7 ms·

Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www

Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trust-in-media-plummets-only-congress-less-trusted-among-major-us-institutions/ar-AAMbOr0 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus... People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Cybotron5000 5y ago
Why though? What is it that has changed their business model or people’s minds? Ask yourself that. What is it that is particularly biased? Opinion pieces and ‘advertorials’ etc. that they are forced to adopt because of falling revenues and fragmented attentions are bound to be biased.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  The NYT is actually doing great financially. They lost their credibility because they did the one thing that a journalist can never do, lost their neutrality. They let Trump get under their skin, lost all skepticism, and started printing anything negative about him even if it was only a rumor. It's basically an organ of the Democratic party now.
  - tclancy 5y ago
    Oh for the love of Buttigeig, if the Democratic Party had an organ, I would hope it would do a better job of stating policy and sticking to it. If The Times is your idea of a lefty boogie man, life must be pretty easy.
    - leereeves 5y ago
      You should read more. Everything fallingknife said is backed up by statements from insiders. As one wrote: > Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. ... > But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm. > What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets. https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
      - hobs 5y ago
        Famously biased person claims bias of other people, yawn.
        BitwiseFool 5y ago
        Bias is not in-and-of-itself a bad thing. The B-Word feels like a rhetorical trick for simply dismissing someone with a strong stance.
        leereeves 5y ago
        It's just confirmation bias, the desire to avoid information that conflicts with their worldview. Comments like hobs' contribute nothing to the conversation except partisan dismissal of a differing viewpoint. What's ironic is that this attitude was described in the quote hobs responded to: > If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Please distinguish between Democratic Party and actual leftism. I don't like NYT because they keep lying us into stupid wars, which isn't leftist at all.
      - BitwiseFool 5y ago
        >"Please distinguish between Democratic Party and actual leftism." I am so tired of this trope. Nothing is ever 'true leftism' and yet everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, *-ist, etc.
        jessaustin 5y ago
        ...everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, -ist, etc.* Yes that happens, in the New York Times. It's wonderful for a center-right organization like Democrats to pose as leftist in their party organ. Rational people, including rational actual leftists, are less likely to try to "de-platform" anyone.
consumer451 5y ago
The number one news source in the USA is also the one most likely to make viewers less informed, or even ill informed. I personally lost the last of my faith in the USA over the pandemic and the Trump era. We needed a vaccine agains News Corp about twenty years ago. What we got instead was normalization of “alternative facts,” and now everyone is worried about cancel culture or some other b.s. while I’m over here watching the end of the age of reason.
- rscoots 5y ago
  You'll note that the current VP and various MSNBC & CNN hosts & contributors casted major doubts on the vaccine when it seemed it would be released in time for Trump's reelection cycle. It really is turtles all the way down with the media and political parties. It's time to remove the artificial divides in your mind and fight these issues from a more party-agnostic position. We need your help.
jancsika 5y ago
> People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT. What is the relationship between more trust in a mainstream source and susceptibility to disinformation you are implying here? For example, IIRC Rush Limbaugh's audience gave him a lot of credibility and was less informed because of that.
- me_me_me 5y ago
  If you want to learn about news about your country read papers of other countries about you. Though you still need some critical thinking to filter out BS. For example Russian Today is often a great source for all non-russian news. But its a propaganda tube for russian news.
  - soco 5y ago
    Without actually reading it, I somehow think RT will select convenient non-russian news as well. Like, underlining Le Pen or AfD declarations or the post-Brexit downsides... there's room for disinformation also when doing a simple selection.
    - me_me_me 5y ago
      Of course they would. But thats not my point. My point is if you want to hear about BS happening in your own country you'd probably read about it from foreign papers/sources first. Those have no incentives not to bash your homeland, as oppose to local sources that have to balance not pissing off government (for access to interviews, news, sources) and ad revenue by reporting on the sensitive topics.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - fomine3 5y ago
        I'd put BBC or Al Jazeera as a example rather than RT or Xinhua.
disease 5y ago
In my experience, people just want their biases confirmed and their prejudices reinforced. Moving away from mainstream media gives the people what they really want: white supremacy and conspiracy theories.
everdrive 5y ago
Although a lot of the mistrust of mainstream news is well earned, there is also an explosion of doubt and misinformation these days. (How many stories these days are a media story with a strawman? "You'll never believe what [publication] is saying!") The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least at the level of the individual story and/or writer. But people have become so cynical or mistrustful, that a NY Times article is dismissed automatically even when it shouldn't. Feel free to swap out NY Times for any other publication which performs good journalism. There's a difference between legitimate criticism of a publication, (which nearly any publication would deserve to varying degrees) and lazy, automatic dismissals of the news as "broadly untrustworthy." (To be clear, and at a personal level, I don't particularly like the NY Times. Their headlines are often politicized and the editorial section is completely awful. However if you get off the front page and just read some of their in depth reporting, you'd be crazy to write them off as wholly biased or untrustworthy.)
- leereeves 5y ago
  > The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least the level of the individual story and/or writer. And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing? The most effective misinformation tells the truth, but not the whole truth.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    >> The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least the level of the individual story and/or writer. > And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing? All editing is selective, that's pretty much definitional. I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The alternative to the NY Times (and similar publications) isn't some ideal publication that gives an accurate picture without distortion, it's talk radio and other opinionated sources that give pictures that are even more distorted. The NY Times is like a plate of food with a fly in it. There are salesmen out there that spend a lot of time talking about the fly, reminding you how gross it is and how bad they must be for it to get there, etc. Then they'll offer a plate of dogshit as a substitute, and distressingly a lot of people will take it because they've been successfully fixated on that damn fly.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trust-in-media-plummets-only-congress-less-trusted-among-major-us-institutions/ar-AAMbOr0 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus... Quoth your link "The shift coincided with the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, when trust in the media was often juxtaposed with trust in Trump’s presidency." The problem the media has is that it can't please everyone's biases. If it's appropriately skeptical of Trump, the people who hate to see Trump criticized will be unhappy (and in that case there's an ideological media alternate universe willing to capitalize on that unhappiness and turn it into mistrust). If it becomes a Trump love-fest with either muted skepticism (e.g. Fox News) or hardly any at all (e.g. OANN), then a lot of people with mistrust it (because it's arguably not doing its job). It's a lot like Congress, actually. People mistrust "Congress" but usually like their Congressman. That's because their Congressmen likely to be ideologically similar, while "Congress" as a whole has people who are very different ideologically (and it may be controlled by those people). And to top that off, the electoral strategies of both parties often play up fear and mistrust of the other side in order to drum up votes (which unarguably helps the candidates most of the time, but hurts the institution).
- makomk 5y ago
  No, more than that. The problem the media has is that it wasn't enough to merely be sceptical of Trump or to oppose him based on what he actually did; in order to be sufficiently anti-Trump you needed to believe an endless cavalcade of things that weren't true. Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server. This made no sense on any level; neither Trump nor anyone in his circles controlled the mail server or its DNS, they were behind so many levels of subcontracting he'd have to involve a bunch of people he had no reason to trust and who all denied any such thing happened, all to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need some other, undetected, much better communication channel to get any meaning out of it and that was tied to the Trump brand for no good reason. And this was supposed to be a better explanation than other mail systems which had received promotional hotel e-mails merely doing automated DNS requests as a result, like many e-mail systems do. So naturally, the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate this in a way that implied they were somehow supporting Trump if they didn't, and went massively viral on social media with this demand. The New York Times pushed back against this in the mildest way possible, by saying that the FBI had looked into these claims and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal email systems doing ordinary things in response to marketing emails. (This was also what nearly every technical expert seems to have concluded regardless of party.) Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Cybotron5000 5y ago

