17 ms·

Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

• wirthjason 4y ago
  I remember being in an after school philosophy club and we were discussing truth. My teacher popped out of his office, blurted out then returned to his office: “all objectivity moves through subjectivity”. We never discussed it in the context of new media but it feels quite relevant.
• pookha 4y ago
  Only half? Good lord.
• beej71 4y ago
  I never thought it was malice. I thought it was greed. They'd say whatever made the most money. People talk about news agencies trying to brainwash people to a particular world view, but I don't think that has some kind of left/right bias. It has a "most money" bias.
• naasking 4y ago
  They are deliberately misleading. Not outright lying usually [1], but very, very misleading, both in their coverage and what they don't cover. [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-061 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...
• SaintSeiya84 4y ago
  Maybe because is true?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nokcha 4y ago
  Highly relevant: https://AstralCodexTen.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies https://AstralCodexTen.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
  • bmacho 4y ago
    > The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”. I don't think it's true (why would it be), and even it is true, it is stupid to assume that it is true. It only can cause harm, but no benefits at all.
    • whynaut 4y ago
      > It only can cause harm, but no benefits at all. you’re on HN. surely you have the imagination. edit: apparently not
    • kqr 4y ago
      What do you not believe is true? That print space in newspapers is limited so you have to report selectively and your news organisation may just find one category of articles more relevant or interesting or important than another?
  • mc32 4y ago
    It's right in that they don't often feed you with provably false stuff --at least not at the time of publication (such as Hunter's Laptop being Russian misinfo but now owned up to by Hunter himself) but yes, they lie by omission, innuendo/leading and half truths. Similar to how quite a few social programs are based on small unreplicated studies that sound good on paper --the intent matters more than the results or reality.
    • kneebonian 4y ago
      Don't forget the talking about how one thing now could lead to something else down the road.
      • PartiallyTyped 4y ago
        Slippery slope arguments that don’t allow for a middle ground solution by painting one side as insane.
• jqpabc123 4y ago
  Yes --- and the biggest offenders are the ones who regularly complain about it.
  • robertlagrant 4y ago
    Citation needed.
    • brink 4y ago
      With all due respect, you either don't live in the US or are living under a rock if you feel like you need citation. Denying the US's propaganda machine is like denying climate change at this point. The news corps don't tell flat lies, they cherry-pick facts and events, often reporting them out of proportion to paint a narrative; which is almost as bad as telling flat lies.
      • marpstar 4y ago
        Agreed. Pull up Fox News and MSNBC... they're never consistent, so who's telling the truth?
      • robertlagrant 4y ago
        I was after a citation for the claim that talking about media bias is correlated with media bias. You seem to be talking about the general existence of media bias, for some reason.
        • gwbas1c 4y ago
          This isn't Wikipedia. It's a discussion. Almost everything that someone posts is an anecdote, and you can't expect everyone to come armed with reams of well-researched facts.
          • aww_dang 4y ago
            Another issue is the ease of cherry picking supporting "facts" to suit one's argument.
• gtmitchell 4y ago
  Because, to first approximation, this is true. Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda. I'm not sure why Americans believe that objectivity in news reporting is even possible. Other countries don't seem to have as much of an issue with this, since you typically have news sources that are either owned directly by the government or are published by political parties.
  • b4je7d7wb 4y ago
    This is still very much an issue in many countries with government owned "nonprofit" media. Even in countries with low amount of corruption and high freedom of press.
    • mantas 4y ago
      It’s not an issue. You just assume that this is government voice. It’s good to have direct propaganda channel to learn what your government is up to. But it shall not be confused with journalism.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • RivieraKid 4y ago
    The first approximation is: a typical journalist working at a serious news organization has some amount of bias but at the same time tries to be objective. So it is approximately false, they don't deliberately mislead. My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't.
    • didntreadarticl 4y ago
      American news organisations are all paid for by advertisers who have a vested interest in the status quo
      • 4y ago
• bmacho 4y ago
  Half of Americans now believe the news organizations
• mc32 4y ago
  I mean, talk about delusions --believing your lies so much you don't believe you're lying or believing it's necessary because people are too stupid to figure things out for themselves. They want to be able to set agendas but also want to be known as authoritative and uhhh unbiased. Both cannot be true simultaneously. Cry me a river!
• hunglee2 4y ago
  Optimistic news - elevated degree of skepticism of any 'produced information' is fully justified, seeing as news organisations are driven certainly by commercial agenda, and frequently also by political agenda which they are - as a rule - far from being transparent with. We need citizen and independent journalism, and better yet, trust in our own direct lived experience, to balance out of 'information diet'
  • ErikCorry 4y ago
    Counterpoint: People are dumb on average and their citizen journalism will be even worse. I don't think it's a good idea for journalists to proclaim that they are abandoning objectivity. https://reason.com/2020/06/24/journalists-abandoning-objectivity-for-moral-clarity-really-just-want-to-call-people-immoral/ https://reason.com/2020/06/24/journalists-abandoning-objecti...
  • wincy 4y ago
    My lived experience is I sit safely in my suburban home with my children, comfortably collecting a salary to argue points of planning for software development. I work from home and very rarely leave the house. I am unwilling to go down to the local protests or whatever to “see what’s up” because I’m essentially willing to accept zero risk to my person while my children are growing up. I need accurate news to know what’s going on in the wider world because my day to day is so insular, and I’d hazard I’m not an anomaly here. It’s annoying because I feel like half of my friends are crazy but I’m not sure which half it is. My wife is glitching out and believes all sorts of crazy stuff but heck, maybe it’s true. Maybe the world has always been like this, and I’m just old enough to realize that the news media is bullshit. But it just felt like the older journalists that have retired now were less desperately and smugly trying to convince me that they’re correct than the ones working now. I wish I felt like I could trust literally anyone beyond my immediate family.
    • recyclelater 4y ago
      I am not weighing in on the article or any commentary with this statement…You don’t sound healthy and might want to do a little self evaluation. Never leaving the house, not trusting anyone, thinking your wife is glitching, all sound outside the norm, even if what you are observing is true. You should still be able to do basic risk analysis and leave the house. Sorry for the bluntness here.
• KptMarchewa 4y ago
  The problem is that people look at some (relatively rare) media lie, decide mainstream media aren't trustworthy and go to "alternative" media that lie all the time.
  • kneebonian 4y ago
    I realized that a lot of MSM was grox turds when they spent two full weeks of nonstop coverage on covefe and whether it was some sort of secret Nazi dog whistle. If anyone can defend why we needed to spend 2 weeks on covefe though I'm all ears.
    • foldr 4y ago
      It doesn’t make a lot of sense to ignore good reporting because there’s also some bad reporting.
      • sumtechguy 4y ago
        A lot of people who come to the conclusion that news is 'fake' have a gateway moment. Mine is from 25 years ago and something rather silly. In this particular case a typo. What we see out of the email dumps on twitter should scare many this is the case. They were having twitter 'take care of it'. To pretend they are not doing this to our media and other web sources would be a bit of a stretch to say the least. Our media is manipulated. Seeing good sources amongst the sea of bad ones is a tough ask.
