I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper.
It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse.
I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly stopped reading newspapers, and don't trust anything they write, without checking the facts.
Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it.
I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course agree there are many kinds of people who call themselves journalists many of which don't improve our society. We must fight this battle, as we must fight every battle, because that's the only way things change for the better. Do not let cynicism win.
And there's the rub. What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"?
In theory I would gladly support the theory of "quality investigative reporting", but the reality is a propagandist machine where opinion pieces replaces actual unbiased, adjective-free objective news.
As a former developer who worked closely on Thomson Reuters News feed (in the 00's), I've seen how there is almost zero fact checking for the information that appears on news feeds. Instead, news outlets trust the 'upstream' feeds and then quote the reports verbatim.
To be fair, there are those who are really awesome at doing research and releasing information that are part of the MSM. Unfortunately, there are plenty others who are not affiliated with MSM news outlets and hence aren't regarded as "reporters" per-se. These latter ones are regularly attacked via "fact checking" websites as a way to discredit them.
In short, there's a bunch of information out there and without each and every news report clearly citing original sources, then MSM or not, it must be regarded as suspect.
So for "quality investigative reporting", the actual reports must rigorously cite objective sources.
I find it mildly ironic that you link to a clip from the PBS NewsHour while, from my reading, you also imply that objective reporting or investigative reporting don't exist or are dwindling. There are clearly some sources left that are worth their salt.
In the US, I've found most PBS/NPR news broadcasts fairly objective, and the various NPR podcasts sometimes chart into investigative territory but there are other sources I rely on for this (e.g. ProPublica) which I don't expect to be just objective.
I'm not sure I understood exactly what you meant about quality investigative journalism, so forgive me if I misread. I generally agree with your comment.
> The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and Van Zandt as an "armchair media analyst."[3] The Poynter Institute notes, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[4]
I doubt that we can achieve absolute objectivity, that's why I wrote that I consider it fairly objective, not that it is. That said I don't see a reason why should Columbia Journalism Review or Poynter Institute be any better arbiters of what is correct way to measure bias. (Especially because both are competition.)
Also Poynter Institute has record of "weaknesses in the methodology".[1]
Having a bias doesn't in itself imply lack of objectivity, in relation to what we call 'facts' and 'truth'. It would seem somewhat of a coincidence if 'center' (politically) is right where that lies.
Not that I'm saying that 'reality has a liberal bias', as some would. I personally think it has a left bias, but I'm not nearly certain enough of my opinions to make that claim!
"Unbiased" or "factual" does not mean "we take both sides' opinions and put them next to each other without comment" - that's what the BBC does and it gives extremist, dangerous viewpoints far more legitimacy than they're worth. The fact that coronavirus got caught up in a bunch of political nonsense does not change that.
That's precisely what unbiased and factual means. You're actually arguing that the media should be opinionated, which is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint, but please don't try to destroy the meaning of words to make disputing your preference impossible.
Edit: I should clarify that I meant "unbiased and factual" together. Of course it's entirely possible to be both biased and factual, by choosing which facts to include.
You investigate specific claims. For example, take the claim that Covid-19 is "no worse than the flu". You could report on people making this claim, and state that others disagree. That can be considered an example of unbiased reporting, but it's nevertheless problematic as it may leave a reader with the impression that all reported-on claims are equally valid.
Choice and presentation of opinions you report on is not a neutral acitvity.
edit: I was distracted when I wrote my answer, so I missed some context. Was your question about differences in tone pointed out in a sibling comment[1]? Without having read the articles in question, at first glace, I'd considere this an example of journalistic bias.
> take the claim that Covid-19 is "no worse than the flu"
That's an interesting example of how difficult unbiased fact checking is.
To start with, there are many interpretations of the statement. Does worse mean death rate, severity of symptoms, infectiousness, or something else? What strain of the flu, and in which country? Which paper or anecdote does the fact checker cite? Because of differences like these, two fact checkers will give different ratings for the same statement.
Journalists aren't experts and shouldn't act like they are by presenting a single perspective as if it were unchallenged fact, or by injecting their own unqualified opinions. Any issue complex enough to be a matter for serious debate isn't going to be solved in an article.
They can be unbiased and report what the leading figures have said, like a camera at a televised debate, or they can be opinionated and add their voice to one of the camps, but they can't (honestly) do both.
Not everything can be fact checked in the first place and if it can, who fact checks the fact checkers? There are numerous examples of fact checking websites being factually wrong.
Compare the language in the first paragraph, describing the severity of the pandemic.
In the context of left-wing political activity, just:
> In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic
In the context of right-wing political activity, a far more frightening description:
> despite the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which continues to wreak havoc on the lives and livelihoods of households across the country.
If NPR didn't lean left, the second article could have started with a tone similar to the first: in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump campaign will address another pressing issue, restarting the American economy. The rally has prompted fears that the close contact of thousands of attendees could lead to a spike in case counts.
A campaign rally is not the same thing as a grassroots political protest by far. It's an organised event that an organiser explicitly invites people to, which primarily serves party politics rather than any particular political issue.
That still doesn't change the very obviously biased framing of the information. You can objectively describe one as more important, or more justified if you will, but manipulating the reader by speaking to his subconciousness like they did is not what should be expected from serious journalism.
I disagree - stating the different situations in different ways is entirely reasonable and to be expected. Can you find me some "serious journalism", ever, which operated in the way you describe?
It's not the political orientation of the mass gathering - it's the purpose. One is the President organising a gathering in an attempt to boost his election campaign - the other is some random people who came together to protest a specific thing.
>> COVID-19 doesn't suddenly become a "different situation" depending on the political orientation of the mass gathering.
> It's not the political orientation of the mass gathering - it's the purpose. One is the President organising a gathering in an attempt to boost his election campaign - the other is some random people who came together to protest a specific thing.
How does the purpose of a public gathering alter a virus? Does it have political awareness and dynamically modify its transmissibility according to the righteousness of the cause?
Or perhaps the purpose of a public gathering justifies journalistic framing (altering the description of the severity of the virus, which in turn alters readers mental model of reality). If it's this, what is the logic behind the justification?
I am not about to jump into a debate about which of the two is "worse", because no matter the outcome it is absolutely disingenious to frame COVID-19 as "deadly coronavirus pandemic, which continues to wreak havoc on the lives and livelihoods of households across the country" in one context and plain "coronavirus pandemic" in the other. It is the same virus. If you don't see the bias in that then consider the possibility that you share it.