Why though? What is it that has changed their business model or people’s minds? Ask yourself that. What is it that is particularly biased? Opinion pieces and ‘advertorials’ etc. that they are forced to adopt because of falling revenues and fragmented attentions are bound to be biased.

fallingknife 5y ago
The NYT is actually doing great financially. They lost their credibility because they did the one thing that a journalist can never do, lost their neutrality. They let Trump get under their skin, lost all skepticism, and started printing anything negative about him even if it was only a rumor. It's basically an organ of the Democratic party now.
- tclancy 5y ago
  Oh for the love of Buttigeig, if the Democratic Party had an organ, I would hope it would do a better job of stating policy and sticking to it. If The Times is your idea of a lefty boogie man, life must be pretty easy.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    You should read more. Everything fallingknife said is backed up by statements from insiders. As one wrote: > Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. ... > But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm. > What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets. https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
    - hobs 5y ago
      Famously biased person claims bias of other people, yawn.
      - BitwiseFool 5y ago
        Bias is not in-and-of-itself a bad thing. The B-Word feels like a rhetorical trick for simply dismissing someone with a strong stance.
        leereeves 5y ago
        It's just confirmation bias, the desire to avoid information that conflicts with their worldview. Comments like hobs' contribute nothing to the conversation except partisan dismissal of a differing viewpoint. What's ironic is that this attitude was described in the quote hobs responded to: > If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Please distinguish between Democratic Party and actual leftism. I don't like NYT because they keep lying us into stupid wars, which isn't leftist at all.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      >"Please distinguish between Democratic Party and actual leftism." I am so tired of this trope. Nothing is ever 'true leftism' and yet everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, *-ist, etc.
      - jessaustin 5y ago
        ...everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, -ist, etc.* Yes that happens, in the New York Times. It's wonderful for a center-right organization like Democrats to pose as leftist in their party organ. Rational people, including rational actual leftists, are less likely to try to "de-platform" anyone.

consumer451 5y ago

The number one news source in the USA is also the one most likely to make viewers less informed, or even ill informed. I personally lost the last of my faith in the USA over the pandemic and the Trump era. We needed a vaccine agains News Corp about twenty years ago. What we got instead was normalization of “alternative facts,” and now everyone is worried about cancel culture or some other b.s. while I’m over here watching the end of the age of reason.