        • foldr 4y ago
          I'm not sure anyone has ever suggested that Twitter (in general) is a reliable source of information, so I'm not sure why you bring it up. Apart form that, perhaps I am misunderstanding, but you seem to be saying that you decided not to trust the news because you saw a typo in a news story 25 years ago. I'm doing my best to be charitable here, but how can that possibly make any sense?
          • 4y ago
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  When everything is fake news, the fascists win. Democracy is dying and "both sides" believe the other is the "enemy". It's going to get bloody, folks.
  • jiveturkey42 4y ago
    Go back to reddit
    • JustSomeNobody 4y ago
      Keep your head in the sand. You cannot have politicians and media telling people day in and day out that people who don't look like you or believe like you are the enemy and not have people try and hurt their "enemy". You can't.
• tuatoru 4y ago
  I don't know about the "deliberate" part, but on "mislead" this is good news. Gell-Mann amnesia[1] is wearing off. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
  • MrLeap 4y ago
    IDK I've watched this video looking for a "lunge" a hand full of times and it seems like a deliberate lie. An honest headline would probably center around a man getting his face grabbed, but that's not at all how it was reported. Rare to be able to factcheck an article without leaving the page and disprove it from its own content, but the lies are not rare. https://www.newsweek.com/video-mike-rogers-held-back-he-lunges-matt-gaetz-viewed-21m-times-1772055 https://www.newsweek.com/video-mike-rogers-held-back-he-lung...
• elil17 4y ago
  Better headline: half of Americans don't know that (many) news organizations deliberately mislead them.
  • k1m 4y ago
    Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I
    • AlbertoGP 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        Why do you have vaccines in scare quotes? If a vaccine makes it less likely that you catch a disease, wouldn't that make it less like that you spread the disease? Am I missing something here?
        • fidgewidge 4y ago
          [flagged]
          • amanaplanacanal 4y ago
            Can you link to where anybody has redefined vaccine, and also evidence that the vaccinated become more likely to catch it than the unvaccinated? All that sounds like complete baloney.
            • fidgewidge 4y ago
              Here you go - maybe you can reconsider your priors for classifying things as baloney now? Gov and media put a lot of effort into breaking our intuitions about their trustworthiness. Your gut reaction is the one we're trained to have. CDC changed their definition of vaccine and vaccination: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126... > Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” > The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” Even dictionaries were edited: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fact-check-merriam-webster-changed-vaccine-definition-accuracy/6354415001/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fact... > Merriam-Webster revised its "vaccine" definition to replace "immunity" with "immune response." This was done when it became clear that COVID vaccines didn't actually create any kind of immunity and thus weren't technically vaccines. Like always in public health they fixed this problem by manipulating language - now it only has to provoke some sort of response from the body. If that response turns out to be useless or actively harmful, no big deal, it's still a vaccine. Observe that this change totally alters the meaning of being anti-vaxx. Take a substance that provokes an immune response but it's the wrong sort of response and doesn't work, diverting the immune system into wasting time whilst the virus replicates. It is 100% rational to oppose such a useless product, but by subtly manipulating the definition of vaccine they have now trained people to consider such opposition anti-vaxx and therefore automatically irrational. Unfortunately this problem is not theoretical, bringing us to negative efficacy. It exists and is visible in many studies, but hidden by governments which use a variety of invalid statistical methodologies to alter the raw data, which is kept secret. Nonetheless, they aren't the only ones that can count cases. It's a big topic but some studies and explanations of what's going on can be found here: https://bartram.substack.com/p/even-more-negative-vaccine-efficiency https://bartram.substack.com/p/even-more-negative-vaccine-ef... The root biological cause seems to be related to the definitional game playing. The vaccines targeted the 2019 Wuhan spike and the antibodies vaccinated people produce are meant to dock with those specific proteins. But by the time vaccination is rolling out big time we are already at Delta, the virus spike has evolved quite significantly and the antibodies aren't so effective anymore. The body doesn't seem to recognize this quickly enough and spends a lot of time producing the wrong sort of antibodies, thinking it's successfully fighting the invader. Unvaccinated people have immune systems that haven't been trained in any way, so their first real SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the antibody learning process immediately and they develop immunity to the latest version of the virus quicker. This problem is called imprinting and is visible in the booster and bivalent trials. They didn't help reduce COVID cases and even made them higher - actually 100% of test subjects got COVID when exposed in the bivalent trials, but the vaccines were approved anyway because under the new definition they only need to provoke an immune response of some kind, not create immunity. Public health responded to failure by conflating the means and the end. The media never covered any of this and systematically attacked the independent bloggers and researchers who did. Which is why smart people don't trust them.
• nivenkos 4y ago
  They do. The only real investigative journalists these days - Edward Snowden and Julian Assange - face life in prison and exile. Even Seymour Hersh has been smeared to discredit him now he dared speak against the establishment. It is not journalists' role to be a mouthpiece for the government, but to challenge it.
  • tallanvor 4y ago
    Edward Snowden was not, nor as far as I know did he ever claim to be, a journalist. He was at best a whistleblower, although given where he now lives and the citizenship he holds, it's clear that nothing he says or does can be trusted.
    • potatototoo99 4y ago
      You mean in exile?
      • twoodfin 4y ago
        Edward Snowden has not been exiled in any non-misleading use of the term. He had many opportunities to return to the United States, and could do so today if his current hosts allowed it.
        • not_a_shill 4y ago
          Are you kidding me? You honest to God would trust the US government if you were in his situation?
          • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
            I would have used legal avenues afforded to whistleblowers. > Contrary to his public claims that he notified numerous NSA officials about what he believed to be illegal intelligence collection, the Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities - legal, moral, or otherwise - to any oversight officials within the U.S. government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so. Snowden was aware of these avenues. His only attempt to contact an NSA attorney revolved around a question about the legal precedence of executive orders, and his only contact to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Inspector General (IG) revolved around his disagreements with his managers about training and retention of information technology specialists. > Despite Snowden's later public claim that he would have faced retribution for voicing concerns about intelligence activities, the Committee found that laws and regulations in effect at the time of Snowden's actions afforded him protection. The Committee routinely receives disclosures from IC contractors pursuant to the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (IC WPA). If Snowden had been worried about possible retaliation for voicing concerns about NSA activities, he could have made a disclosure to the Committee. He did not. https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_review_-_unclass_summary_-_final.pdf https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_r...
• hgsgm 4y ago
  Differing definitions of "mislead" are going to make these comments useless. > Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting. The headline defines "mislead" as including "leading via truthful reporting" aka "present opinion".
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    That is a pretty garbage question phrasing. The idea that journalism shouldn't persuade is a bizarre affectation meant to make journalists appear as special professional class, like doctors. When your kid tells you what happened at school, they're a journalist.