Making any kind of judgment about what’s “important” or “worthy” is exactly what OP was saying - that media suffer from bias and rarely confine themselves to neutral reporting of facts.
I don't know how this fiction has to be represented in every discussion. I don't want neutral unbiased reporting if it requires giving equal time to people who think that neutral unbiased reporting is real. The selection of what's important to report is literal biasing.
You're right, determining what's newsworthy is a biased process in and of itself. But that doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, neutrality is still something we should constantly aim for, even if it's a moving target.
For example, if a media outlet compare actual vs expected turnout for a Trump rally and report that turnout was "lower than expected", it would be plainly biased not to do the same comparison for Biden. The lines are obviously going to blur at some point (where 'balance' involves publishing something far less 'newsworthy'), but it's a lot like the definition of pornography - you know it when you see it.
Besides, most modern media outlets are blatantly pushing their own narratives anyway - I'd say it's far more important that we fix this before moving on to the smaller problem of selection bias.
> What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"?
I don't think better ownership changes anything. The Guardian is owned by a trust, yet falsely reported Mark Duggan was unarmed in a front page headline (if you're unaware, this was false and the Gruan had to retract the claim after a PCC ruling).
Not sure why you're being downvoted. The biggest German left-wing newspaper (taz) is owned by a cooperative. If anything, I find it more annoyingly partisan than other newspapers. It's a hard problem.
The problem isn't bias/partisanship. You can't have any one source be truly unbiased and if you're aware of the politics behind any given source you can neutralise it and temper it with multiple sources from opposite camps.
The problem is that we're not being delivered news-as-information, we're sold news-as-entertainment.
In some parts of tech people treat politics as a team sport, so criticism of their 'team' (even pointing out mistakes acknowledged by the publications) is considered to be punishable.
Indeed. The Guardian Trust has also ruled in editorial complaints that factual inaccuracies in the opinion section are fine, which seems to be to be incredibly irresponsible.
IMO we need some kind of data driven media/data driven reporting/data driven newspaper type thing.
Then we can have reporting/debate/conversation on the meaning of the data but without the filters we use to have in place all reporting has essentially become meaningless, untrustworthy, opinion pieces.
> I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting.
Where do I find quality investigative reporting?
I support the Guardian and two regional/local newspapers and I' also forced to pay for the state run broadcaster here but I have to say that I also find myself reading a number of other sources to figure out what is really going on (for the Scandinavians here I'm one of those who will happily look to both Klassekampen and Document, in addition to vg.no and nrk to figure out what is really going on in certain cases, and I understand I am not alone in this).
Once you know a bit of history and a number of different angles you realize some things are horribly complicated and big media is making things worse by pushing misinformation, and by conveniently omitting facts. My favourite example from my favourite (i.e. least despised) local mainstream media source: X fired at a number of positions in neighbouring country Y yesterday. <Long article about this>. <Towards the end:> This happened after a barrage of rockets was fired from these positions shortly before. And that is the most honest of them. The rest seemed to just omit the fact that part Y fired first.
PS: The reason I support some of them is 1) because I feel it is the right thing to do. 2) because I feel at least one of them have actually managed to do some great quality investigative reporting as well as some great feature stories in between. We talk about certain companies and public healthcare organizations getting some much needed sunlight.
Abrams Foundation, Altman Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Barr
Foundation, The William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, The Peter and Carmen
Lucia Buck Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Craigslist
Foundation, Davis Wright Tremaine, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation,
Democracy Fund, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Dyson Foundation,
Emerson Collective, The Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation,
Goldhirsh Foundation, The Jerome L. Greene Foundation, Heising-Simons
Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Joyce
Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, John S. and James
L. Knight Foundation, Leon Levy Foundation, The John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation, Metabolic Studio, Park Foundation, The Lisa
and John Pritzker Family Fund, Charles H. Revson Foundation, Sandler
Foundation, Select Equity Foundation, Skoll Global Threats Fund,
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Solidarity Giving
I've come to really enjoy long-form podcast investigative reporting, as there's enough content that it's pretty obvious whether proper journalistic work has been done or not.
My favorite in that vein is 'In The Dark' by APM Reports, which was a massive eye-opener for me in terms of flaws in the justice system (especially Season 2).
I'm all for quality investigative reporting, but that is not something that 99% of journalists do.
I've been interviewed by journalists a few times and I've seen at least a half-dozen other people be interviewed. The articles published are totally disconnected from what was actually said. Heck, I've had a journalist make up a quote and attribute it to me.
Don't talk to journalists. If you must, record everything.
How would you measure good journalism? In OP’s case they could only see a given journalist was bad by personally witnessing the falsity. You don’t get many opportunities like that unfortunately.
I do think some journalism is good. Many reporters at the Financial Times come to mind for example. But I found your reply did not really address the nature of OP’s complaint.
Financial Times is considered one of the least biased papers out there. I feel the quality dropped a bit recently but in general,they are ligh years ahead compared to the usual suspects of this world.
Also stopped reading any news and reports from big media about 3 years ago.
Just curious are there any independent investigation journalists that work on the patreon/subscription model? Would consider donation them rather than NYT or WSJ.
It's difficult (for values that soon reduce to impossible) to get press accreditation as an independent journalist.
There are plenty of scrappy little online micronewspapers now, usually with an evident political slant, and some of them do real investigative journalism.
But there's no chance they'll get the direct access to the political system their mainstream cousins do.
It's also incredibly easy to astroturf fake news at that level, so not all of those sites are reliable.
The point about the MSM is that they're mass media with a huge subscriber/reader base. That's what gives them their leverage.
Exactly. The main problem is MSM with corporate money behind it. Getting things wrong is normal, getting things wrong intentionally (or recklessly) is malicious.
Are they doing independent investigative journalism, though? I jumped around in the episode a bit and it just sounds like talk radio commentary/opinion that cites MSM sources.
It's more like media analysis I think. Both John and Adam take clips from main-stream/internet media and try to examine it. I think they do a very good job at that. There's a long donation segment because the show is produced by listeners. Sound effects and such started out as a joke but listeners like it, and almost everything around the show is done by the community, including the website, shownotes, and transcripts.
Adam was on Rogan in March. I recommend watching that episode.
