The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press.
Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it's also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we're going to get are "tabloids for politics" - and that is what we see. It's just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening.
Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the "opposite side" media as tabloid-like, it's been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it's still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam's Razor to their own.
This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it's critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.
This is why the Economist, FT and the WSJ still have a somewhat positive reputation. They're expensive and tend to write about things that are important, not sensational.
All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.
> Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now
WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade.
I'm still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website.
WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it's not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.
> WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly.
As a Indian, I disagree. The reportage on anything India is the usual mix of patronizing caste-curry-cow (and now 'Hindu terror') BS. The morons in-charge of international news at every one of these outlets (incl. Intercept, Twitter, Google..) think that just because they are white, their imagination of the world is the reality.
The "media" isn't optimizing for clicks or engagement. The media is optimizing for advancing the democratic political party. It blocks stories that cover topics where the political right may be correct.
Proof: Stories like the one they are hiding can drive a lot of traffic. They are hidden to advance one political party over another. The stories aren't killed because they want traffic.
That's interesting. It's not just India and it's not about race. The NYT has a problem with Britain too, believe it or not. This article goes into some examples but they aren't the only ones:
As an Indian who reads NYT's international coverage, I disagree with your comment. NYT's India reports have been excellent and evidence based.
The right wing extremism is indeed on the rise[1].
Any report I see, they are presenting their statements with ground report backed by statistics, usually by Govt. data.
If their "ground reporting" had any kernel of truth to it then they would not be covering up the rise of islamic extremism in India using bogeys of "right wing extremism".
That one factoid, namely that two of their writers were of the wrong persuasion almost 20 years ago, seems to be the extend of criticism people can actually come up with when put on the spot. Even though they had plenty of opposition against the war on staff and on paper, and very few of their readers were likely to change their opinion on that topic. And, not being having the presidency and Congress at that point not being neccessary for a declaration of war, their mostly Democratic audience had little to no influence on events.
It's noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party, which actually made the decision to invade Iraq. And also to lie to the world, its citizens, and, yes, those people at the Times that were naive enough to believe them.
The Bush administration offered the choice, and a bipartisan majority of congress took it. No need to invoke tribalism and blame an impersonal mass of people--we know the names of the specific individuals involved.
The Bush administration controlled the information used the inform congress (and the media while we're on the subject of the parent posts).
Congress and the media deserve some blame for not digging hard enough... but when assigning blame here, surely we ought blame the liars and misleaders more than the lied to and the misled?
> Congress and the media deserve some blame for not digging hard enough...
Except that the Bush Administration story was on several key points, including the nature of the “winnebagos of mass destruction” a lie, and that the US knew it to be a lie, and that, they were, in fact, associated with a weather balloons used in artillery spotting and had been sold to Iraq by the UK, was reported, in the media, at the time the story was being presented by the Administration.
The media did not fail to dig hard enough. Neither really did Congress. The media reported the truth, Congress and much of the population had the truth in front of them and choose wilfull pretense of ignorance, and the former gave Bush the authority to decide to go to war—sure, there were factual determinations that had to be made first, but the Administration was already known to be lying about the facts to get authority to go to war, so it was predictable they would lie to exercise that authority.
That the bush administration controlled the information is the failure of congress and the media.
Why would we give congress war powers if not as a specific check against a commander in chief who would otherwise start undesireable wars? It is congress' job to specifically not just go along with what the administration tells them. They have their own investigative powers, and 59 congress members voted against the invasion so clearly it was possible for congress people to question the validity of the administration's argument.
As for the media, accepting the government's narrative without question is the most heinous sin. That is not journalism, that is propaganda. Of course the government is going to massage the truth, just like any other institution. Most people take it as a given that politicians lie. However when the media, which is supposed to have an antagonistic relationship with the government, reaffirms what the government is saying, then it holds substantially more weight. It would be like if a prosecutor claimed the defendant was guilty and the defense attorney agreed.
You don't get any slack for having been lied to when your entire job is to identify lies.
I think the criticism of media comes down that they only dig if politically favourable and recent behavior made that more transparent. People will loose their conscience at one point because mistakes are repeated.
The more divided a country, the more the media has to pander for the extremes. People expect to get dirt only on the other side so the media has to take sides, or be left hated by both.
If the lie was one that warranted an invasion sure.
If I tell you that some guy called you fat and you go kick the shit out of him, I'm at way less or even no fault. If I tell you that some guy diddled your kid, sure that's on me.
Not true. The Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee has plenty of power to call witnesses, but its chairperson, one Joseph Biden, would not call anyone critical of the administration's position.
Plus, regardless of that - Congress had, at the very least, the information available to the public, which includes what the UN was saying, what weapons inspectors were saying etc. So they didn't need to "dig" anywhere.
>The Bush administration offered the choice, and a bipartisan majority of congress took it.
And later it came out the administration lied extensively about that, including some in-retrospect ridiculous assessments about how long the war would take (what was that quote, doubt it would take 6 months, doubt it would cost much at all).
> No need to invoke tribalism
Oh yes there is, especially because after that complete and utter fiasco of the worst foreign policy decision by the US ever, was there any honest introspection or learning by the administration and/or Republicans in general? Nope, it just was completely ignored.
> It's noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party
2008 brought a Democrat president along with an increased Democrat majority in both houses, so if they weren't faulted at the time (and they were) then they were certainly faulted just a few years later.
Both for continuing the military intervention and for not bringing anyone to trial, nor even a public accounting, for cooking up the false claims used to justify the invasion; nor for the torture; nor for the killing of civilians; nor for the use of depleted uranium and white phosphor; etc.
Not one. Russiagate in its many variations was and still is happily peddled by NYT. Coverage of Syria is also straight from warmonger 101 textbook. There is likely more, but I stopped reading them regularly after 2003.
> nobody ever faults the Republican Party, which actually made the decision to invade Iraq
Both parties happily voted to invade. Both bear the blame.