• quacked 4y ago
  I never watch or read any news, I'm just sick of them reporting on things that have full unedited videos without posting the full unedited video. One example is the Floyd case. The full bodycam video was available for almost half of a year before it was pushed in the media during the trial. My extended family exclusively saw it through the professional news filter, which means that those who watch bluer news organizations came to the conclusion that he was murdered, and those who watch redder news organizations came to the conclusion that he overdosed. I'm not saying that everyone should "draw their own conclusions" or "do their own research" whenever there's a new video, but it helps to keep a clearer head when you've seen the evidence and are now waiting for expert analysis, rather than seeing the evidence pushed by a relatable authority figure who's already been instructed to be in a certain mood and is only showing short clips at a time. I sometimes daydream about a "grey news" organization. No hosts, just text articles with confidence intervals next to claims, all sources listed, no editorials, and all interviews and videos reported on have full transcripts next to the full unedited video.
  • sumtechguy 4y ago
    'grey news' not a bad idea but can still be manipulated by editorial. Org A is the one you want to promote. Only show clips that make org A look good. Org B is the one you want to demote. Only show clips that make org B look bad. If org A does something bad pad it with 'org B' doing the same thing or never show it. If org B does something good never show it. What is shown to you, and order matters. The talking heads bits most orgs go for along with it just adds color to it. But it is the same editorial process. You only have X amount of time and Y amount to show X < Y. Something has to go. You can pick sides even with that method.
    • quacked 4y ago
      That's a good point. I've also thought of a structure where there's a news organization that's just openly biased, the prime directive is listed on the front page, and each news article is explicitly edited to explain how the article is presented to support the main mission of the organization. Maybe could link to refutations to keep the appearance of honesty. This of course falls into a funny counterfactual scenario that I don't have a clever term for. "In the world where this solution is possible to deploy, the problem doesn't exist". If you could staff an entire news organization that was so dedicated to exposing its own bias, it would mean you had a critical mass of adults in society that were actually concerned about the truth, and you could just do news the regular way.
• cramjabsyn 4y ago
  Why is it that propaganda somehow has become a new idea? Is it because the phrase “fake news” dumbed it down? Either way its always been a factor, and was likely worse before the age of information. The big problem now is there are multiple competing false narratives, instead of just the one in the paper.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    What propaganda? Don't trust your instutions and don't trust the media? https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/564013066/russia-using-disinformation-to-sow-discord-in-west-britains-prime-minister-says https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/564013066...
  • deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
    Except that the purpose of the phrase “fake news” was, in fact, to create propaganda itself. It is certainly not better for the president of the country to be the gatekeeper of truth based on what aligns with their political motivations. It is the very definition of propaganda.
    • none_to_remain 4y ago
      It was journos who started the "fake news" meme. I believe they were complaining about completely fabricated clickbait like "Pope endorses Trump". The journos were seemingly unaware that their own perceived fakeness would be much more salient.
• pkphilip 4y ago
  Only half?!
• omgomgomgomg 4y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, but this is attributed to Jefferson: "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers" Makes you wonder who remains to be trusted, the governments are not reliable at all times either in most parts of the world.
  • tootie 4y ago
    He said this (I believe) in the context of the French Revolution. Possibly also as a dig to Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson was most likely advocating for a rounded education that did not rely solely on topical information. He was an ardent supporter of free press and even considered it more important that functioning government. https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/jefferson-s-preference-for-newspapers-without-government-over-government-without-newspapers-1787 https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/jefferson-s-preference-for...
• brookst 4y ago
  Conspiracy theorists strong in this thread. Is this really a HN-aligned topic? The responses do not reflect well on the community.
  • megaman821 4y ago
    I don't see a conspiracy at all. Sentiment analysis of the news shows a strong shift to fear and anger. Those emotions drive engagement. People here didn't like when the Facebook news feed was surfacing these things to the top to drive engagement, but seem to be more OK with human editors doing it.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    Lot of people think that all the media are lying to them but some random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or globalists is the one true news source.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      > random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or globalists is the one true news source. Seymour Hersh, Jeff Gerth and the CJR, Wemple at the WaPo, Chris Hedges (ex-NYT Middle East bureau chief, ex-NYT Balkans bureau chief during the Yugoslav wars.) Not to mention recent nonpersons like Taibbi or Greenwald. You were required to read and believe what these people wrote in order to get your liberal card in the very recent past, but for having the wrong opinions on rising nationalism they get demoted to "random guys."
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ilikehurdles 4y ago
    News organizations write articles and headlines to deliberately mislead people if it means those people will click on those headlines, open up an article, and engage with some ads. Is this so controversial that nearly half of people disagree? This doesn’t come from a partisanship bias, as nearly all well known media outlets, large and small, engage in that behavior. Their content often still has some value, and we need both hard and soft reporting to make sense of this world. That doesn’t mean all this content is motivated or framed by some selfless desire to shine the brightest light on the darkest places at any cost. I don’t think automatically equating skepticism with conspiracy theory adoption is fair. I can’t really think of any conspiracy theory I buy into.
• SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  Eh, most of it is IMHO due to optimising for entertainment value, i.e for ratings. More of a commercial agenda than a political one. Is that "deliberately mislead"? It depends on what exactly you mean by that. Don't agree and shift the meaning.
• dopylitty 4y ago
  If you’re interested in media criticism the podcast Citations Needed[0] is very well researched and covers media issues both in modern day and with a historical lens that shows how media has operated and does operate with relevant source quotes. 0: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/
• bigger_inside 4y ago
  There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for decades, and how exactly this works. With a mountain of examples. So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through." Though of course this is the wrong reaction; it has always trickled through. Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols. Every piece of information is produced with interests for audiences; objectivity is a pink unicorn Santa Claus, something you really shouldn't believe exists after you're, like, 8. But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims, and who are not organizations whose literal existence depends on state licensing as a corporation. Not to say that there is no structural pressure in the independent realm; ideology still exists, years of socialization in the country of origin with their (often folly) "self-evidence" myths exist, the need to eat and make money somehow still exists. But the pressures are much, MUCH fewer than in the case of corporate and state news.
  • VieEnCode 4y ago
    "But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims" I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.
    • pjc50 4y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformation-supplements.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformat... (which of course will be immediately accused of bias, but he's not wrong about the facts of the extent to which those people are funded by supplements) It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-oborne-resignation-senior-writer-quits-telegraph-dramatically-over-hsbc-allegations/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...
• Yuioup 4y ago
  What makes it hard for me to trust online news nowadays is click-bait. As advertising dollars going the way of polar ice caps it's gonna get worse, not better.
• throwawaytimes 4y ago
  Don't trust any news organization that publishes opinion pieces. Because they welcome people who align with their ideologies only.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Don't trust any news organization that doesn't publish opinion pieces, or pretends that the guest editorials they publish are anthropology rather than assistance. They're hiding their bias as neutrality.
    • throwawaytimes 4y ago
      You can validate news but not opinions.
• cryptope 4y ago
  Almost certainly true. Just look at how they dealt with the Epstein story, for example. So many high-profile rapists and child abusers, and it was all swept under the rug. The news organizations are captured by these abusive elites.
• StreamBright 4y ago
  “News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.” - William Randolph Hearst I think it is undeniable that new organizations are deliberately misleading the public in many cases, not necessarily part of the conspiracy but simply acting as the agent of the government. There are many cases when is became obvious. It is also easy to find sources that are free from government collusion usually classified either far left or far right whatever those mean.
