trust" and see that most sources reflect the obvious distrust on mass media. Looking for alternatives is only the next logical step. Or do you have any hard evidence that people will just sit by?
I'll show you mine if you show me yours. I'm waiting on your provision of evidence that high-integrity media institutions are now low (or even at all measurably lower) integrity. Proof that people believe that is not the same as proof that it is true.
Once you've furnished that, I'd be happy to continue this discussion and respond to the points you've raised here.
And I quote my comment above:
> I'm no investigative journalist and this is a comment section.
Here we give opinions based on the little understanding we have about the world. Or would you like to provide evidence to? After all you were the first to claim that alternative media is not as good as mass media.
Also any evidence we might present can be portrayed as unreliable, making it unproductive to evidentiate the obvious. So let's stick with opinions, cause I have a day life to attend to.
That is, people want to compare the New York Times and Vox, Wall Street Journal and Infowars, the National Review and Breitbart, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post, and allege that there is no fundamental difference between them. It reasoning usually goes something along the lines of "all media is owned by corporations trying to make money, so they will all make money the same way: by spinning to a narrative they think is profitable, and ignoring things they think is not, even if this prevents them from reporting the truth."
What people forget is that while yes, many (not all) journalistic institutions are for-profit and trying to make money, they have an entirely different approach: They believe more people will pay them for their dedication to the truth, and to at least an attempt at unbiased reporting, than will pay them to push out screed. They play a longer game; one that, in fairness, isn't always as successful in the short-term as the sensationalist yellow-journalism model, but one that has persisted over time nonetheless.
To make the comparisons I made above is to ignore the fact that the entities being compared have fundamentally different ideas about what they're for and what their goals are.