In a democracy public perception of reality directly correlates to your ability to perform as a politician.
The Bush administration used the full thrust of the office to knowingly foster false perception of reality in huge swaths of the population. Rendering objections moot.
The ultimate blame lays with the deceiver. Even though representatives of all parties votes for the invasion, they acted in a reality manufactured by lies and they represented the will of their supposed voters.
You may accuse them as spineless, but there's still magnitude difference between deceiving the public, and failing to convince the public it's all lies.
Losing this distinction just makes the crooks stronger.
What is the proof that one party did it against the will of the people, while the other went with the will of the people? Given how much ongoing violence was continued and expanded even once the democrats has a president and congressional majority, it seems like both parties were and are happy to perpetuate imperialist violence in the name of a fictional protection.
> namely that two of their writers were of the wrong persuasion almost 20 years ago
It was the editorial board, or perhaps I should say the organization at large. And it wasn't just Iraq, it's US interventions in lots of places that are supported and/or positively spun. Also - AFAIK, there was no process undertaken to try and avoid this occurring again.
> In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.
> In this context, 10 is an interesting figure because it is also the number of front-page stories the Times ran on the Hillary Clinton email scandal in just six days, from October 29 (the day after FBI Director James Comey announced his decision to reopen his investigation of possible wrongdoing by Clinton) through November 3, just five days before the election. When compared with the Times’s overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election.
——
But here’s the real kicker. It’s not that the NYT made a mistake about prioritising the wrong coverage and convincing undecided voters to break for Trump or stay home. People make mistakes and we should forgive them.
The real issue is that since then the NYT has convinced people that it was the Russians and Facebook and Cambridge Analytica that got Trump elected. Their breathless coverage of the email non issue had 0 influence, it was entirely the fault of everyone else.
And it worked! No one blames the NYT now for their mistake in 2016. Which is why Greenwald thinks it’s the right thing to do to start emails 2.0.
I don't know why you got downvoted, this is pretty much on spot without any counter indications.
This was typical elite-orientated journalism that articulated ideas to spread election talking points for Clinton. It was certainly no journalism, it was probably for rubbing some friends in Washington.
If you believe what is being said about the NYT it challenges a couple of core beliefs that many people (especially on this forum) might hold
1. Freedom of speech is not always a good thing. A free press reporting on topics like “but her emails” can have negative consequences, even if those journalists are acting in good faith.
2. People in the aggregate can’t be trusted to make sound judgements, even if that means democracy is built on shaky foundations. Give them all the information and let them take a call is a strategy that can backfire. Flat earth, anti vax, qanon are all ideologies with vast following online, regardless of how stupid they are.
When you challenge people’s core beliefs, it hurts them. They respond with downvotes.
Nope, not op-ed. This is a reference to Judith Miller, and others, that published false information in the New York Times about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction on the front page.
The two part PBS documentary[1] is a terrific source of information. From the events leading up to the war until the origin of ISIS skirmishes.
They explicitly cover the aluminum tube and how the government used a news paper article to justify their stance. It also covers the famous 16 words from Bush [1].
I found it fascinating to learn about all the internal politics during this period and the war state shapes the opinion of the masses. How does one go about justifying a war that has left millions dead, maimed, and traumatized for life, that has cost (and continues to) trillions of dollars, and continues to shape the world we live in today? Highly recommended.
Op-ed is still part of the paper's message, considering they do not just publish a random sample of letters received, and editors can be fired for allowing the wrong op ed to run.
Apparently this is something that has totally stuck with the NYTimes. I respect them (for a mainstream media publication), but no one can get over the fact that they lied blatantly at the time.
Not just that, they chose to support the Bolshevik regime in Russia while their own correspondents knew about the massive starvation in Ukraine causing millions of deaths but that was not the narrative they want to push to the whole world. They wanted Communism to be a shining star and not report the facts. NYT is as biased as you can go.
Ignoring how these accusations oversell some supposedly uniform position of the the paper, some countries have not completely recovered from either communism or the invasion, so it's not like it's some minor thing.
Yes. But relativelty that mighty fall makes them reek like trash. At that point, it's a duck.
What's worse is they continue to leverage their once-stellar reputations to sell second-rate "stuff" as "news". They've lowered to bar for the accepted definition of journalism.
They might not suck, but they're intentional pursuit falling has broad societal and cultural implications. Perhaps not 100% tabloid, but they use that tool enough to make it more and more legitimate.
To have a healthy and proper Democracy requires a coherent, honest and transparent Fourth Estate. That ship has sailed, and it was prior to Jan 2017.
> WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly
I would imagine its probably because their advertising revenue has been falling down because of the internet. You have to be flexible with your standards when your revenue is declining.
It's getting harder to buy this line as their financials keep getting better and better. They have nearly 5 million subscribers and aiming to hit 10mil by 2025. The advertising revenue isn't growing much, but subscriptions are.
It supports the OP's point. NY Times has switched from a revenues model to a subscriber model, which means they're strongly incentivized to publish articles that reinforce the worldviews of their paying customers. Before, when they were dependent on advertising, they needed to be objective and represent all viewpoints because they needed to reach as large an audience as possible.
Why would subscriptions over advertising change their target audience? It seems that either way they are trying to get as many eyeballs as possible. Getting repeat subscriptions versus repeat page views (or whatever the ad revenue metric) seems irrelevant to me.
Because of the publish something that does not say Orange Man Bad they will loose a bunch of their subscribers. Getting subscribers is much harder then loosing them.
Let’s say they covered Hunter Biden scandal. How much would that cost them? Quite a bit I bet
If that's the case there is no way to save the US. Everyone will keep screaming at each other based on the propaganda they buy into until the guns come out.
There has to be a way to present alternate ways of interpreting facts without immediately getting accused of partisan censorship. US media can't even agree on what the facts are without the partisan accusation coming out.