• silent_cal 4y ago
  American propaganda is so sophisticated that people think it's news. At least the Soviets knew it was fake.
• __jambo 4y ago
  This is very old news. The encyclopaedia Britannica article on the subject says a good propagandist knows the mainstream news are untrusted, and will target their audience through receptive channels, like influencing family or social groups. https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Media-of-propaganda https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Media-of-propaga...
• booleandilemma 4y ago
  They don't?
• dvh 4y ago
  50% isn't much. If you ask people if they believe something obviously false (is Obama lizard?) 5% people will tell you they believe it. If you ask them something that COULD happen (did Biden tried to cover up New Hampshire docks shooting (I just made it up)) 30% will tell you they believe it.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  There is a simple reason for this. The necessary ingredient in a news story is a conflict of some kind, and the people who feel misled recognize that the conflicts that news orgs present, decorated by mostly real facts, are synthetic, the product of an ideology. In a story, there's a figure-ground relationship between facts and the tension between them, and the people very-concerned about "alternative facts" don't get that others don't believe them not because of the disinformation on the internet, but because they register to us as liars who sprinkle some facts as palatable icing over an underlying lie derived from an ideology designed to produce cheap conflict. In a moral sense, news that uses synthetic conflict sourced from ideology is in effect, false witness. To me, anything problematic or anti-problematic is a synthetic conflict generated from underlying pre-problematizations. One doesn't have to agree with this assessment to understand it, but pretending to be mystified as to why a majority of Americans don't agree with them only makes the divide irreconcilable, imo.
• ohmanjjj 4y ago
  The other half are in denial.
• kleiba 4y ago
  Thanks, Don!
• twelve40 4y ago
  So much bitterness here in the comments like "duh", "took them long enough", etc. So, honest question: if, you know, a pillar of democracy is by default laughed at, how can then this democracy function? If half the country thinks they are getting brainwashed, and the other half doesn't think they are getting brainwashed (while possibly getting brainwashed right in that same moment). How can such people make educated choices?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • aww_dang 4y ago
    Educated people disagree on all kinds of things. There are various schools of thought. Perhaps smaller polities would be less controversial. Perhaps mass democracy or democracy generally is disfunctional.
    • kneebonian 4y ago
      Hmm if only the founding document of America was written in such a way as to divide the country into smaller polities that could focus on their own issues, we could I don't know divide the country into 50 geographical areas and have them manage within their borders pretty much anything that isn't defense, foreign policy, or weights and measures. But that's nonsense of course, why shouldn't voters in SF decide the best way for the people of Bismark to live.
      • deleted 4y ago
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  • dudul 4y ago
    Let me ask you what educated choices do they have to make?
    • twelve40 4y ago
      voting, which is presumably the cornerstone of the society, is done by this same mass of people, and results in electing people with the most deadly powers in the world, among other things.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  I (live in the US) started reading a lot of BBC. At least their agenda isn't to promote some kind of ideology within my own country. What's frustrating is that almost all news sources I come across have agendas. I used to watch a lot of the Daily Show in the 2000s, but when it was a slow news day, just make fun of Bush. Later I used to watch the Nightly show with Colbert, but a year into the Trump presidency they got so hyper-focused on Trump that they didn't talk about anything else. I stopped watching. Now that I commute occasionally, I sometimes listen to NPR. Sometimes they offer news, but most of the time their point of view is just promoting a narrative that I either find uninteresting, or irrelevant. I lean pretty left, but I don't need to listen to a story about a fringe group every time I sit in the car.
• deleted 4y ago
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• bts327 4y ago
  As evidenced by: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fzYj11qWb-M https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fzYj11qWb-M
• bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Yes, it is very true that "news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting." But I contend that: 1. News organizations today are less biased than they have ever been. 2. They are better than every other alternative. 3. They are better than nothing. 1. People imagine we had a golden age of news reporting. Never happened. For example, the media sat on the juiciest of juicy stories (JFK's affairs) so that they wouldn't lose access to the White House. What other more subtle ways were they influenced? 2. Where else are you going to get your news from? Facebook, TikTok? People claim that independent sources on SubStack are better, but then they list examples that have obvious and massive biases... 3. Informed voting is a crucial aspect of democracy. If you don't explicitly seek out the news you're going to get it anyway, and those sources are things like ads or political parties that are very much trying to influence you. I think we have to throw in "news organizations" with "democracy" and "market economy" in the category of "awful things with obvious massive drawbacks, but better than any other alternative". Like democracy and capitalism, we should concentrate on making news organizations incrementally better rather than discarding them for a worse alternative.
• HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  Well, you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that pretty much all of American MSM is highly partisan, some worse than others. I grew up in the UK and 70s-80s BBC seemed a lot more neutral, but of course every news organization has their own implicit world view, relative to which they report the news. There is no such thing as an unbiased news source, although there are those that try to brainwash you and those that at least try to keep it factual.
  • Aperocky 4y ago
    I've always thought about having one news agency/aggregator that are strictly opinions verboten, i.e. just report the fact and nothing else, use as little adjective or subjective wording as possible. Something happened here at date involving these people. Done. No opinion, no analysis, no conjectures or sarcasm, no calling people with words that either accurately describe them or inaccurately, only official titles and names. It might just be possible when the rest of the field have clearly departed from objectivity, competition seems low enough.
    • HDThoreaun 4y ago
      CSPAN exists. People aren't interested in just the facts.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • fullshark 4y ago
      Won't work, the issue isn't so much a news organization writes "you should think X about this problem" it's more how they frame information, what information they leave out, and what information they choose to amplify in order to make a certain point, to the point of misleading in many cases. There's certain words that have subjective connotation which they also use, and it's near impossible to write anything coherent for an audience if you decide any words with subjective connotation are forbidden.
    • SkyBelow 4y ago
      >just report the fact and nothing else, use as little adjective or subjective wording as possible Wouldn't work. There are too many facts and it is possible to build a narrative just by choosing which facts to show or not show. Easy example, pick some demographic. Now report just the facts about all violent crime that demographic is involved in. Add in the most news worthy violent crimes of other demographics (the ones other news channels are carrying) to help create the image of impartial coverage, but always ensure an abundance of violent crime reports from the targeted demographic. Thanks to the size of the total US population, you'll always have a new story to cover even without having to add in any opinion. The US, with 300,000,000+ people, will have a few new leads every single day. The disproportionate coverage, even while sticking to just facts, will be feeding a false narrative just as much as any opinionated coverage would.