I don't think so, but I've been listening to them for years. They criticize all sides, but one needs to listen to a few episodes to get into it, because they do have their own style of inside-jokes/jargon that might make first-time listener feel a bit lost, but that's the case with most indie/alternative media I think.
There's plenty of independent journalists on YouTube/Patreon/Alt-Tech, some more reliable than others. Hopefully, in the future, more people will start getting their news from the independent YouTube/Alt-Tech journalists who wound up migrating to those platforms after they were laid off from their mainstream media publications during the past decade of layoffs for that industry. Anyone can find a list of such YouTube/Alt-Tech channels by searching Reddit. Of course, that also means having to go through the process of weeding out the biased low quality journalists. Hard hitting debates are rather rare on YouTube, but, as a general rule, I have found that the YouTubers who are willing to debate others (and who present facts during that debate) are better sources of information than those who are unwilling to ever debate anyone.
Vice (NYT reporter involved in the overall ordeal) got a person they doxxed to be kicked off Patreon aka their livelihood for some period of time before after she (the person) retaliated against Vice — SexyCyborg. Not sure if there’s a space or not.
Though they are sunsetting their platform, there were a bunch of high quality newsrooms on Civil which can be supported via donations. I recommend checking out https://readsludge.com/ & https://popula.com/, for local news Block Club Chicago, FAQ NYC, Gotham Gazette, The Colorado Sun.
That is deed my criterion as well: I support independent investigative publications only (and I read few other sources, haven't had TV for nearly two decades for instance).
I'm not sure about individual journalists, but The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project has a donate button. If there's a journalist whose work you admire, you could check if they have Patreon. https://www.occrp.org/en
> Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society.
Statistical significance is not the only epistemological tool around. I would even argue that, outside of some scientific fields, it is really not that important (and might even lead to a lot of wrong conclusions in the context that is used nowadays, but that is a different discussion altogether).
We are not some dumb statistical machine. We have an entire model of the world in our heads, and one single observation can have profound implications on it. The journalist reports to an editor, who maintains a system of job promotions, and all of this is connected to an institution that holds very real power. The OP observed this journalist manipulating the story, not in a random direction, but in their view in a direction that would appeal to the status quo. It is normal to update one's map of reality when confronted with first-person experience of an event that goes against what you've been told, and when the simplest explanation for how the world works changes in light of this direct observation.
And this is also how your mind works, and this is also how you formed your views on reality, including repeating the "N=1" cliché. None of it has anything to do with p-values.
Quality investigative reporting is even more tricky because it's even harder to double-check
In my country, there's a supposedly quality investigative reporting outlet. I did trust them for years. Then one time they did report on something I happened to know more details from other sources. Their reporting was complete BS bending facts to come to opposite conclusions.
Months later it turned out that political party loved favoured by those journalists had an internal struggle and the dude in article above happened to be on the "wrong" side. The report was about his overseas business, not political affairs. As a bonus point, "good" side was involved in bribery scandal.
Another investigative outlet recently published a series of reports on another politician that comes from unfavourable party in among mainstream media journalists. So far all of those reports seem to have little substance and they seem to be in she-said, he-said gray area at best. I'm pretty sure the dude do have skeletons under his bed. But investigative journalists seem to just post whatever rumors they got and see what sticks. Which is not exactly helping their quality investigative reporting image.
I was going to say that we could defer to whistleblowers instead but I realized that that term has also been loosely used. That said, it’s not journalists but news organizations that shouldn’t be trusted.
That's a problem specific to news reporting, not journalism as a whole. I consider news reporting seperate from investigative journalism. What happened is far easier to report and consume than a report on why it happened. So, a better filter against biased news reporting, better than averaging, is taking a longer view and reading more comprehensive analyses. You can spin everything, but I find the more the article tends towards a study (investigative journalism), the blatant spinners drop off exponentially. Any bias is usually clear in such texts and therefore easily accounted for.
I think unfortunately journalists are trained to take phrases out of context so that they sound "sensational" / trigger emotional responses in the readers. You quickly find that out if give out interviews - you need to be very mindful how things may sound if taken out of context.
E.g. a while ago a newspaper here took me an interview/ they were building a story about people that had somewhat remarkable results in school & ample opportunities to leave (e.g. I participated in IOI and had 2 medals), and still chose to stay in the country - what were their motives, how it turned out for them. During the interview, I mentioned something along the lines that "I earn well enough to afford everything that I want, and my friends/family is here, I'm used to the local culture, etc". As a result, "I can afford everything" became basically the headline.
Wealth is one of the classic ones that journalists like stretching. My mom, a classical musician, got asked about her wages, and after some back and forth (since they varied by the job, of course), she was given this more specific question: "what's the most you made from a gig?" The sum she replied with, of course, made it into the resulting magazine article as an hourly average. Cue the stinkeyes from colleagues.
This is so common in British press of lower quality: an engineer on £80K salary gets arrested for x,y,z. A man in his 30s left his £2M house before he decided to steal money from the donation box and etc.
In Britain: very unlikely. I think sometimes journalists know the exact salaries ( public servants) or simply guess based on job title. The same with house prices. Again, the chances of getting anything through courts are very slim.
I don't think that distinction is helpful. Journalism is too important to our society for us to give the profession a free pass by giving the shadier parts a different name.
I'm sure that wasn't your intention but a profession won't improve if there's a way for its practitioners to shrug off criticism by telling themselves some version of the no true Scotsman fallacy.
My friend's cousin got involved in some shady activities and some regional newspaper ran a full page article on this. That's where a 2 bedroom semi detached in a not so glamorous part of a small town became: a large villa in a leafy part of the town...
The father of one of my neighbours recently died in a house fire. It was a tragic accident, nothing sinister. The whole family could be described as boringly average with nothing of note about them. The family refused all requests for interviews from the media.
That didn't stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family photos (both old and more recent ones) and published pictures of the whole family. The family could deal with the headlines, but that someone leaked family photos to the paper really hit them hard.
The story was so sensationalised and gory and completely off the scale. A few column inches would have sufficed, instead it was double page spread implying the family was in turmoil. The paper turned an already painful family situation in to an absolute nightmare.
My favourite example of all time of journalistic shamelessness is ABC reporting that Robin Williams's were "respectfully asking for privacy" following his death, while a banner at the top of the same page advertised live aerial footage of Robin Williams's home:
Two different countries. There was a big hoo-ha in 1916 about all that.