How to rebuild institutional trust once it's gone?
Not under the current paradigms for media and news. Other countries do somewhat better (Germany) but they too face rising nationalist movements.
The issue, amazingly, is Fox News and it’s ilk. Yet, the conversation here is the NYT.
This is a problem on two grounds
1) people talk about what they know. So like many discussions people nerd out on what they have information on.
2) The issue of Correlation vs causation in Fox’s impact on its viewers is pushed away for another day, when things are worse.
Is conservative pandering media causing a break from reality, or are they simply doing what they need to when dealing with their audience. Or perhaps both?
Is having someone like Rupert Murdoch and his children running the show a good thing ?
> The issue, amazingly, is Fox News and it’s ilk. Yet, the conversation here is the NYT.
That is because practically everyone on HN agrees Fox is bad, biased, etc. Therefore the debate is going to be implicitly about how bad the NYT is in relation to Fox.
A related factor is that it's hard for an educated person to get suckered by Fox. There are too many garish infographics and obvious nutjobs. It just does not give even a superficial impression of being Legitimate and Unbiased and Supported by the Best Experts. But the NYT does, and that's what makes it more dangerous.
If I go into "Uncle Cletus's Homeopathy Clinick", I kind of deserve whatever I get. But if another con man has a convincingly faked (or even real) Harvard M.D., then sets about poisoning lots of people through incompetence and apathy and greed, then everyone insists it can't possibly be his fault because he has an M.D. from Harvard...
...you can see why "Uncle Cletus is the real problem here" can seem nonresponsive. It is not even especially obvious to me which is "worse", "Uncle Cletus" or Fake M.D., even if we grant that Fake M.D. is somewhat better at medicine. I know I personally could get suckered by the latter but not the former, making the latter more dangerous to me.
> A related factor is that it's hard for an educated person to get suckered by Fox. There are too many garish infographics and obvious nutjobs. It just does not give even a superficial impression of being Legitimate and Unbiased and Supported by the Best Experts. But the NYT does, and that's what makes it more dangerous.
So, same reason why scam emails are rife with spelling errors.
They might actually face more criticism if they don't turn away the part of the audience with half a brain first.
US already had a civil war. It is sort of remarkable just how stable the republic been since founding.
Maybe US is due for another go. Unfortunately this time there will be no neat geographic divide and it will probably resemble Russian civil war. That scares the shit out of me, I am Canadian btw. Delegitimization of the elections, stuffing the court, non-stop riots, armed militias. Good vs Evil narrative.
This Pandemic has not been that bad, imagine if this thing was more deadly.. there is no unity, republic verges on the brink
>If that's the case there is no way to save the US. Everyone will keep screaming at each other based on the propaganda they buy into until the guns come out.
You say that like it's hyperbole but there's a hell of a lot of people who think we're on that track. What not everyone agrees on is whether it'll be a problem next Wednesday morning or a problem for our great^N grand kids.
From outside it looks like you have an media establishment that is keen of pitting people against each other.
I don't think removing information can work. You can however provide more plausible information. If you remove anything you might as well give it up because it will always be seen as paternalism not fitting a democracy.
In 2005 we already had insane conspiracies on the net. Instead of using them to elevate yourself to a mundane level, you better ignore them. People will get bored quickly.
The democrats greatest failure was probably not championing freedom and free speech. You don't give such a precious thing to your political enemies.
It is refreshing to see conservatives arguing for it. You shouldn't believe them, but liberals arguing for speech codes should reorient themselves. Best start would be yesterday.
It's not, you can safely ignore anyone so untethered to reality that they either a) parrot "orange man bad" to deflect any criticism of Trump or b) actually believe yet another emails story.
It's like there's this collective cultural shrug of acceptance whenever someone does something that 1) makes a profit 2) is technically legal.
And people just jump in with explanations of how it totally makes sense to act like that in the given the profit motive.
It sets a pretty low bar for expectations. Also, it gives a lot of power to individuals whose modus operandi is the above.
But why is this the expectation? You could also subscribe to and support a publication because they make the hard choices, also publish the unpopular news. Because you think this is important. However, if you do this, support the publication, but the publication starts chasing profit instead of truth, then in the US, joke's on you! Of course they would chase profit instead of truth, everybody will tell you.
It kind of reminds me of the Ferengi in Star Trek sometimes. Does the Star Trek universe perhaps offer any insight how they run a society when the entirety of this society is doing nothing but chase profit?
> Before, when they were dependent on advertising, they needed to be objective and represent all viewpoints because they needed to reach as large an audience as possible.
No, they needed to represent viewpoints that were palatable to their advertisers.
A US-centric, neo-liberal world-view does not really 'represent all viewpoints'.
Their revenue isn't declining, so the argument can't be based on their survival as a company. They are growing and there's multiple ways to grow. There's no excuse for being 'fallen' anymore.
I think it is the other way around. There are fewer advertisers than subscribers, so the publication's strategy tends to get optimized towards keeping those few(er) people happy.
You don't have to, at least if you're private. There's the option to actually stop. That's not necessarily a horrible thing, even if some people think it is.
What we're really seeing is the difference between those that actually want to "provide the best X possible as a business" and those that "want to make money in the market for X".
Everyone says they are the former, but the difference is that those that actually are sometimes go out of business rather than compromise too far. Those that are the latter may not want to compromise too far but, well, "the goal is to make a profit, right?"
The Economist is quickly losing that reputation. I cancelled my subscription. The FT is still pretty good, though they shy away from anything critical of powerful corporations/individuals.
You can choose which bias to read, but you can't read unbiased news. If you think your news is unbiased, then it's the most dangerous kind of pandering.
While they are very much in the neo-liberal Anglo-American bent, they still provide the most eclectic and readable collection of global stories in one format.
What about the economist made you cancel? My impression is that they're still doing a great job of providing trustworthy news which avoids sensationalism
When I read the Economist, I can't help but feel like I'm reading an advertisement for the center of the Anglo-American neoliberal Overton window, drafted by some recent grad who doesn't know who Allen Dulles was.