• talkingtab 4y ago
  This is really simple. Media are now in the service of advertisers. Or more specifically of people who are willing to spend money to target particular people. For example, the NYT targets the wealthy, which is why they frequently have stories about "how much will $900,000 buy in a home"? By targeting the wealthy, the NYT and other media present a view of the world that is very much at odds with the way many if not most Americans experience the world. There is another set of media that sells access to the "less well off" in America. Here's looking at you fox. It is hard to call them media because what they do is foster outrage and sell that. This audience is targeted by those with political agendas. Who pays for your media determines how you see the world and what you see of the world. Period.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    Fox is generally more popular among the very wealthy in the business world
  • stuckinhell 4y ago
    Not really, it's clear demand for Christian stuff in America is huge. Yet the media avoids this like crazy. One of the biggest movies of all time is "The passion of the christ" there.Yet most media in America is highly liberal and arguably anti-christian. It's not about the money clearly, its not about the money. American Corporations have undergone idealogical capture. There is no other reason Disney risked and lost their self governance by going up against Desantis. This maybe changing though. My firm is actively beginning to re-evaluate its social activism after 15% layoffs (more layoffs incoming too). The next big phase is regaining our market in the "heartland". I'm in strategic meetings with a lot of executives, that are becoming screaming matches over the direction of the firm.
    • chowchowchow 4y ago
      This isn't a refutation. If the markets for christian stuff and <everything else> are sufficiently disjoint then it can and probably is perfectly rational to choose the bigger <everything else> pie rather than trying to compete for the Christian market. You see "ideological capture," other see the market at work. Somehow I also doubt passing laws in Florida to force Disney to make Mickey Mouse less woke will have the intended effects but it probably feels exciting to you all the same. To be clear I also think its a bit ridiculous to have Disney operate as a local goverment of a town. But I'd say that if Disney was a feed supply company and not a media/theme park outfit just the same while your (and Ron D's) concern seems to be that "Woke Disney" specifically had that jurisdiction.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• psychphysic 4y ago
  Only half? Title is editorialised however, its mislead or adopt a particular view. But making readers adopt a particular view is basically their purpose.
• aliqot 4y ago
  Not one news org agrees on any one thing, so as they say "one of you motherfuckers is lying"
• fortran77 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's "deliberate" though. I think the biases of the reporters just comes through. There's no big conspiracy. Still, to cite a recent example, the reporting from most news outlets on things like the Kenosha shootings and trials were outrageously bad.
• jamisteven 4y ago
  ..which is, quite accurate really.
• nickdothutton 4y ago
  Edward L. Bernays published his book "Propaganda" in 1928. Even that only came after his earlier works in on a similar theme in the early 20s. I clearly remember questioning my father at the breakfast table (where newspapers were read) about the veracity of some story I barely grasped at age 5. He explained to me that not everything you read in the papers was true, and some of it was made up from whole cloth. My 5 year-old-self was stunned, why would someone go to the effort of producing a newspaper only to make up what was in it? What I'm amazed at now is that only about half of an educated, first-world nation have figured this out.
  • yonaguska 4y ago
    New people are born every day, and increasingly they are raised on the teat of whatever media they are exposed to at a young age.
  • Lammy 4y ago
    And earlier than that in the 'teens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio... “[George] Creel urged [Woodrow] Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate "not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'"”
• keyanp 4y ago
  Yes I know that traditionally media has been used for propaganda, but I'm surprised by the reactions in this thread and those who find what seems like fairly objective reporting as biased. Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news sites that are deliberately misleading? If this propaganda is so rampant then where is it? (Note: I'm opinion articles excluded because they are uh opinions). https://www.nytimes.com/section/world https://www.nytimes.com/section/world https://www.nytimes.com/section/us https://www.nytimes.com/section/us
  • EricE 4y ago
    >Can someone show me a story from the NYT world or US news sites that are deliberately misleading? How about their "reporting" on the jews and certain activities with them in a European country before the US entered WWII? Just do a modicum of research and if you are not thoroughly repulsed by the character of the NYT...
  • criddell 4y ago
    Even great, objective reporting can be sullied by a headline writer who is rewarded for doing things the news org can easily measure. https://www.instagram.com/nyt_headlines https://www.instagram.com/nyt_headlines
  • sixQuarks 4y ago
    There is so much. Any time there's a war, the NY Times manufactures consent, Iraq war and weapons of mass destruction for example, more than half of Americans thought Saddam had nukes. Russiagate is a recent example: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/03/revealing_the_new_york_times_deceitful_russiagate_coverage_148809.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/03/reveal... Misleading can also be what the NY Times doesn't cover. For example, the Columbia Journalism Review published a scathing report on how the media misled on Russiagate and NY Times and other MSM just tries to ignore it: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p... Watch this 10 minute video by Glenn Greenwald that goes over in detail how the NY Times misleads and lies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZB0jan4QSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZB0jan4QSY
• jawns 4y ago
  I formerly worked as a news editor at a metro daily newspaper, and before that I worked at various other news outlets and magazines. Here's the reality: The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness. I worked with a bunch of really talented reporters and editors throughout my career, and almost without exception, they highly valued those things. Moreover, many have an anti-authoritarian bent, and that leads to a desire to expose corruption, rather than protect it. But ... * I've seen publishers kill stories because they thought it would make advertisers unhappy. * I've seen senior execs put pressure on editors to downplay stories that painted the region in a bad light. * I've seen a political campaign refuse to permit a certain reporter to attend their campaign events because they didn't like that the reporter wasn't acting like a PR tool. * I've seen budgets for "watchdog journalism" become slowly starved, in favor of clickbait. And unfortunately, most of the public doesn't see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business (who are really trying to make money and exert influence). Granted, there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued, and unfortunately that's where a lot of eyeballs end up these days, because so many people just want their existing biases to be re-inforced. But what America really needs is more media literacy, so we can better distinguish the former from the latter. We, as a society, are SO BAD at this. Our B.S. detectors have lots of false positives and false negatives. We look to the wrong signals to determine whether a news report is trustworthy. We fail to evaluate information critically as long as it validates our pre-existing views. We have a hard time separating facts from opinions. This lack of media literacy is worrisome enough, but now we've got political leaders capitalizing on the fact that we're bad at this and actively trying to delegitimize the media (as if it's a single thing) because it serves their own purposes.
  • remote_phone 4y ago
    Did you work during the Trump era? Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth. That’s when things went from bad to worse and I abandoned the mainstream media entirely.
• gamechangr 4y ago
  They do. (deliberately mislead) The days of subjectivity are over. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for Large corporations to have self interest and to highlight stories that benefit them and minimize/ignore things that would negatively effect them.
• commandlinefan 4y ago
  We believe that because news organizations deliberately mislead us.
• smcl 4y ago
  In an ideal world this means people will simply start taking what they're told with a pinch of salt and are little bit more sensible about believing sensational things. However we don't live in such a world. I suspect that what's more likely is that a bunch of people will fall into believing in stupid shit like flat earth or qanon, and will end up following weird conspiracy freaks like Alex Jones or white supremacists like Nick Fuentes.
• Quillbert182 4y ago
  I certainly agree with that sentiment. It is my belief that the modern American press is the enemy of the people, as they rarely do anything but cause strife.
