Serious news is expensive, and at this point, a niche market.
I suspect that's correct. It's hard now to find any news outlet now that sticks to "Who, What, When, Where, Why". This is a consequence of pay per click, probably.
The left and the right now both have a checklist of mandatory positions required to avoid punishment. Those positions are in many cases contrary to fact. That's not good. Denial has become a core part of American politics.
I'm 48. My family had a newspaper subscription (in my case, the Miami Herald). I've been a consumer of news all my life, mostly print media. (My family rarely watched local news except for when a hurricane was headed our way, but would often watch programs like 60 minutes.)
When was the news ever "Who, What, When, Where, Why?"
It's always had a slant as long as I remember. Here's "the most trusted man in America" calling ror the U.S. to get out of Vietnam:
The news has always chosen what and what not to report. Just deciding what is and isn't newsworthy is a political decision. Heck, my conservative friend used to read the Wall Street Journal. I'm talking when we were kids (10-12) I'd argue with him about whether Reagan was a good president. I thought even then he had a highly colored view of reality and I'm sure he thought the same of me.
BTW, I don't think the problem is the press. I think it's a lack of open-mindedness, critical thinking, and healthy skepticism. We get what we deserve by not educating our kids better about how to consume information and consider view points outside their own worldview.
> What is that if not a partisan political opinion?
What was partisan about what he said? He made no mention of US political parties. He simply said that the war was failing and it needed to end. May I suggest you are projecting your partisanship onto this?
Objective journalism is not about giving both sides an equal voice. It is OK to use rationale and logic to support one side over the other. Should all journalism about evolution also include equal time for creationism?
Saying that the USA should get out of Vietnam is an opinion. You do not have to explicitly mention a party to express a partisan position. “Real” journalism reports the facts of what’s going on and lets people make their own decisions. They can interview people and report the opinions that other people hold, but they should try to avoid inserting their own biases. Walter Cronkite leveraged his position to express his personal opinion to the nation- that’s political.
You don’t have to give time to things that are objectively untrue, but a fair journalist should acknowledge when other opinions exist.
Saying, “I think we should get out of Vietnam. People are dying, we’re spending too much money, and we’re probably going to lose” is bad journalism. Saying, “According to a recent poll, fewer than 40% of Americans support the war in Vietnam. Commonly cited reasons for the lack of support are the death toll, the economic cost, and that there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. Most supporters of the war say we should continue fighting otherwise all the soldiers that have given their lives will have died in vain” is good journalism.
And yes, a journalist covering the creationism vs. evolution debate should research and interview people from both sides. If you don’t then you’re writing an opinion piece and not doing journalism.
I of course agree completely that a journalist should be open minded, aware of their own bias, conduct thorough research, interview knowledgeable people, and all of that. At the end of this process they are ideally quite an expert in whatever they are writing about.
But I'm not sure I see why journalists should try to be strictly objective. A journalist is in a unique position to identify the BS, provide analysis and context, and help the reader understand what to make of the competing narratives.
If you’ve ever read a journalist’s take on a subject that you’re an expert in, you’ll realize that they do not become experts after researching a story, nor are they any better at identifying BS than other people.
Some journalists that specialize in a particular field become experts, but it takes time to learn. Journalists don’t have some secret way to learn faster than other people.
Journalists do get training in interviewing experts and writing. That’s what they should stick to. Just like we really shouldn’t pay attention to a celebrity’s opinion of an issue that they don’t have special training in, we really shouldn’t be paying attention to a journalist’s personal opinion- we should rely on them to talk to experts and convey information, but their ability to form an opinion isn’t any better than yours.
I think you may have a bias against journalists =p.
It’s true that they may not be experts in everything that they report on, even if it’s their niche. Eg I think Kara Swisher does a reasonably good job of representing technology related things but there’s things she says that are not really true.
However the one thing journalists do cover well and have good expertise in is current event and politics. They are closest to the sources. And thus they become pretty good at identifying BS in those narrow fields at the very least. Given that, I certainly value their “take” on what the current events portray.
>However the one thing journalists do cover well and have good expertise in is current event and politics.