To rip off a pg-ism, they are intentional moderates. Intentional moderates are boring.
There are different types of boring. When I read The Economist, I find their writing unchallenging, never broadening my worldview or making me rethink my preconceived notions.
Good journalism and opinion writing isn't boring, it's absolutely fascinating, and that's something I find The Economist lacks.
> I find their writing unchallenging, never broadening my worldview or making me rethink my preconceived notions.
Why would you want that? Amateurs adding a personal spin on topics they don't understand is bad news. Reading that will just make you more misinformed.
If news is just going to tell me what I already know and regurgitate what I already think, why bother reading it? Am I really more informed in a meaningful way if all I'm viewing is a carefully manicured slice of reality designed to keep me feeling comfortable?
I'm not asking for amateurs throwing in their two cents, I'm asking for actual journalists to do their job and speak truth to power.
> For decades, methadone — a synthetic opioid developed in the 1930s by a German company — was associated not with pain relief but with weaning addicts off heroin and other drugs. The word summoned an image of clinics, often in seedy parts of town.
I mean that's what I know methadon from. Always has been and still is.
And I also know that it's not like a "safe" replacement for heroin to kick yourself off. It's absolute shit. But it helps with the heroin withdrawal, which is absolutely worse.
(not that I have any experience with heroin addiction, but I know some people that work at these addict care centres, that distribute methadon (not sure how this works though))
> A case from 2009 epitomizes this divide. Two sisters, injured in a car accident in South King County, needed pain relief. One, with private insurance, received OxyContin, an expensive drug. The other, on Medicaid, received methadone — and within a week, overdosed and died.
but OxyContin is also shit.
for very different reasons than methadone, that I won't go into here right now.
but fact of the matter is that neither are commonly prescribed as pain killer meds, outside the US.
our politicians actually want less people to be on oxycodon (the generic) because it's terribly addictive, and campaign against it.
I forgot the law's name, but with the Economist happens that every time I read an article about something I know the article leaves me dissatisfied. It is presented "objectively" but always key information is omitted if it goes against the Economist worldview (Free markets and liberal democracies led by center, center-left parties in USA and the UK is what is best for the world)
That's correct! And I've asked myself, if these guys are presenting this lopsided article about Venezuela, Colombia , Costa Rica, what chance do I have to get a better information from them on Nepal, Denmark or Egypt?
I had been a subscriber for almost 30 years. Loved their cheeky style and erudite, but clear writing.
In 2015, the publishing house Pearson sold their majority stake to a bunch of globalists: the Agnelli family, the Rotschilds, Cadbury, etc.[1]
I was not aware of this at the time, but noticed the change of direction a year or so later.
Cancelled my subscription - sadly there are few real journalists left.
Pearson sold their majority stake of the B shares to the Agnelli family. They have no control over how the paper is run. The A shares are owned by the “globalists” and have been for as long as the paper has really existed. Furthermore, nobody is allowed to sell shares without the approval of an independent board who is able to veto any sale or purchase.
There’s been no change in editorial control or voice in the paper. It’s all you.
Given The Economist's neoliberal bent, why would the sale to "globalists" change their values?
Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional or not - but using the word "Globalists" as a pejorative for the Rothschilds is a very common anti-semitic tactic.
Globalist is a commonly used dog-whistle to talk about Jews which itself lacks a clear and useful definition.
Neoliberal has a clear definition. "Top 1% of the 1%" has a clear meaning. "Globalist" does not. "Globalism" isn't an ideology so far so I understand it.
For that reason I understand it to be a word that signals something about the writer more so than it describes something about the subject. But I could be overfitting this curve.
To me globalists - the top 0.1%, with their business interests spread over the world, completely unaccountable to any government (in fact, increasingly influencing/corrupting governments around the world with their money).
And attempting to sprinkle anti-semitism into it is just a (typical) attempt to make the word "globalist" socially unacceptable. Nothing to do with Jews, but hey, nice try.
You are correct in your view of who the globalists are. The only racist idea here is that all of those people are Jews. The idea that saying “globalist” is an anti-Semitic pejorative is just an idea being installed by Globalist Propagandists and their (witting or not) repeaters, to make it socially risky for anyone to discuss their nefarious deeds when labeled in a way that promotes pattern recognition by readers.
I mean, it's not "just" propaganda; but that is a possibility that certainty muddies the waters and would benefit people wanting the topic underdiscussed.
Though generally I just refer to these people as Reptilians.
I have print subscriptions to the first 2 but I disagree because what I recall from working in blue collar jobs is that people who would benefit from that world view will not bother. they spend their days thinking about basic survival and when they pick up a paper (on the bog) just want to be entertained. Sadly the typical reader of the Economist never had to deal with anyone from the "lower" classes. They consider them as something they need protection from. A minimum wage, social safety net and working health care system usually goes a long way in preventing this divide from growing into a normal (like in the US - or very poor countries that share that class divide as a common property with the US).
I do very much love the outstanding clear graphics the Economist does with most of their stories. And I agree with others’ comments about the NYT web design team—awesome talents! But the overt bias of the paper is such turn off. They’ve lost all objectivity. Sad.
I agree (as someone to left of the wsj median), but it's worth knowing that the editorial desk is an entirely different team from the opinion desk (with different standards etc)
Is this good? I don't think so, but it's worth being aware of, like to understand "why is that brand diluting itself with an opinion desk?"
(I don't have a satisfying answer though)
Like, that's what an editorial page is? What you are really saying is, they don't have the same bias as you. As for standards, that's really unfair. They have high standards and are much more apt to invite opposing opinions than the NYT, or WaPo. They refused to endorse Trump in 2016. Good people can disagree with you for real reasons, not because they have lower standards.