• claytongulick 4y ago
  "It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." -Thomas Jefferson
• aww_dang 4y ago
  99% of what we see in the news is editorial content. We are being informed of where partisans stand on issues. The actual event is tertiary. The narrative surrounding it is secondary. The primary item is the partisan goal. "Joe Biden fell off his bicycle", we can believe that much. The other 99% of the content is partisan posturing. Maybe if I were there, I could have further insights, "His aides should have given him platform pedals instead of cages". Thankfully I wasn't there. Even if I had been there, my observation would have still been subjective. However, there are some narratives and editorial positions which are trivially self-refuting. We can evaluate them from first principles. "A misinformation czar is required to protect democracy" or "We need censorship to preserve a free and open society" If we trust people to vote, then we must trust people to consume and evaluate information independent of state institutions. Ultimately these discussions revolve around our premises. Our first principles inform us. The specific event can be almost irrelevant in many cases. There are other crank ideas like those advanced by David Icke. I cannot prove that world leaders are not lizard people, but I'm naturally skeptical. Even if I watched Biden fall, I couldn't prove it. Crank theories don't threaten me, they amuse. Hopefully this is something which isn't controversial for partisans on this site. We could substitute other news items and theories. I'm more troubled by the users shouting down these delightful absurdities. "My truth is bigger than yours" From my side they have my deepest sympathy for wherever the disagreement injured them. However, moving forward perhaps it would be best if they didn't identify so closely with editorialized content or specific news outlets? "9 out of 10 HN users chose Brand-X Truth and here's why..."
• 0xDEF 4y ago
  Just a reminder that Fortune is now a pay-to-play publication.
• jamesgill 4y ago
  All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. --Marshall McLuhan
• arecurrence 4y ago
  One must only take a glance at the ownership breakdown of any major story on Ground News and it will be rather clear they may be onto something. 3 or 4 conglomerates are often 85%+ of the news sources.
• slenk 4y ago
  I can't get past this ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    When posting YouTube links, it's considerate and future-proofing to give the title, in the event of future content removal and so that those assessing the link can better base a decision to follow. Thanks.
  • slenk 4y ago
    Title: "Sinclair's script for stations"
• pastacacioepepe 4y ago
  The real question is, what is the other half thinking?
• MrMan 4y ago
  and 2/3 of the angry programer dudes on HN
• robswc 4y ago
  Seems it will be an ever rotating 50%, lol. During the war in Iraq, it was primarily leftists distrusting the mainstream media. Now ~20 years later it seems to have completely flipped. IMO, they simply mislead when it works in their favor. That makes it a minefield though and the best way to handle it I've found is to simply turn it off. If something is important, somehow that information will filter up to you.
• GeekyBear 4y ago
  I can remember seeing Walter Cronkite on a PBS panel discussion warning America that this would be the end result of the deregulation of media ownership. If a small number of people are allowed to own the vast majority of media outlets, those media outlets are no longer going to represent the interests of the public at large. Back when all television/radio was broadcast over the air, there used to be this quaint concept of broadcasters having to prove that they serve "the public interest" to receive and retain an FCC license to use the public airwaves. https://www.benton.org/public_interest_obligations_of_dtv_broadcasters_guide/public_standard https://www.benton.org/public_interest_obligations_of_dtv_br...
  • MrMan 4y ago
    the public interest is dead, look at the sentiment here on HN. everyone has taken red pills from either Peter Thiel, Joe Rogan, or some influencer at the listener's socio-economic level, who propagandizes them about the Individual and how you cant trust anyone but other bros who also dont trust anyone.
  • rendall 4y ago
    I dunno. I suspect that the news was just as partisan and biased back then, but the public was less able to independently verify news reports.
    • GeekyBear 4y ago
      There was a time when journalism was seen as an expense in the public interest and not as a partisan entertainment profit center / propaganda outlet. Stations that did run an editorial with a given partisan viewpoint were even required, by law, to allow an opposing view to be aired in response.
      • yamtaddle 4y ago
        Early SNL (1970s) turned this into a bit on the news segment, with Chevy Chase introducing someone to respond to some (non-existent) editorial of theirs from a past program, to provide alternative viewpoints, as was their journalistic duty (which respondent invariably had mis-heard some word and so was responding, passionately, to entirely the wrong thing—that was the joke)
• PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I noticed there's a lot of affirmation of this belief but very little citations. So I'm going to ask HN: What is the news journalism or reporting you rely on to believe that other news organizations mislead you, and why did you believe the first over the second? [This is also a way for me to discern news I should be listening to!]
• anovikov 4y ago
  What's to "believe" about it? It's what they are, what they always existed for: shape public opinion in a way beneficial for its sponsors. I can see nothing wrong about it, read both a left-leaning and a right-leaning source and you will be able to figure out what really happened, more or less.
• te_3239843 4y ago
  The full surveys are worth reading IMHO: Part 1: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/American-Views-2022-pt1.pdf https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Amer... Part 2: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/American-Views-2022-Pt-2-Trust-Media-and-Democracy.pdf https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Amer... Some thoughts: The first part of the survey focuses on the question: who pays for news? An executive overview of the opinions is: most (3 in 4) say that news organizations are first and foremost motivated by their own financial interests. However... well over half of people say that they will never pay for news (although this summary obscures a lot of details in the PDF). So, there's a bit of a contradiction here. News is usually a business first and foremost (government sponsored news organizations being the main exception), and one would postulate that the less reader subscriptions are necessary, the more news will tilt towards satisfying commercial interests (or other sources of income) above all. As far as trust is concerned, online news and US cable news fairs poorly. The former despite a growing amount of people preferring to get their news online; the later despite being the most used news source currently. "Big 3" network news and (surprisingly for me considering the network decay of local news towards low-quality national-generated junk I've seen over time) local news TV fares better. Low trust in national news is linked to a negative outlook in democracy and other aspects of the political process. One aspect of these types of reports that I always wonder about is how much of these actually reflect issues in interpreting news in its core. The current digital era generates tons of articles, much of which is useless noise. So sometimes, I feel that some complaints about media in reality are an inability to sort out critical information from the noise in media (both in news and everything else). So, an interesting tidbit of this survey to me is this finding: "Americans with low emotional trust in national news are much more likely to find it difficult to sort out the facts in today’s information environment." Is information overload a huge part of the trust problem? I suspect this is the case. A conclusion I postulate is that (as per the above) too much of the "news" is (to equivalate with food) low-nutrition "junk food" designed merely to stimulate clicks and maybe some base emotional response, but offering nothing insightful or valuable for the long term.
• jsonne 4y ago
  I am not in journalism per say however as I've spent a decade in advertising I work with media companies a lot. Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways. Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional to pull something like that off even if they wanted to. There are however many internal and external pressures on organizations that shape narratives in a specific ways and journalists are human beings (they're biased based on their own experiences) so reporting always has a slant. That is worthy of critique and is healthy. The debate on media generally has jumped the shark. IMHO it's not the answer that many folks (that tend to be conservative) want to hear, but meaningful diversity of opinion and experience would help balance this out. You want news with a working class, middle America viewpoint? Then you need to help some % of those people get into media. (This is just one such example of course).
  • dudul 4y ago
    That's exactly what someone involved in a global cabal would say! /jk
  • Liquix 4y ago
    "Global cabal" might be a stretch, but it is a fact that there are large-scale government projects underway to deceive, mislead, and control the narrative via journalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://web.archive.org/web/20131025035711/http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php https://web.archive.org/web/20131025035711/http://www.carlbe...