They are only "good" at this because so many of them worked on campaigns and there's a revolving door between that campaign work and the politics desk at media organizations. That isn't a badge of honor, or a signal that they know what they're talking about. It's a mark of partisanship, and they try their best to cloak it when they do their reporting ... but then they go back to the campaign when their guy is running.
> I think you may have a bias against journalists =p.
He may not, but having been through the grinder (on both sides), I do. I'm not even talking about the Ben Rhodes' quotes about them being young idiots.
> However the one thing journalists do cover well and have good expertise in is current event and politics. They are closest to the sources. And thus they become pretty good at identifying BS in those narrow fields at the very least. Given that, I certainly value their “take” on what the current events portray.
>Saying that the USA should get out of Vietnam is an opinion. You do not have to explicitly mention a party to express a partisan position.
The Vietnam War was started by a Democratic administration and continued by a Republican one, through several Congressional midterm elections. It was a bipartisan effort, so I don't see how having an opinion on it, for or against, can count as partisan in the sense of advocating for one political party over the other.
And yes, a journalist covering the creationism vs. evolution debate should research and interview people from both sides.
Well this is Hacker News, if you phrase it as a question about are we living in a simulation they will take it seriously, but of course a simulation would imply someone or something running it...
My point is that there was never an "objective" news that didn't fall somewhere on the left/right spectrum and which colored how that source presented the news.
> Objective journalism is not about giving both sides an equal voice. It is OK to use rationale and logic to support one side over the other.
I agree. But don't you think that reporters at The Atlantic and at the National Review both think they are doing that? Or NPR vs Fox News? And yet they present very different views of the news.
> Should all journalism about evolution also include equal time for creationism?
It’s okay to take positions on factual matters even if a political party also happens to take that same position. If one party believes the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the other party disagrees, it’s not exactly “partisan” (at least not in the pejorative sense) to take a side on that matter.
If that is the standard, political parties will just start claiming that all their opinions are factual (as happens in practice, coincidentally).
If we had an algorithm to sort fact from fiction then that would be fine, but we don't. Our method for sorting fact and fiction is to ask an expert. Experts are not reliable in political situations because there are experts who are willing to believe anything for money.
Particularly for economic questions where it is likely that the experts have a financial stake in one political outcome.
It's not only money. People are ready to believe (or to claim they believe) in things they think will make the world a better place (for some definition of better). This where the real partisanship lies. Tell a white lie, turn a blind eye, jump to conclusion, ... are all easy things to do if they justify moving the needle towards a world you truly think it's better.
People of course have wildly different standards w.r.t what "better" means.
And once shaped, the goal is hard to change. It takes more than facts or logical arguments to change one's idea if what the ideal world looks like. It's part of your identity, it's intertwined with your community.
> Should all journalism about evolution also include equal time for creationism?
If a scientific finding in evolutionary biology which undermines some previously fundamental aspect of genetics or the timeline of natural selection (a finding which Creationists would exult in promoting and probably exaggerate for their own biases) is not given its due time in the trade journals then yes, we'd have a serious problem. While I realize this may not quite be what you meant, because Creationism simply isn't scientific, evolutionary biology as a matter of being a human endeavor is certainly subject to bias in publication.
It feels strange to question what's partisan about cronkite's statement on an article highlighting instances where positions didn't pass a party's smell test.
Ideally a concept like "getting out of the war" could be a non partisan concept. Back then perhaps, but in 2020 definitely, there's no room for that. Maybe because of the internet, maybe because of cable news, I dunno, but even a single stated position plops you on the right or left in America. Sure it's not ideal but it's reality.
If only Republicans knew how many American communists were pro-armed-populace. If only it were possible to be conservative and reconcile your preference for self sufficiency and blue collar values with the ideals of people living on a commune, or the Green and Sustainability movements. But no, Climate Change is Fake News and Guns Are Bad. Full stop.
> Here's "the most trusted man in America" calling ror the U.S. to get out of Vietnam
That was an op-ed piece. It's fine for media to do op-ed if it's identified as not news; the most trusted papers have done it forever. Real journalists (tm) can absolutely do neutral, fact-checked, 5-W, reporting on one story and then express an opinion in a different column:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Watergate was a long, difficult, expensive and risky investigation for the journalists and newspaper involved. They did it because, in their opinion, Nixon was doing something wrong. Without opinions, what would motivate real journalism?