There's bias and then there's intentional misleading. Providing a platform for the Koch etc funded think-tanks doesn't fit into "just bias". Eg their attempts to undermine climate science.
Again, you’re just confusing disagreement for bias. As if The NY Times or WaPo don’t provide a platforms for left wing think tanks? Are you worried about the bias of The NY Times Editorial page when they undermine the science of gender or IQ? The WSJ editorial page should be the most important thing you read every day so you can actually understand the reasoning (yes reason) of people with different positions than you.
For example, the following are questioned and dismissed by large numbers of opinion pages in the WSJ and other Murdoch papers and media outlets:
* Is COVID a pandemic?
* Is climate change happening at a rate that is unprecedented in archeological and geological time?
* Is that climate change due to human activities?
Let alone ridiculous assertions like claiming that the Democratic party in the US espouses "socialist" policies or that the GOP party has "fiscal conservatism" as an underlying principle.
Might as well add the Masshole, 'strayan and Cheeto in Cheif to that list.
I can't think of a single politically involved billionaire who doesn't have at least a couple very onerous "keep the unwashed masses under control" type policies they are trying to advance.
Every single one of them. But if we are to make a ranking, I think spreading climate denial to protect your oil empire does do a lot make you uniquely loathe worthy.
Hate I'm not sure about, but you should be nervous and distrustful of anyone to whom buying a PR firm is relatively cheap (as in, 2-3 days income cheap).
The great thing about biased opinion in a financial newspaper is that if you trade based on that opinion, chances are you'll lose money.
From 2008 through 2016, WSJ opinion hammered on the supposed fiscal recklessness of the US federal government, warned that inflation and interest rates would skyrocket, and fretted about bond vigilantes.
If you traded on this opinion and shorted long-term bonds, you would have lost a lot of money. Naturally, their promised inflation, interest rates and bond vigilantes never materialized.
Curiously, they've been mostly silent about fiscal recklessness since 2016, despite $3 trillion deficits.
It makes complete sense to me to not be honest with your opinion on economic predictions. It would be insider trading light. And if you could broadcast misinformation to a broader public of traders...
In fairness, all those things are the expected outcomes of hugely profligate spending and have been seen in other economies that adopted the same policies. It's surely a bit of an open question why the USA, and to some extent other western countries, have been able to sustain such huge deficits for so long apparently in defiance of financial gravity. I think you're implying the WSJ's interest in the topic was entirely political in nature, but it's also possible they just noticed that their predictions kept not coming true and dropped it for that reason. After all, Trump promised big spending with tax decreases, with correspondingly huge deficits, and there doesn't seem to have been any negative effect of that (yet).
The story is still developing and had several major points that are clearly worth further investigation. Please don't dismiss this issue as without merit, this will be investigated long after the election no matter who wins.
The only ongoing developments in this story are embarrassing revelations that show what an amateur hour version of Russian disinformation this is and the sort of idiots who are prepared to believe it (and the useful idiots like Greenwald who get paid to promote it.) Not only do we have the Tucker Carlson "USPS ate my homework" saga, we have the verification source that turns out to be completely made up.
Glenn Greenwald is probably the last neutral journalist. Respected worldwide for publishing the Snowden story, which the conservative establishment was totally against, he is completely independent of partisan politics, and is after the real story.
Glenn Greenwald is a hack. He stumbled into his one big scoop (Snowden) and since then has not really distinguished himself or shown that one case to be anything more than a lucky break. He is not independent of partisan politics, he is simply partisan on an anti-establishment axis.
note that the economist, ft and wsj are neither impartial nor a well-rounded balance of daily record. but yes, wapo and nyt--and i'll add npr--have largely turned into partisan opinionating (which i'd coin covidizing, if i had any such clout), save a few longer-form investigative pieces (which have a leaning via editorial discretion, but aren't typically editorialized).
I've stopped caring about institutions' reputations because I don't need them to gatekeep for me anymore.
If I want to read about finance, I can read Matt Levine. If I want to read about law I can read Eugene Volokh. If I want to read about about security I can read Bruce Schneier. In every category I care about, there are writers who are experts who make their expert opinions known without me having to subscribe to the Economist, FT, or the WSJ, all of which are great, all of which I grew up reading.
But I think I'm done with their gatekeeping now, I don't need it.
WaPo and NYT are trash and that was made nakedly obvious in 2016. It's more blatant now than it was then, but I guess if you didn't notice it then, you won't notice it now.
Ok, so what are your experts on housing policy? On agrarian policy? On international trade? On Newfoundland state politics? On medicine?
The number of areas where you can personally vet your experts is very small. For the rest, you must either choose to be uninformed or you can choose an organization to vet those experts for you. Trust is transitive.
This may be true in general. But the these particular. organizations have demonstrated that they are not trustworthy. So now what? Trusting known liars is a foolish path.
You’ve been downvoted but I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s lots of debate in these comments about how journalism is dying due to various monetization schemes, organization and lower dynamics, etc. But I personally think the issue is that we, as news consumers, are becoming lazier and are simply looking for someone to tell us what to think, rather than a comparatively dry report on the facts that then requires the reader to make do their own analysis. Opinion articles seem to be what dominates traditional media outlets like the NYT and WP, while 24 hour news networks don’t even label it as opinion, they just bring on pundits to comment on every single thing that happens.
Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened. Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the internet has accelerated and further enabled it to the point where it feels like journalism as an institution is collapsing.
Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened
And on the other hand, it's about reporting what might happen. What I'm seeing around me is that "news reporting" is more often than not speculation about tomorrow's events, rather than reporting about today's events. Maybe it's for the same reason, reporters feel that today's events have already been covered to death because of the hype news cycle, so they turn to speculation rather than confirmation and contextualization?
> Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened.
No, it hasn't become any more about that than it has been for centuries. How it's changed within the recent past is it's become more diverse in the ideological slant of outlets, so every major outlet isn't telling you the same thing to think about what happened, regardless of slight divergences in the information they select to include about what actually happened. So, more of the difference in outlets is on narrative/spin than fact details. This makes the spin more noticeable.