But this isn't slander. The Indo didn't lie they grossly exaggerated the truth in a gory manner.
Yes, the daughter was distraught - why wouldn't she be in the circumstances? But the Indos headline was along the lines of "AGONY AND PAIN FOR name AS FATHER PERISHES IN NORTH-SIDE INFERNO". This was accompanies by lots of quotes from anonymous "friends and family" about how she and her family were suffering. This article featured lots of personal photos. The really sore things about this is that these photos were only on display in her house, someone she trusted took copies with a smartphone and sent them to the paper.
As she is the copyright owner of some of the pictures I am going to suggest she invoice the paper for reproduction fees when she feels up to it.
The Republic of Ireland is situated on the island of Ireland, which is itself one of the archipelago known as the British Isles (a term which is offensive to certain people from the Republic). Other entities which sit on the British Isles include the Isle of Man and the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", comprising four nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). Great Britain is one of the British Isles, and it contains most of Wales, Scotland, and England.
Many, many years ago, I was the foreman on a murder trial in our little town. In the jury selection process, the public defender -- a good, respected, local attorney -- asked the first candidate pool if they had read about the murder in the local paper. Almost everyone had. Then he asked if any of them had ever had a story written about them, or, say, their business, in this local paper. Three or four people raised their hand. Then he simply asked, "Did they get it right?" Everyone shook their head. Everyone laughed, and he moved on. Point made. That was my eye-opener.
I had a similar experience with reporters. I worked on a commercial product, on release someone just opening store had a sale, some reporter interpreted that sale as dumping a failing product and wrote that story. No amount of proof to the contrary would get them to retract. Whether or not it effected sales I have no idea but I learned some reporters are scum
There is also the phenomenon of reading articles about topics I know well and haven them be completely wrong which leads to to at least entertain the idea that the same is true for topics i don't know about. No idea what the solution is.
Some things to keep in mind when doing any interview.
First, know what message you want to get across, and focus on that.
Second, avoid almost all "what if" type hypothetical questions.
Third, make your own recording of any interview, and make sure the reporter is aware that you are doing so.
I was fortunate enough to be part of some media training early in my career, where the trainer (an ex-TV reporter) recorded an interview with one of the participants. The next day they played for us the video they had put together splicing different questions into the interview and editing down the responses. The resulting "interview" was a real hit piece, and the editing was done smoothly enough that it presented as a single continuous take (even with the switching camera angles). It would have been very damaging if it had been broadcast like that, and without proof that it was faked the PR effort to counteract it would have been challenging.
I'd say even more simply, don't talk to the press without the intermediation of a competent PR professional.
It's the same reason you don't talk to the police without a lawyer. Even if you're the cleverest person in the world, you're playing a game against an opponent who does this for a living and holds all the cards.
Many years ago, a close family friend, who was a police officer in a small town, committed suicide. The local television news kept trying to find the man's children and wife in the days immediately following his suicide to ask them questions. Because there's no informative news value to the general public in his family's reactions -- of course they're heartbroken and grieving, their beloved husband/father took his own life -- it was clear that the media just wanted to air emotional people to appeal to viewers.
I stopped watching television news -- because the vast majority of 'news' programs are just entertainment with a veneer of news.
First and foremost, I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired. NYT is a reputable journal and shouldn't tolerate such unprofessional and potentially dangerous behavior. The person breached a few lines of ethical journalism, and for no justified reason:
First, purposefully using an incorrect name (and Scott Alexander's online identity is Scott Alexander). In many other cases, even if the name is known publicly, and it is (or was) a legal anme, a journalist does not need to write it.
Second, for everyone having vocal opinions, it puts them in real danger. If revealing someone's identity (or a threat of such) makes someone close their blog, the journalist have already made their damage.
Third, it erodes trust in journalists. Such journalists make any other journalism harder, as people have justified reasons not to talk. Not every person wants to increase their risk.
I hope that until the journalist gets fired, no activist, whistleblower, a person who wants to speak about professional malpractice, controversial artist etc. won't talk to NYT. For their own safety.
The NYT isn't reputable anymore. Haven't been for a while. Case in point, this article they might publish.
They fired most of their senior editors in 2017 because they were both too expensive and enforcing old school journalist standards and integrity which doesn't generate clicks like hot handed opinion pieces followed by reverse opinion pieces does.
Though mind you that senior group was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, so take their integrity with a grain of salt.
As an NYT subscriber, I'm very concerned by this, but I think it's ironic that people skeptical of the media because they don't wait to get facts right are so willing to jump to the conclusion that Scott's account is the full story. I'm inclined to believe Scott, but just as a remotely plausible hypothetical: there's also been rumors of a hit piece floating around for a few days[1]. Maybe they uncovered something Scott doesn't want out there besides just his identity and this is his way of seeding distrust before it gets out.
If the piece can run without the guy's name then it should.
If he's violating HIPAA or something, then sure, name names. But if it's simply about the content of the blog, then his nomme de guerre should suffice.
Isn't this just speculation? He gave out enough good reasons for his identity to not be known, the biggest is that he works as a professional psychiatrist with clients of wide ranging political stances.
He's also, I suspect (I don't follow his blog), given and written enough to at least earn enough good faith to be taken at his word.
Yes, I give him the benefit of the doubt, but at the time I wrote the comment NYC was barely awake yet and people were already cancelling their subscriptions and calling for the journalist to be fired.
To be honest, I was hoping NYT would have cleared things up by now, but I've been monitoring Twitter and haven't seen anything.
I guess part of the problem is that there are few reputable sources. Reuters still seems ok. So does Financial Times. WSJ dropped in quality, but still seems to cater well tonita audience.
Or US-aligned coups. Passive voice and aggressively dodging the word "coup" can go a long way.
All awfully convenient for the State Department, and equally convenient for the paper's relationships with their contacts within it and other parts of the US government.
> I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired.
Not going to happen. The reporter was doing his job. No one will lose their job just because your favorite blogger agreed to go on the record for an interview and is not upset that his identity will be revealed.
Breaking trust, going against wished how people prefer to be addressed and endangering people for now good reason - well, it's at most style of irresponsible, tabloid-level journalism.
If NYT aims for tabloid level standard, indeed, the journalist was doing his job.
> Breaking trust, going against wished how people prefer to be addressed and endangering people for now good reason - well, it's at most style of irresponsible, tabloid-level journalism.