rscoots 5y ago
You'll note that the current VP and various MSNBC & CNN hosts & contributors casted major doubts on the vaccine when it seemed it would be released in time for Trump's reelection cycle. It really is turtles all the way down with the media and political parties. It's time to remove the artificial divides in your mind and fight these issues from a more party-agnostic position. We need your help.

jancsika 5y ago

> People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT. What is the relationship between more trust in a mainstream source and susceptibility to disinformation you are implying here? For example, IIRC Rush Limbaugh's audience gave him a lot of credibility and was less informed because of that.

me_me_me 5y ago
If you want to learn about news about your country read papers of other countries about you. Though you still need some critical thinking to filter out BS. For example Russian Today is often a great source for all non-russian news. But its a propaganda tube for russian news.
- soco 5y ago
  Without actually reading it, I somehow think RT will select convenient non-russian news as well. Like, underlining Le Pen or AfD declarations or the post-Brexit downsides... there's room for disinformation also when doing a simple selection.
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    Of course they would. But thats not my point. My point is if you want to hear about BS happening in your own country you'd probably read about it from foreign papers/sources first. Those have no incentives not to bash your homeland, as oppose to local sources that have to balance not pissing off government (for access to interviews, news, sources) and ad revenue by reporting on the sensitive topics.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - fomine3 5y ago
      I'd put BBC or Al Jazeera as a example rather than RT or Xinhua.

disease 5y ago

In my experience, people just want their biases confirmed and their prejudices reinforced. Moving away from mainstream media gives the people what they really want: white supremacy and conspiracy theories.

everdrive 5y ago

Although a lot of the mistrust of mainstream news is well earned, there is also an explosion of doubt and misinformation these days. (How many stories these days are a media story with a strawman? "You'll never believe what [publication] is saying!") The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least at the level of the individual story and/or writer. But people have become so cynical or mistrustful, that a NY Times article is dismissed automatically even when it shouldn't. Feel free to swap out NY Times for any other publication which performs good journalism. There's a difference between legitimate criticism of a publication, (which nearly any publication would deserve to varying degrees) and lazy, automatic dismissals of the news as "broadly untrustworthy." (To be clear, and at a personal level, I don't particularly like the NY Times. Their headlines are often politicized and the editorial section is completely awful. However if you get off the front page and just read some of their in depth reporting, you'd be crazy to write them off as wholly biased or untrustworthy.)

leereeves 5y ago
> The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least the level of the individual story and/or writer. And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing? The most effective misinformation tells the truth, but not the whole truth.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >> The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least the level of the individual story and/or writer. > And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing? All editing is selective, that's pretty much definitional. I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The alternative to the NY Times (and similar publications) isn't some ideal publication that gives an accurate picture without distortion, it's talk radio and other opinionated sources that give pictures that are even more distorted. The NY Times is like a plate of food with a fly in it. There are salesmen out there that spend a lot of time talking about the fly, reminding you how gross it is and how bad they must be for it to get there, etc. Then they'll offer a plate of dogshit as a substitute, and distressingly a lot of people will take it because they've been successfully fixated on that damn fly.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trust-in-media-plummets-only-congress-less-trusted-among-major-us-institutions/ar-AAMbOr0 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus... Quoth your link "The shift coincided with the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, when trust in the media was often juxtaposed with trust in Trump’s presidency." The problem the media has is that it can't please everyone's biases. If it's appropriately skeptical of Trump, the people who hate to see Trump criticized will be unhappy (and in that case there's an ideological media alternate universe willing to capitalize on that unhappiness and turn it into mistrust). If it becomes a Trump love-fest with either muted skepticism (e.g. Fox News) or hardly any at all (e.g. OANN), then a lot of people with mistrust it (because it's arguably not doing its job). It's a lot like Congress, actually. People mistrust "Congress" but usually like their Congressman. That's because their Congressmen likely to be ideologically similar, while "Congress" as a whole has people who are very different ideologically (and it may be controlled by those people). And to top that off, the electoral strategies of both parties often play up fear and mistrust of the other side in order to drum up votes (which unarguably helps the candidates most of the time, but hurts the institution).

makomk 5y ago
No, more than that. The problem the media has is that it wasn't enough to merely be sceptical of Trump or to oppose him based on what he actually did; in order to be sufficiently anti-Trump you needed to believe an endless cavalcade of things that weren't true. Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server. This made no sense on any level; neither Trump nor anyone in his circles controlled the mail server or its DNS, they were behind so many levels of subcontracting he'd have to involve a bunch of people he had no reason to trust and who all denied any such thing happened, all to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need some other, undetected, much better communication channel to get any meaning out of it and that was tied to the Trump brand for no good reason. And this was supposed to be a better explanation than other mail systems which had received promotional hotel e-mails merely doing automated DNS requests as a result, like many e-mail systems do. So naturally, the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate this in a way that implied they were somehow supporting Trump if they didn't, and went massively viral on social media with this demand. The New York Times pushed back against this in the mildest way possible, by saying that the FBI had looked into these claims and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal email systems doing ordinary things in response to marketing emails. (This was also what nearly every technical expert seems to have concluded regardless of party.) Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.