For general news, I would still prefer the common touchstone, and diversity of an Economist, FT, Post or NYT. Each of these papers has their weak and strong points (ie. some have covered tech better than others).
In more specialized fields, sure nothing beats an expert.
I still don't understand why (apart from money) the major cable news networks allow Paid Partner trash to fill up the bottom of the front page of their websites. "Leading gut doctor: I beg every American to throw out this vegetable NOW!" type nonsense.
> "Leading gut doctor: I beg every American to throw out this vegetable NOW!" type nonsense.
That and obscure investments into shitcoins. I get that the FDA and every other public health agency worldwide has more pressing problems than quacks, but what are the SEC and their European counterparts doing all day? I'd expect them to investigate scams and questionably legal "investment" opportunities.
>but what are the SEC and their European counterparts doing all day?
Raking in the $$$ fining banks for missing technicalities on reporting and whatnot.
Look at the incentives and you can predict the outcome.
It's the same reason the DOT spends their time harassing scrap haulers and dump trucks for being a few pounds overweight rather than trying to track down the people driving on no sleep or systematically skirting the rules. Fining people for petty BS is the financial meat and potatoes of their operation. Good Old Fashioned Police Work (TM) is just a loss leading sideshow to keep public approval high enough to get money. It's like how Red Bull's primary business is selling energy drinks but they also have a bunch of extreme sports ventures for PR purposes.
Pretty much every enforcement agency is like that. You want to see the EPA, OSHA or SEC or whoever levy big company ending fines that scare everyone into compliance then you need to take away the low effort to enforce petty stuff that is the bulk of their revenue stream.
Do you actually read the economist? The publication has downgraded quality enormously since 2004, when I first start reading the economist as a subscriber and not casually.
For the economist to make sense you have to accept reality in very simplistic terms, e.g. "US/NATO good, Iran/Russia/China bad". If you can live with this simple worldview, than the ecconomist is fine.
Well said. I think there is an element were individuals in the system, say journalists like Greenwald, may understand and see how dishonest their organization has become, and how it’s turning into a partisan tabloid, and some of the audience do too. However, they can’t easily voice their opinion or disagree without paying a price. Granted in this case he did speak up and put his job on the line, but many others probably just stay quiet and employed. So the tabloidization just spreads like cancer.
On another level I think they are selling their ability to change public opinion. That’s for to anyone willing to pay. Large companies, governments, political campaigns and so on.
Chomsky said somewhere that with media like this, you can often invert what they are saying to find the truth. Especially if they say “don’t look here, nothing to see here, look over there instead”. That could be a clue there is something really interesting they are hiding. The more effort they are expending, the more interesting the information. This laptop story has that kind of a vibe to it.
If there was nothing to it, and it was a fabrication, they would gladly turn it into a 24/7 advertisement money maker, exposing the fakery and showing everyone their journalistic investigative skills. But this level of suppression certainly raises my eyebrows...
Why would Substack solve this? It's just a more refined Medium with better monetization opportunities. Being on Substack doesn't mean the author is trustworthy, only that they have content that people will engage with (and potentially pay for), which is still the same KPI you're referring to.
Substack allows you to subscribe (paid) to an individual journalist or publication. They can then post long-form stories to your inbox. That gives them the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with you where credibility matters.
At any rate, that is the argument. I don't think it will work, because buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive. Hell, buying it one paper at a time is too expensive. The better approach is the Apple News Plus or Google News one, where you pay a single subscription for a very wide range of outlets.... But, their idea isn't crazy.
> "buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive"
Yes and no. It is if you want to get all of your daily news that way. But if it's an area you care about and you're somewhat affluent, it's well worth the money. (I'd think a good chunk of HN e.g. has a subscription to Stratechery)
It's a workable strategy for a few extremely good journalists. But there are a lot of issues with it.
Societally, this is problematic in that it makes decent reporting a luxury good. Long-term, this is a problem because there's no institution where junior journalists can learn the trade. In terms of information, it's a problem because there'll likely be no way to get a wider overview of world news in that way.
Here are licensing the right to consume text without any ownership or ability to redistribute. It's more akin to Netflix.
And people are already complaining about having to pay too many aggregators, paying per TV episode is completely out of the question as the way forward.
I did too, until I realized that Taibbi is basically the exact same thing we are all railing against here. It quickly becomes clear that Taibbi puts out almost nothing but counter-outrage porn. Virtually every article was some variation on how the media is stoking public anger against wrongthink.
And it’s not that I think he’s wrong. I think he’s absolutely right. The problem is that it’s basically nothing but opinion pages from someone I already agree with. That’s not news, and it’s not journalism. The problem with modern journalism is that opinion columns seem to have completely overtaken plain, boring reporting. It’s text media outlets mirroring the strategies of 24 hour news networks, in which simply reporting the news is given an increasingly small amount of attention, in favor of “analysis” from pundits and panelists who basically tell an individual what to think. People simply find the outlet or panelist that most closely agrees with what they already feel.
Taibbi doesn’t fix this, he is literally just more of the same. He just does it with a less mainstream viewpoint that appeals to people like you and me.
I also subscribe to Taibbi. I have a slightly more positive impression than you.
Yes, it's true that his thing is meta-journalism with dollops of amusingly worded outrage - "the first pebbles from the towering Matterhorn of bullshit that was the Steele dossier" was an enjoyable sentence in a recent article.
But it isn't just opinion. He backs up his statements with references, facts, summaries of what's going on and generally puts what's happening in context, which is exactly what a journalist is meant to do. I can't possibly follow the whirlwind of immediately forgotten "scandals" that typify American political news, nor can I or do I want to spend all my time watching CNN or obsessively following other US news outlets. I'm not even in the US. But the summarisation of what's happening Taibbi does is useful to me because the meta-story of what's happening with the distribution of news is interesting and relevant. For instance, I learned about how the US media were ignoring the Hunter Biden story via Taibbi. I'm not interested in Hunter Biden but I am interested in the descent of the US media landscape into being an arm of the Democrats. That's what Taibbi (and Greenwald) are currently providing, and it's worth paying for.