Did you read SSC's post? SSC didn't mention anything of a "promise" or "agreement" for the reporter to not use his name. The reporter found it another way.
Now, if SSC explicitly said the reporter promised not to use his name, then that opens a new can of worms.
Doxxing is not something new. Scott Alexander is clear about his anonymity.
If a journalist interviewed a popular camgirl who introduced herself as (say) LustyClaraXXX, and then "did research" to compare pictures, and revealed her legal name an occupation (say, a schoolteacher), would you consider it ethical?
> If a journalist interviewed a popular camgirl who introduced herself as (say) LustyClaraXXX, and then "did research" to compare pictures, and revealed her legal name an occupation (say, a schoolteacher), would you consider it ethical?
It really depends on the context of the story, with additional nuances that a competent editor must consider:
Is this camgirl the central figure of this story?
What are her reasons for not revealing her real name?
You say she is a school teacher. What kind of teacher? Is she a well-known professor? Is she someone who teaches kindergarten?
Does she make more money from camming than being a teacher? That in itself could be another story about the system.
> Journalists shouldn't print anonymous articles. Journalists should use anonymous sources as little as possible.
Correct. But there are times when anonymous sources are necessary. Look at WaPo and NYT's political coverage. They use many political insiders who can't go on the record but reveal necessary information for the public.
One example: Trump's "shit hole countries" comment. That came from anonymous sources who were in the room, backed up with a few on-the-record commends from outsiders.
It baffles me when people trust the "news", _especially_ if they only consume news within their own little bubble. I was interviewed a couple of times on technological topics (once by a NYT journalist), and was once in the middle of events that were reported on, so I knew what actually happened. In all three cases what was printed was total clickbait horseshit that had nothing to do with reality. So if a journalist wants to talk to me now, I will only do it if it generates clickbait horseshit that's good for me somehow.
You can always agree for an interview on a condition of receiving final draft before it gets published and having a say on it. Whether they agree or not depends on how many other sources they have for that story.
I had a similar experience in Iraq. I had saw an attack happen and then heard the CNN report about it a few hours later and it wasn't even in the realm of what happened. It was surreal.
This may be slightly off topic here, but I attended a birthday party of a friend last year. Long story short, there was a guy at the same pub who OD'd and my wife and I helped him until the ambulance arrived. There was a 'reality' TV cameraman with them and we didn't want him filming us so I asked him to stop. His tactic was to shove the camera in my face and make snide remarks to provoke a reaction. When I put my hand up and stepped back, the guy tilted the camera back really quickly and took a knee panning it up at me, and started saying things like "you hit me! That's assault". To this day I have no idea what ended up being shown, if anything, but it was an eye opening experience about the abject dishonesty involved in reality TV. I can just as easily see that applied to TV journalism.
After getting in trouble with the law and getting the story in the paper as a kid, I realized people like a simple narrative which matches with their expectations. Reality is complicated and people just don't have time for it. Not the cops, not the media, and not the readers.
Having seen the inside of a few events and the reporting produced in response, I'd say a healthy dose of scepticism is usually warranted when reading about something you have no personal involvement in.
In fact one of the worst experience for me in terms of trust for the media was working at a startup. The willingness of journalists to produce puff pieces, or print press releases virtually verbatim, on the basis of 5 minutes of SQL queries cobbled together and cherry picked to produce the desired result was frightening.
News organisations pander to their audience, so I think it's really important to understand what that audience is. If you happen to be in that target audience, then of course there's a real risk you'll end up in an echo chamber that becomes increasingly far away from anything resembling a consensus reality.
I've come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different target audiences. I occasionally read the Daily Mail (my mother gets it, don't judge) and the Guardian. My main source of general news is the BBC news site, but I also regularly read The Economist. From time to time I pop on to the Fox News site, partly to remind myself that the Daily Mail could actually be a lot worse. I listen to LBC in the car (A London based politics and current affairs talk radio show).
Genuine question - I'd be interested in how others approach this. Is my set of sources too skewed one way or another? Am I missing a decent balanced source, or should I add a credible source on any particular political leaning?
Getting the news from "both sides" is just getting two bullshit spins on the same topic, but the truth isn't in the middle.
You can get "just the facts" from outlets like Reuters. You may find that this isn't really entertaining and that really you do consume news for other reasons than getting informed. You may recognize that you actually want "the spin", you want the emotional turmoil, the sensation.
From that perspective, consuming news is more like a consuming a drug: A guilty pleasure that should not be overindulged in.
For example, you can come to a very different centre point for "both sides" by just choosing which representatives you have for both sides. The centre point of the NYT and the Guardian is very different from the centre point of the Washington Post and Breitbart.
For UK sources, I'd suggest adding The Spectator. They're not perfect (some of their columnists strike me as fairly obvious shills), but overall I've found them the most intelligent right-of-centre source.
For the Americans reading, they have a US site too, might be worth checking out?
This is not true, the spectator is a very right wing newspaper which our current pm used to edit (who was undeniably on the right wing of our the Tory party, which if you run the numbers on voting must put him in the rightmost 20% of the country).
It’s probably well written though, the irony is that the right wing press is often externally funded, not intrinsically profitable, and so has more cash in the bank to maintain high production quality, if completely destroying any pretense of neutrality.
I don't think The Spectator claims to be neutral? Everyone knows that it's a right-leaning magazine and it doesn't pretend otherwise. I'd describe myself as centre-left but I agree with GP that The Spectator is one of the better sources for a right-of-centre perspective. (I also agree with GP that there are exceptions... God I can't stand James Delingpole.)
Just because a source has an editorial slant doesn't mean it doesn't provide any insight. The problem is when journalists push their opinions on you while pretending to be impartial.
The Spectator is not only profitable (rare amongst newspapers) but has seen a surge in subscriptions. It's given back its COVID support money from the government.
It's actually the left wing papers that tend to lose money, as they're reluctant to go behind a paywall. They prioritise influence over profits. The Guardian is the clearest case of this.
Most news is worthless. What's important will have more perspective available six months from now (or, better, six years from now); what's not important is just parlor room gossip.
Reading e.g. the politics section of the NYT religiously for the past couple years, your biggest takeaway would be that Trump is an idiot who doesn't belong in office. Which, as far as it goes, is true, but there's no need to pick up a bad habit like reading the NYT in order to know that.