    • l3mure 4y ago
      I recently came across an amusing connection [1] to Bernstein's piece and its highlighting of Joseph Alsop. The author of the following is Bernard Fall, who certainly is otherwise pro-West and anti-communist, later KIA while on patrol with American troops in Vietnam. > [...] the American press gave a completely distorted picture of what happened in Laos in the summer of 1950, with the Washington Post and the New York Times being among the worst offenders. [...] > Press dispatches bore such news as "Viet-Minh troops advanced to within 13 miles of Samneus city" (UPI), and even the staid British agency Reuters headlined on September 3 that "the Royal Laotian Army was today preparing to defend the capital of Vientiane"; while on September 5, an editorial of the Washington Post, citing the "splendid examples of alert on-the-spot reporting" of its columnist Joseph Alsop spoke of "full-scale, artillery-backed invasion from Communist North Viet-Nam." All this was just so much nonsense. [...] > Two weeks later, the letdown began. Even the New York Times report in Laos, who, until then, had swallowed whole every press release circulating in Vientiane, noted on September 13 that "briefings have noticeably played down the activities of North Viet-Nam in the conflict. This led some observers to believe that Laotian political tacticians were creating a background that would soften the blow if the [United Nations] observer report on intervention by North Viet-Nam was negative." Indeed, the Security Council report of November 5, 1959, did fail to substantiate the theory of a Communist outside invasion of Laos. [...] > There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that certainly North Viet-Nam and perhaps even Red China, gave military and political support to the Laotian rebellion. But their aid was in no way as overt as originally suggested in the alarming reports spread around the world by American press media, some of which went so far in their affirmations as to accuse almost anyone who doubted their stories as being either a blind fool or "soft" on Communism. Joseph Alsop's "Open Letter" to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life (both of which refused to be stampeded by their less hard-headed colleagues) is a prime example of this attitude. [...] > While the British and the French--whose sources of information in Laos already had proved more reliable the year before--awaited more hard facts to go on, Washington took up the cudgels in full, both officially and in the press. In a somber column, Mr. Joseph Alsop spoke of the "yawning drain" which Laos was likely to be engulfed in; compared the 1954 Geneva settlement to the Munich sell-out of 1938; and called our Canadian allies who had staunchly defended the Western viewpoint in the international cease-fire commission (the other members being India and Poland), "approximately neutral." This was written in 1964, so over a decade before Bernstein's expose. [1] Street Without Joy, pp. 331-337
• ihatepython 4y ago
  The Pulitzer Prize is named after the guy who invented Yellow Journalism
• justin66 4y ago
  > In one small consolation, in both cases Americans had more trust in local news. This trust in "local" news is often misplaced given how many local news outlets - television stations or newspapers - have been subsumed by larger interests. For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Deadspin video of dozens of local news anchors reading the same editorial content handed down by Sinclair Broadcast Group is striking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo https://deadspin.com/how-i-made-a-dumb-video-making-fun-of-sinclair-broadcas-1825106452 https://deadspin.com/how-i-made-a-dumb-video-making-fun-of-s... There is an awful lot of really, really good stuff put out by local newspapers and TV stations but people ought to be thoughtful about their use of any media.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• foo92691 4y ago
  Only half?
• surume 4y ago
  Such a shame that this is our state of affairs. If half the public don't trust the establishment, then how stable is that establishment? Last time I checked, chaos is not fun.
• uhtred 4y ago
  The "respectable" ones don't lie, but they do choose what to not cover and what to draw attention to. For example, the lack of coverage of the train derailment in Ohio. And zero articles since the government said the UFOs they shot down were benign asking "Hey, government, that's it? No explanation as to why you wasted millions of dollars shooting down benign objects? With all your capabilities you really can't find the debris?"
  • goatlover 4y ago
    They have to decide what's newsworthy. There's limited time and space. Your examples might be apt, but not because they're making decisions. That's a given for any possible news organization. You can call that a kind of bias, sure. But professional news people will have a pretty good idea of what their consumers are likely to consider relevant news.
• bannedbybros 4y ago
  [dead]
• jasmer 4y ago
  Good, we need to stop being naive. Obvoiusly they do. They are clickbait and narrative drive, almost all of them. Even those with high journalistic standards can be heavily misleading. MSNBC has high journalistic standards (and some brilliant minds, with great researchers) and some of their taalking heads have pretty heavy bias and FYI I'm not 'taking sides' here. The most interesting thing about the 'news' is trying to determine where the bias comes from.
• now__what 4y ago
  Using this thread to yet again pound the drum of local news. I don't work in media; I've just found my local newspaper subscription to be extremely valuable. Your local news organizations will be biased in some ways, yes, but it's easier to keep track of the writers who lean one way or another (smaller journalist teams). Since they're regional they can't skew too far on either end of the political spectrum or they'll anger the residents and lose subscribers. Their accountability is higher, because people in the community generally know what's going on around them and will call the bluff in op-eds or the paper's social media group. And, of course, the reporting is actually relevant to you! They don't need to rage-bait you for clicks because most of the reporting has tangible bearing on your life. Subscribing to my local paper has kept me both informed and grounded, so I'm very nervous about the prospect of the medium being abandoned for declining profitability. I've yet to find a more valuable source of news.
  • TechBro8615 4y ago
    My local newspaper is owned by USAToday and their site is some kind of white-labeled USAToday wordpress template that's shared by a bunch of other formerly-independent local newspapers which are apparently now part of the USAToday portfolio. I don't have any interest in supporting USAToday, so I will never make it past my fifth article of the week.
    • ceejayoz 4y ago
      Gannett is the parent company; they own USA Today and dozens of local papers. I worked at a Gannett paper for a few years, at the time, we had a corporate-managed templating system but were able to make fairly significant modifications to it. That eventually transitioned to the one-size-fits-all approach you see today. Same's happening to the physical product; mostly a thin wrapper around state/national news from Gannett corporate.
    • now__what 4y ago
      Well that's upsetting. My local paper has been owned by Advance Publications since the 40s, but it doesn't seem to suffer the same quality issues. It's even won several major awards, both for individual journalism and for the publication as a whole :) I almost wish they would pick up a template website though, because theirs is super buggy (I'd likely get the print version anyway).
• clavalle 4y ago
  Are there any journalism democratization efforts we should be aware of? An organization who has incentives aligned with providing journalism for the people?
• mentos 4y ago
  Only takes me one minute and thirty six seconds to convince anyone I meet of this point: "This is Extremely Dangerous to our Democracy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
  • gspencley 4y ago
    This discussion was just had on Joe Rogan's podcast about a recent CBC article, which appeared to be deliberately trying to equate the word "freedom" with "something bad and scary" through a guilt-by-association argument. https://youtu.be/Imh5qst3gCg https://youtu.be/Imh5qst3gCg
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  I read a book called "The Fourth Turning"(published 1996) quite awhile ago. It ended up predicting many of these recent events and generally tries to bring awareness of the eternal recurrence of "turnings" in one's life. > If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. > The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas, killing some. Congress enacts mandatory quarantine measures. The president orders the National Guard to throw prophylactic cordons around unsafe neighborhoods. Mayors resist. Urban gangs battle suburban militias. Calls mount for the president to declare martial law. Civic virtue tends to get lost in the daily news cycles during the climax of a crisis, but it is frequently regained. Moral and cultural standards are increasing and thus the news will have to adapt to it as it always has. People are slowly returning to classic virtues.