> But it isn't just opinion. He backs up his statements with references, facts, summaries of what's going on and generally puts what's happening in context, which is exactly what a journalist is meant to do.
No it’s not. Most opinion pieces have some kind of facts or summaries included to make their argument. The difference between journalism and the newsroom is that they stop at the facts and the summaries, and opinions go on to tell you how you should interpret them (in the author’s view). That’s what Taibbi does. I too tend to agree with his opinions, but people here are confusing “agreeing with his opinions” with “he’s a much better journalist than those found in standard media outlets”. He shouldn’t be considered a journalist, as he exclusively writes opinion pieces.
I think you mean he shouldn’t be considered a reporter, which is the term for a journalist who reports the news with minimal interpretation. There are very few reporters left.
>buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive.
I think this closed view is partially do to how we consume media as a service vs. a cheap one time payment/view.
I'm not sure if substack is a solution or if micropayments will ever kick off, but I don't see how it is more expensive to pay the journalist directly if the mass publishing mechanism is solved.
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. It may turn out that the "V" in MVP here necessarily required monetization, for those who see journalism as the search for truth, not the search for clicks, to take the leap of going indie. Certainly if that trend continues we ought to expect larger organization - where solo-indies merge into mini-guilds, and so on, hopefully to the point where these become large organizations comparable to the 'old' media companies before they shifted away from journalism. Certainly Taibbi and Greenwald could be the first "dyad" to collaborate within this alternative media universe, so that might give us a clue of what organizing principles this new world may operate under, with these new incentives.
Being on Substack solves the problem of censorship by way of one's editor or organization. It re-introduces the problem of unedited journalism; i.e journalism that isn't passed through a degree of peer review to ensure rigour. It seems as though it's no longer guarantee both full journalistic freedom and rigour at the same time.
The "peer review" being provided by most media outlets appears to be worse than useless, as Greenwald's experience shows. Typos and spelling errors can be fixed by machines for a very long time already. Editing for space is less necessary when writing for the infinitely long pages of the web - a good writer knows how much detail their audience wants better than an editor does. It's not clear why news has to be filtered through biased editors anymore when technology has eliminated space and distribution constraints.
A nitpick on technical language: what you describe is a _positive_ feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is one that is able to calibrate its output by applying corrections to fluctuations. On the other hand, a positive feedback is one which can grow out of control, because it does the opposite. I think that's what you meant when describing how failing media outlets will double-down on the wrong strategy.
> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press.
That's a big 'if'. The 'media's value prop is not to promote a free press. Those that believe that to be the case are quickly going extinct.
> This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. [...] I think the market will correct this error
If it's true (I don't think it is), and to the degree that you can sustain a business over many years. I don't think it's even possible to be true, because the money itself is corrupting. The market cannot correct what doesn't require correction.
I think where your analysis fails is that you presume that the media has shifted their position on their own. They haven't; they've reacted to the public. It's actually a positive feedback loop, not negative -- it's just that it's positive in the direction you dislike. We cannot depend on or hope for market correction. A free press in modern times requires public funding.
And a vast majority of Fox's growth has been from talking faces, not news. Tucker Carlson has mentioned several times that he's "not the news", but an opinion commentator. I think this reinforces the OPs point.
Maybe we need to have more strict regulations on what can call itself a "news agency", when most of its programming is entertainment opinion commentary.
Many journalists lobbied themselves into a position where they can only be seen as opinion commentators, so we have little else anymore. You just have to pick the opinion you like most. This is not an endorsement of Carlson, just for the record.
It goes back to what a company's value proposition is. Media companies certainly benefit from optimizing this KPI, but it means they are now going to become entertainment companies. This isn't necessarily "bad" from the standpoint of the media companies or their shareholders, but insofar as the people who make up those organizations still want the company's value proposition to their customers to be providing journalism, the company has failed. Given the culture of journalism being a mission-oriented pursuit, it's fair to assume that many people will feel remorse at these changes occurring within these organizations, even if those organizations become very valuable entertainment companies.
It's not a trap, it just is. In the end you're forced to choose: revenue or something else?
"Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value ... when we optimize for X but are indifferent to Y, we by default actively optimize against Y, for all Y that would make any claims to resources" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
They are an alternative, but not a substitute for institutional journalism.
News exists to give you an approximate representation of what is happening without having to invest too much effort in actual investigation. It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.
There is no royal road to trust in journalism, to paraphrase a famous mathematician. If venerable institutions such as the New York Times can be corrupted by the transition to new media and the excesses of the zeitgeist, then there is no quick fix in the form of trust in institutions.
The web, more than any other medium before it, has elevated the individual. Therefore, it stands to reason that we ought to place our trust in the individual alone, for whom reputation remains meaningful, and for whom the holding of accountability remains possible.
Agreed. It is the best approach. I think it is laughable that editorial reasons for publishing are brought to front. I actually remember the political articles I read from the last years. I wouldn't have released the Biden story but certainly not because of alleged editorial reasons. Everyone lies, but you should set sensible limits.
One source of news that I find particularly trustworthy and impartial (partially because there is no way to financially profit from twisting it, AFAIK) is Wikipedia's current events page[0].
Someone else shared this on HN in the last few weeks, and I've been looking at it almost daily.
> It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.
While this may be true theoretically, it's already been disproven in practice. People believe almost anything posted on the Internet, whether it is a no-name website or a random tweet that goes viral.
It won't work, we will simply just have a collection of disparate, narrowly focused and financially limited sources, from which anyone can draw to reinforce whatever view of the world they already have. You need an instution with the resources to look deep and wide and enough of a reputation that people will listen when it reports something they do not like.