It's probably necessary to know enough about this week's going-ons for social reasons, to the same extent that it's necessary to know who's playing in the Super Bowl, but there are more useful ways to spend your energies.
Reminds me of when I was in elementary and one day I was sick and all my classmates met the governor. The media was obviously there and one classmate was asked to write something to say to the governor. The media claimed he was 11 but his age was 12. The teacher taught us that the media isnt always necessarily telling you the truth. There is way more bias in the media these past few years than I have ever seen so confirming sources is more important than anything. I dont usually trust "anonymous sources" unless there is accompanying hard evidence.
I learned this in college. I was head of an organization that supported a lot of activities around sports and I was interviewed by the school paper.
Had a nice conversation and then the story came out. He used 2 sentences from a 30 minute conversation to insert out of context in a piece totally unrelated to what we were talking about.
This is a pretty easy conclusion to come to theoretically, too. Any position of power is going to tend towards abuse and incompetence if there's not some sort of filter in hiring for or sustaining the institution. Newspapers live or die by clicks and subscribers: There's no incentive towards any notion of "journalistic integrity", there's no filter ensuring that journalists are especially intelligent or honest, and there's no reason to believe that the typical journalist is any less likely to abuse their position than the typical police officer.
Just as there are individual dedicated, ethical police who believe deeply in fulfilling their mission the right way, there are good journalists out there who make the world better. But for every Ronan Farrow, there are a thousand Farhad Manjoos and Cade Metzes; for every Foreign Affairs, there are a hundred New York Times or Fox News. The net effect is the same as with police: understand that we've got a horridly imperfect system chock full of dishonest actors and engage with it on those terms. Don't talk to cops without a lawyer; don't talk to a journalist without a PR person and/or a specific plan for what you're getting out of the exchange and how to protect yourself from exploitation[1].
The Internet has greatly accelerated this trend. Pre-Internet, if by some miracle you managed to get enough honest, intelligent people together in a single paper, you could establish a culture of journalistic ethics under the aegis of the slack afforded by your local monopoly on distribution. But in the Internet era, you need to be fully competitive on the terms defined by the market, which, as described above, don't point towards honest, ethical reporting at all.
The tragedy with journalism is that government is usually a useful tool to address this problem: well-crafted regulation can shape incentives such that you don't need to rely on wishing for good cops, which is the direction that police reform discussions are taking. A heavy government hand, however, is anathema to the role that journalists are supposed to play in modern society, so this tool is off the table.
I've thought about this for a very long time, and I don't know how to solve this.
[1] This obviously doesn't apply in narrow cases like "observation from man on the street"
The Times wrote a story about a play written about my life (long story) and there was a mistake in every line - most trivial and inexplicable, like guessing an age for people and getting it wrong, and some mistakes actively annoying.
Also, I once appeared in the Post and the Times in the same day when my friend and I got blown up in a steam pipe explosion (we were covered in mud but undamaged). The Times made us seem suave and hip (they mentioned my natty tie covered by mud) and the Post made us seem like victims of a tragedy. Such different pictures!
The problem is that the press drives policy decisions, so you cannot disengage completely. You would need to find a direct line of communication towards representatives without the press. We have the means for that theoretically, but it needs a lot of engagement. I think most people would benefit when cutting out classical papers.
Just by luck I've been interviewed on camera a few times, and each time Im astounded, how im not really beeing interviewed, im rather beeing asked questions phrased a certain way, so they have a certain response that fits a narrative.
In 2005, The Australian newspaper published an article claiming that Macquarie University IT Services was going to make redundant 50-60 staff. (I can't find the text of the article online, but I can find a citation for it [1].)
I remember being amused by this article, because I actually worked there at the time, and we didn't actually have 50-60 staff to make redundant. If they'd let go of 50-60 staff from our department, we would have had a negative number of employees remaining (the actual number of employees was a bit over 40). It also reinforced my tendency to distrust journalists, who often fail to get even basic facts right.
(There was an element of truth behind the story – they did plan a significant round of job cuts, 15 years later I can't recall exactly how big, but it could have been a third of the department – it was just the numbers in the article had been impossibly inflated. And the plan was never to lay off the entire department, just a significant chunk of it.)
This is interesting to me. In central Europe, or at least my country, the serious media keep very high standards.
Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals.
I find our independent media to be a key element of our democracy and I am worried when I hear the US media don't work quite the same.
Edit: I thought I might as well reply with our solutions to your bullet points
- Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist. The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians.
- The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society. (+ ads ofc)
- If one wants power to change things the far superior strategy in my country is to do the actual politics and not to report on it.
A very eye-opening event for me was when I visited Berlin in 2003 (?). We watched ZDF (government-financed German TV) news and saw a huge crowd protesting against Bush’s war in Iraq. Wanting to join them, we found a mostly empty square with a much smaller group of protestors standing in a triangle-formation in front of the cameras, which were setup such that the crowd would appear massive on TV.
So if you think European media are free of political bias and distortions, think again.
I know nothing of ZDF, but right now our state public tv is also in a very bad shape.
It used to have high quality, but in the previous government period one of the ruling parties changed the management and now it's not objective at all. In fact, all the respected journalists left for other media and the reputation of the organisation is tarnished (polls show people don't trust it anymore).
Independent objective media are the lifeblood of democracy. You literally cannot have a healthy democracy without a strong and independent fourth estate.
For a long time I underestimated how much of a bedrock requirement this is. It's easy to dismiss the media as entertainment at best or noise at worst.
But at best they model fairness, balance, and rationality, and if you have no one doing that in public the quality of discourse soon crashes.
I often wonder if the news/media has been purposefully weakened as an institution over time, so as to keep the populace more ignorant and controllable by people in power.
I guess it goes in cycles though. Apparently in the 1890s it was _actually worse_!?
I don't think the media has been weakened. I think that the media has always been this bad. Perhaps even worse. The public just didn't know about it, because it was a lot harder to verify the facts through other means.
> The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians
The news (public service) I consume from time to time does this too. However while they try to not favor a particular political side they often instead fail towards trying to find dissent where there is none.
They invite some people with supposedly “opposing” views and then spend the time trying to provoke a fight. Usually it’s just people highlighting different perspectives with no interest in representing some kind of conflict over the matter.
Would you mind sharing which country are you talking about? I'm from another country in central Europe and the situation is same as in the USA or western Europe.