The problem with journalism today is not opinion, but that we’ve allowed “newsish” to pose as real news, to the extent that people can’t tell the difference. And on top of that I don’t think people are generally equipped well to recognize opinion as such.
I'm a Mexican living in mexico. When I was a kid? My dad was subscribed to Time Magazine. In my opinion it was quite informative and nin-skewed.
Nowadays I follow American news channels for entertainment (both CNN and Fox Bews are soooooo skewed). I usually go to CBSN or AlJazeera for 'boring' unskewed news.
For what it's worth Al-Jazeera is owned by Qatar and this has been known to color their reporting. One site I use to check myself on the bias of news outlets is below - the example in this case being Al-Jazeera.
It may not always matter or be distinguishable, but don't lose sight of the fact that there is a difference between having opinions, and having partisan opinions.
I think one of the things ailing us is that cynical partisans have been quite successful at pulling ever-growing amounts of our lives into this gravity well. Dry, straight, factual news has its place--but it also leaves a narrative-vacuum that partisans will happily fill.
But he was "the most trusted man in America". People across the political spectrum trusted him to reliably and accurately report what's what. There are figures like that today - Joe Rogan comes to mind - but I don't think anyone could become so trusted while adhering to the speech codes outlined in the article.
It doesn't help that there's not really any competition with news any more. Nearly every small news outlet is owned in some way by a larger one and those are in turn owned by an even larger one. Everything is fed top down, so even small local stations end up showing the same news as large ones. The main problem is news isn't news any more. It's entertainment, it exists to tell a story, not explain current events in an objective way.
It's been going on longer than the internet era. My dad jokingly blames entertainment tonight for starting the entertainment news trend, and while I don't think that's likely the reason, it does show an apt comparison. News has definitely become more like entertainment tonight, for nearly as long as entertainment tonight has existed.
It's a problem when every news broadcaster reminds me of fox news from the 90's and they're now actually considered a proper news outlet.
Now for people that have noticed a distinct decline in news quality over the last ten years specifically, this may have something to do with it.
Both the government and news companies have it in their best interests to keep major news organizations as shallow entertainment willing to spout whatever the message of the day is.
It's not much better than if the news was state run media, it's just hidden a lot better and government and private interests share the same goal.
It’s not a question of changing habits it’s the content syndication model that broke down. It used to be if a reporter spent months researching something other news organizations would often pay to publish the same content. As better content directly had higher value, the risk vs reward equation changed.
> It's hard now to find any news outlet now that sticks to "Who, What, When, Where, Why"
No news outlet has ever really done that (and why is usually a matter of subjective ascription, rather than fact, anyway.)
The illusion of unbiased news comes from a time when the major national media were a small set of corporations with largely similar institutional biases, and when advertising was less targeted so number of eyeballs was more important than a narrow, focussed audience, passionate, demographic, favoring a blander presentation and more effort to avoid offending any large group, rather than trying to appeal very strongly to a narrow, specific group.
It's rather depressing. I think it feels like living in the 60s, everyone knows that nuclear war will be a disaster and everyone expects it to happen tomorrow. At least I have a first class ticket on the Titanic.
I’ve always thought the Christian Science Monitor struck a good balance. It’s almost bland these days compared to the hyper charged headlines and slants you see in other papers.
For whatever it's worth: I'm a mostly conservative person who dislikes Trump (that seems to me that should be a tautology, even if it seems to others it's an oxymoron). I've been looking for tolerable media - something that doesn't give Trump a pass. I've found National Review to be an interesting read because the writers there seem to frequently disagree with each other. To my knowledge, none of them have been punished for these disagreements.
I suspect that's correct. It's hard now to find any news outlet now that sticks to "Who, What, When, Where, Why". This is a consequence of pay per click, probably.
The left and the right now both have a checklist of mandatory positions required to avoid punishment. Those positions are in many cases contrary to fact. That's not good. Denial has become a core part of American politics.