It isn’t reasonable to expect independent journalists to take over the work that news media currently engages in. While there are legitimate criticisms of media companies becoming too large and being driven by outrage based engagements, they also provide the resources for some of the best journalists to spend a large part of their lives dedicated to digging into a story rather than worrying about how to make ends meet.
The press is a pillar of American democracy. Independent journalists are great but they just won’t have the same power or credibility as they do when they’re organized.
And, to the degree that they're actually doing investigative journalism, it's really hard to see how the finances work out. I guess there's patronage of various sorts but that tends not to work very well and certainly isn't very scalable.
My sense is that trust is the invariant in the reader-writer relationship. (Lack of) financing is one method to undermine trust, and a method that news organizations are not immune to. Just look at what the internet has done to them!
I'm curious about independent accreditation that journalists can attain and what kind of signal that could provide to contemporary distribution methods. It's easier for Twitter's algorithm to trust such an agency than it is to somehow infer credibility from the lame like/retweet signals it has direct access to.
If I take your argument at face value (that you want to maximise trust), publishing an article which is critical of someone is likely to reduce the audience's trust in you - I believe this holds true in personal interactions, whether or not they agree and whether or not you are being truthful.
So it doesn't seem to me that it's "trust" you are aiming for here.
Agree, but maybe "the market" will NOT correct this error, maybe we need some key regulations, or maybe we need a little more infusion of money to public-funded journalism?
Call me a pessimist, but this core issue is a threat to democracy, and I'm not sure we can rely entirely on "the market" to auto-correct itself.
This is a really great way of looking at the problem. Unfortunately it’s also really hard to balance the incentives throughout a media org in a way that works - see pg’s famous “submarine” article. There’s just too much value in manipulating your audience, selling or trading access, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pkCZBjgrk Glenn Greenwald on fox news (starting with 4:00) My summary: During the last four years the left lost its scepticism towards the secret service, this as the CIA has tried to topple Trump. Now they are in the same boat (in his words 'full union with') the CIA/security state. Snowden was motivated by his anger at the interference of the NSA in internal affairs (who are all supposed to deal in foreign affairs only), now the whole lot is deep within internal matters and 'telling Americans what to think'. He says the whole thing is very dangerous - as the CIA guys are professional disinformation specialists with an authoritarian mindset, and they are likely to gain a lot of influence.
I agree there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism. But who would anyone trust? The incentives in the media point towards pandering and outraging. Left to the shareholders a news organization is mandated to maximize short term profit in whatever way it can. So capitalism is out. Perhaps a benevolent billionaire could support such an effort? But again, who would trust him? Its a pikle.
there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism
There are new media organizations that do very good work, independently. But you have to look for them, and most people are too lazy to bother seeking out quality journalism when the garbage is forced in front of them every waking second by social media.
The other problem is that most of the good work is regional. WTTW in Chicago, The Texas Tribune in Texas, various public radio stations around the country. There's plenty of good journalism. But it's an effort to piece it all together.
I have looked, many times, and I have not been able to find a single institution I would trust to keep me broadly informed. I do not think the problem is lazyness. What would you recommend for US coverage?
Your last point is really good but there is still such a thing as a national political scene and federal government in the US, and it's a beat that we can expect a journalistic institution to cover. (despite an entire continent rolling up to those 535+ really important people).
This was a story about one of two people running for President, and an allegedly corruption-focused outlet wouldn't run it. Wtf. "Trump is worse" isn't a reason not to run that, we all know, it's everywhere all the time in all media.
This is among the oddest conversation for a startup focused board.
What is the market size ?
Recently there was a debacle in India where a news channel corrupted the ratings system.
In the discussions that followed, it turns out that the news industry pays peanuts.
If there is no real market, and just passion projects and idealism- then what’s going on?
Matter of fact India is a good example of what happens. Small independent teams making good news content and the vast majority of the news corrupted into ratings farms.
It's not like there can be only one news organisation. You could say that the incentives point to making a product that most people can afford but there are still companies making $50k watches and million dollar cars.
Sure the largest news organisations will always be serving up garbage for the unwashed masses but there should still be room for one optimising for trust.
I think you just need to find a way to align incentives. Capitalism can work just fine. The reason we're in this situation in part is because the skills and resources you garner for delivering journalism happen to overlap with those needed to deliver political tabloids. We don't worry about air conditioner manufacturers magically becoming insurance companies, because its hard to do so. So ultimately if you align incentives enough I think you can make it increasingly unlikely a specific 'truth seeking' organization will slide into tabloids. But I don't know the formula. It might boil down to re-baking the culture which awards good journalism and bootstraps itself off of valid credentialism.
the danger when we do change who is President in the US is we get a complicit press, a press that does not look, and worse a press that prevents looking
This is why the antri trust against Google is so important, to make it easier for the media to sell subscriptions so as not to have to resort to clickbait.
That's not the issue here. Greenwald just doesn't like having editors and thinks he's above having them, when he's clearly not after desperately pushing a clear propaganda story.
IDK what you're talking about here since First Look Media is a non-profit that runs no ads. You talk about the need to maximize trust and stringent editorial guidelines are part of that. This is a story that even most conservative media didn't want to touch because it was so fishy. Greenwald has always worn his bias on his sleeve and the article and editorial objections (both linked from this post) are pretty clear on that. His entire article is saying the media are covering a poorly-sourced and inconclusive story aggressively enough. His opinion is larded with weaselly statements about how there's no evidence of wrongdoing but there could be. That's terrible journalism and the editor knows it. Greenwald has absolutely always been like this. He's the sensationalist and The Intercept was trying to keep him in line.
Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it's also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we're going to get are "tabloids for politics" - and that is what we see. It's just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening.
Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the "opposite side" media as tabloid-like, it's been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it's still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam's Razor to their own.
This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it's critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.