Ok, I'm not expert on Slovak media, but quick search shows that SME is owned by Penta (Gorilla), HN by Andrej Babis (Berlusconi-like figure), Dennik N is listed on wikipedia as newspaper having liberal slant, Reflex liberal-conservative slant, Markiza is noted as historically being criticized for being against former owner enemies (owner changed, but did journalists?), DVTV as internet tv isn't great example of mainstream medium, also just cursory search revealed that one of their moderators, Emma Smetana, is well known for not being exactly professional.
The fact that you consider those media unbiased doesn't mean they are really unbiased. Plenty of people consider Fox News and Huffington Post as paragons of objectivity.
I'm not interested in defending all of this rapid fire as it would take too much effort on both of our sides.
I can tell you the story of the first one (SME) and you may take what you wish from it.
Penta is a shady investment group linked to heavy corruption scandals across the political spectrum. [0]
As a power move they decided to buy the medium they've seen as their main public opponent — SME. Half of the journalists from SME left, raised money and founded Denník N, which is pretty similar to SME. The other half stayed and convinced the previous shareholders to keep a majority.
45% of SME is owned by Penta but they have no effect on the content and SME critisizes Penta all the time. Penta knows that if they did anything about it, redactors would speak up and leave and they would be left with a worthless company.
Out of curiosity, for Central European media, how many of them reported on the damning half-dozen OPCW leaks[0] that create turbulence for Central European foreign policy in Syria?
The BBC didn't even mention it, at least not initially.
The Guardian article mentioned Russia 5 or 6 times (why?), the rest of the article didn't have any useful info.
The NYT article mentioned Russia 4 times IIRC, and had two half sentances of useful info.
Reuters only mentioned Russia once (hooray!), and actually had a reasonable amount good detail in there.
It pays well to do a 'deep dive' on something like the Syrian conflict, to better understand how the media /really/ works, then the lessons learned can be re-applied going forward. I spent some time studying the initial OPCW report, and independently came to the same conclusion that the OPCW leaks did. A few independent journalists, including Robert Fisk, shed light on some of the other aspects.
A more recent matter is the initial denials of the efficacy of face masks in helping reduce the spread of coronavirus. This was done largely for political reasons IMHO, and became part of advice that was muddled, illogical, and inconsistent.
The best source of advice was highly ranked medical experts in countries that had successfully dealt with SARS, their advice was clear, logical and consistent, right from the beginning back in late Jan. Of course for some reason they're almost never featured in western media, who prefer some celebrity GP or health adviser who's only real interest seems to be their appearence fee!
It’s not a matter of verifying the accuracy, I’m curious if it was reported on at all. The OPCW was the driving force behind Central European foreign policy on Syria which has included everything from arming militias through to sanctions. This conflict has also exposed Central Europe to dozens of terrorist attacks and threatened the safety of everyone. This is arguably one of the biggest leaks about international corruption in the last decade.
So I’m curious if the media there has made much of a fuss with the exposé of OPCW producing falsified reports. American media hasn’t, neither has British or Australian media. But we already know those groups are corrupt.
With this I’m trying to find out (and so can you) if Central European media is as objective (and independent) as what it’s being made out to be.
I don't wish to be uncharitable, but this line indicates to me that there's likely bias involved in the media you described:
>Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals.
Something that seems to be quite common in modern media is to paint anybody who disagrees as a conspiracy theorist or fascist. Are there truly no other groups who have grievances with the news? Communists? The opposition party? Another news outlet that is partisan? It seems unlikely to me that only the groups that modern (left-leaning) media likes to blame everything on would have a problem with it.
On another point, I wish to address this:
>Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist.
You don't need to control what a journalist writes to create biased news. You simply need to control who you hire. Want a news organization that's biased towards right wingers? Hire a bunch of right wingers to be your staff. They will naturally gravitate towards stories that are biased.
>The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society.
The same is true for a lot of biased news outlets elsewhere. It still doesn't change that people like reading news that affirms their view of the world.
I don't wish to be uncharitable, but I believe based on this that perhaps you don't notice much of the bias. I could be wrong, but it just seems very difficult to believe that Europe has such a gem hidden in it. The news in my European country aren't quite as bad as in the US, but they're certainly not unbiased and politics certainly involves the media.
> What if every hospital had an overt political stance and forced doctors to make diagnoses based on those politics?
At least in the US, this is standard. Try getting your local Catholic hospital to deal with complications with your IUD and this isn't a "what if." There are plenty of stories of people who discover that their primary care network has an avowed ideological stance on certain procedures and they need to switch doctors and perhaps go out of network for full care.
> What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health?
Don't they? There is no shortage of for-profit hospitals, and thanks to insurance, Medicaid, etc., they can often increase profit at no cost to the patient by just seeing the patient more and treating them kn more ways that might be strictly speaking unnecessary.
> What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics?
Isn't this approximately the backstory of Planned Parenthood?
Basically, everyone has an ideology, a reason to do what they do. Sometimes it's based on their view of the world and a desire to make it better in some way. Sometimes it's profit. Neither of these is necessary nefarious.
The other requires more than half a decade of intense education, internships, tests and further verifications. (Not to mention thousands of Euros in education costs, if not state sponsored)
I cannot think of a larger difference in terms of barrier to entry.
In France Medical Doctors require 6 years of externship, 4 years of internship + various amount of years depending on the specialization up to 5 (?) for example for neurology.
It's also the population that lead to the most suicides due to how intense the expectations are and failure will lead you to tenures you don't want (There is a spot for everyone but not where you want and on the speciality you want, even though we are lacking doctors ...)
You don't seem to understand, that under capitalism, mostly any work or study has to be backed up with money. Doctors don't become doctors a different way a reporter becomes one. What they teach you in universities it's not whay you end up doing. A reporter doesn't mean to do bad when they start studying, neither does a doctor. The results are totally different.
Doctors are heavily regulated. Journalists aren't.
I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous.
Professional journalism has a long, long track record of opposing any consequences to their actions whatsoever.
I love the idea of professional journalists. But the reality of them just does not work in practice in our current media industries.
>I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous.
Unfortunately expectations do not match reality. 10% of deaths are due to medical errors [0]. Then look at how the rest of the medical establishment are failing us. CDC is prohibited from naming the hospitals that have this error. The only thing they report on is trends [1]. If you have a hospital in your neighborhood, can you find out anything about it? From the medical error rate, to the spread of Candida Auris[2] is there any dangerous news about your local hospital/healthcare system that is public?
My wife and I have a combined >20 years experience in microbiology and medical research, so we’re feeling the pain of “this journalist has no idea what they’re talking about” more than usual these days.
The coverage of COVID has been more distressing than the actual disease. (Hint: epidemiologists specialize in studying the spread of diseases after the fact; asking them about an ongoing epidemic is like asking an expert on Roman architecture to build an office building.)
Here’s some example nonsense in the news. I regularly see the same story argue both points in each bullet:
- Sweden has had too many cases (deaths), and too few cases (people with antibodies).
- Last week 5% of 1000 confirmed cases died; this week 0.5% of 10,000 estimated cases died. “Experts” “baffled” but we are winning and can reopen (the same publication will flip the numbers and conclusion tomorrow)
- Antibodies might not lead to immunity, but the vaccine (which does nothing but cause your body to create antibodies) will be a panacea.
Bonus gem from yesterday:
New study shows kids don’t spread COVID. The numbers are based on studies of areas where schools and daycares were closed, and the kids were quarantined. Adults were more likely to catch COVID at work than from their quarantined kids. There was one (just one) school where the kids spread COVID amongst themselves, but that was probably an outlier. No one really understands how it happened.
Note that the high-level conclusion of this last article was probably right: kids usually don’t get symptoms, and asymptomatic people are less likely to cough / spread it. A stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess.
Even if the reporter was half decent (let's assume he/she was), it would most likely be the Editor that have twisted the story around, for whatever reason or excuse. It happens in all kinds of business. Go talk to an auditor (ANY) auditor and they will have plenty of horror stories where the reviewer rewrote a paragraph "to better reflect the message", in which rewrite the message was changed.
Professionally relevant information - insider sources, other information that is important for you for whatever reason - from original sources. If there aren't any original sources (e.g. politics, history etc) - cross reference multiple interpretations that present story from different angles, e.g. Fox vs CNN, Guardian vs BBC, Washington Post vs Al Jazeera vs Russia Today. Of course for some stories there are sources that are better suited than others due to their focus (e.g. throw in Democracy Now for anything about grassroots movements, various scientific/medical news are discussed most in-depth by specialized podcasts, etc).
And then there is information that isn't important (it doesn't affect you and you can't act on it) and you're just seeking it out of habit (addiction really).
I would like to caution anyone reading the comments to be skeptical of posts that push to erode your faith in journalism. There has been an alarming trend of people pushing a narrative that news organizations cannot be trusted. It is a toxic attack on one of the most important components in a functional democratic republic.
I don’t know if I’ll really be able to add to this conversation, but two cents anyway:
I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better.
I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism.
1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles.
(This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.)
2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath.
3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful.
That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.
Unfortunately every single media outlet has a narrative to propagate. Being that an imposed one or from their own convictions. Can't find a single source of information being totally objective.
May as well ask here, I pretty much only read the weekly Economist to get my news at this point. I think I have their slight biases dialed in at this point. Anyone want to make a case for a different primary news source/argue that The Economist is bad?
For context, I like The Economist because it's mostly unemotional, information-dense, and the magazine comes in a single weekly thing to read.
The Economist is the rare case of a news source that's not too bad, at least at present. We can't let ourselves become complacent, however - just see what's happening to the NYT.
Well, I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter WASN'T at the scene, and yet I later read what she had written about it in the newspaper as if she had been present.
It was a really nice review of a show that... was cancelled.
For me, it’s difficult to “trust”. I assume I know next to nothing about India vs Pakistan or the Mexican drug war and that Journalism isn’t going to change that. At best it’s a source of stories like any novel, at worst it’s trying to mislead.
In the case of Mexico’s drug war, most Americans are probably very misguided as to how dangerous it is for tourists and also how much of it is seen by the average Mexican on a given day. I feel I’ve learned infinitely more in one conversation on Tandem with someone who lives in Mexico than I ever will from a newspaper.
If I read about riots in my city, I know there was something going on but I can’t really trust that the news correctly identified the place, people, or motive. I may have the desire to learn more and so I will reach out to someone who was there our lives in that neighborhood.
I had a waking up moment in 2003 during the Iraq war protests. I learned that the NYT, which was my favorite because each issue was a literary work that could be read from front to back, reported as though they’d never been to NYC. If they couldn’t get basic details right when the story was literally on the same street (Broadway) then I don’t know what they’re actually capable of reporting.
Same here to some degree. Those who wield actual power will never be criticized or exposed, which means that journalists are inherently useless or closer to being a corpse.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, Tim Pool, Andy Ngo are some who are constantly attacked both verbally and physically and thus I have bit more faith in them than I do for others "journalists".
But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either. I prefer the Economist - they clearly have a very strong bias in some political & economical stories, but that bias is predictable and consistent. At least their factual reporting seems on the point.
> But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either.
I'd call myself an "accidental moderate" in PG's terms, and there are lots of good accounts on Twitter that look at both sides of the issue.
You don't need to follow lots of accounts on a wide range of the political spectrum, but simply avoid the partisan/"belief bunching" preachers, and pick the smartest and most rational ones instead. This has been the biggest source of education for me recently.
> "I don't trust anything they write without checking the facts."
I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever.
How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?
What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector?
The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases.
The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - "I don't trust journalists" translates in most cases to "I don't trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint."
This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information.
Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn't mean you should distrust all apples.
"""
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
- Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002)
"""
This isn’t to say that all journalists are “bad apples”, but as the full aphorism says, “A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel”.
> How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?
"Professional journalist" shouldn't invoke any more trust than "professional fund manager".
Surely they're not all bad apples, but they're not inherently incentivized to have integrity, so you must assume that they do not have integrity, for your own safety.
You know what's even more sad? Journalists on average, are more intelligent than an average human being.
An average journalist distorts the truth knowingly and is a scumbag. An average person parrots lies and is convinced of them, and if you point it out, he/she'll be upset with you.
This is how religions continue even in the face of the best thinkers for centuries, coming up with the most considerate, foolproof arguments for why it's bullshit. At some point we have to ask: do people even want to be able to tell truth apart from bullshit, or do they just want to be led and told what to do by someone they like?
It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse.
I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly stopped reading newspapers, and don't trust anything they write, without checking the facts.