• KwisatzHaderack 4y ago
  Reminds me of a Richard Pryor joke: “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?” There’s been many times when news articles have been easily discredited by simply looking at the original source(video, image, research papers).
• flybrand 4y ago
  What’s wrong with the other 50%?
• jeffwask 4y ago
  No, I don't believe it. Corporate media owned by giant conglomerates is untrustworthy.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  People deserve the news they click on.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  There is an infinite amount of things to report on. Every preference is politics. Most news organizations in the US are left leaning white collar interest groups, half the country is right leaning. Hence the results here.
• svieira 4y ago
  It's not unique to America or to the present day, "There's no news in The Truth and there's no truth in The News" was a saying in some regions of the world not all that long ago.
• csours 4y ago
  How many Americans believe that news organizations deliberately mislead OTHER people? If you dig a little deeper, how many people realize there are different formats like opinion, commentary, and analysis? Opinions can't be WRONG, but they sure can be BAD. You can only fact check facts. You can't fact check analysis. You have to apply critique (aka critical thinking skills, or a critical framework).
  • TechBro8615 4y ago
    This is a good insight. When you see people complain about "misinformation," and especially if they complain about "needing to do something about it," your follow-up question should be: do you want your news to be censored, or do you want other people's news to be censored? I suspect when most people reference "protecting from misinformation," they actually mean protecting you from misinformation, not themselves. After all, anyone sophisticated enough to recognize the problem is surely capable of filtering their own information stream, right?
    • captainbland 4y ago
      At least here in Britain I recognise a lot of the news outlets I prefer often print total crap. I wouldn't say there's much of an answer in censorship (for instance the existing limits on what can legally be called 'corrupt' already go too far). But I'd call into question incentives for sure, because some journalists seem to act without self respect in the levels of barrel scraping they go to when clearly trying to contrive a story to conform with some particular direction. I could elaborate but the short version for me is: If we could decouple editorial direction from funding sources I think we'd end up much better off.
      • TechBro8615 4y ago
        I think a lot of problems would become non-problems if people would admit they read the news primarily for entertainment. This expectation that "the news must supply me with reliable facts" is an intellectually-dishonest complaint from an unreliable narrator. It's nobody's job to tell you what to think, and even if it were, it's not also their job to tell you what's important to think about. An objective press is definitionally impossible as long as "the news" can't include a story about every time a tree falls in the forest. Selection bias is unavoidable, and any expectation of a publisher to avoid it is one borne from intellectual dishonesty, because you can only shift the bias, not remove it. The most objective way to read the news is to read all of it. Unfortunately that's not usually possible. So the next best thing you can do (short of ignoring it) is to read the most divergent sources, and fill in the blanks yourself. I've seen this referred to as "triangulating the truth" - is there a story on Fox but not CNN? That editorial selection bias is itself additional information that you can use to infer the motives of the publishers, and over time, based on observed bias, the motives of the subjects in the article. And then you can think from there about why they have those motives and what their agenda might be. ...but that's all a lot of work, which is why I'm also an advocate for deliberately ignoring the news for weeks at a time. Don't fall for the "informed citizen" trap - that's how they keep you hooked to the propaganda.
• skymast 4y ago
  When one looks objectively at media reporting and takes that objective viewpoint on a sliding scale backwards through various reports, it becomes obvious that their mission is not to report news, but to shape public opinion.
• natch 4y ago
  Wow, one has to wonder how the other half can be in such a daze.
• alphabettsy 4y ago
  There’s a certain subset of powerful people who would love everyone to distrust the media so they themselves can be the truth tellers. I don’t think the news from major media organizations deliberately misleads people. I think people often mistake News-based entertainment shows for news as well as things like opinion and editorial for news. There is bias but that’s not necessarily the same as being misleading.
• throwaway8689 4y ago
  Genuinely surprised its only half because Fox News viewers often think CNN is lying and CNN viewers often think the same about Fox News. Both groups can therefore answer 'Yes' if asked if they think news organisations deliberately mislead. I'm picking those two as being big news channels but I think it holds for other tv and for newspapers too.
  • MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    It's so interesting how our country can be divided almost perfectly into "do you subscribe to the thought process/consensus of FOX news or CNN?" Like, how often is there a viewer who actively watches both/switches between the two? It's very polarizing. I can't think of any way to fix it culturally. One party thinks the other is deranged and lying. Will it get worse? Will it get better? Where does this lead us?
    • rewilding 4y ago
      They're both biased; watching both doesn't necessarily accomplish anything. In fact they share the same basic pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist biases.
    • mint2 4y ago
      CNN is not the counterpart to fox. That comparison is apples and oranges. It’s almost like saying strawberry ice cream is the counterpart to chocolate and implying non chocolate eaters all eat strawberry. Yes cnn is a newsertainement org like fox, but it’s not the anti-fox. For starters, No one actually cares about cnn except fox watchers.
      • throwaway8689 4y ago
        I'd be happy to update my comment with a better pair if you can suggest one, but I stand by my general point that most people could name a news outlet they don't trust.
    • asdff 4y ago
      Just look at history. The 1930s in europe were like this. You had monarchists, republicans, fascists, communists, every political spectrum represented to its maximal extent with actual organized boots on the ground and people willing to take up arms and die for these causes. Everyone thought the other side was wrong. Things didn't end up getting mended though, people tore eachother apart in world war II and in the years after, and made whatever schools of thought weren't in control of whatever spit of land political exiles, removed or imprisoned or worse. In the U.S., we didn't make war with eachother, but we hardly "mended" our political misaligmnets from the 1920s and 30s either. In the post war years we simply made talking about communism in the media illegal, blacklisted progressive voices, and ran witchhunts under mccarthyism to root it out of office. Then after mccarthyism, we used the civil rights era and drugs to further alienate political groups from what is legal, proper, and ordained as bonafide american by the ruling class, versus unifying many of these new progressive ideas into our national culture. In later years we divided the labor class into irreconcilable factions, neither of which often thinks critically of the facts of their situation but rather believes the words of their chosen political party leaders as gospel, and never looking back or forward either unless told by said leaders. If we consider history and our current status, we are at the moment where divisions are being made, and once divided into a group people don't tend to switch groups, they usually die believing that ideology they latch themselves on to. What is next is probably either two things: a period of instability as different groups vie for power (unlikely as the ruling class is unified in its position in the class war above all, and much political commentary is just fodder to distract from the class war), or, radicals will get the hippy treatment, and be pacified by both the conveniences of modern American capitalistic life, as well as the fact that their radical ideology receives no honest voice at all in mass media or wider politics.
• yboris 4y ago
  Obligatory: Media Bias Chart https://adfontesmedia.com/ https://adfontesmedia.com/ Arguably the best place to help you pick better media outlets.
• 8943gG4f 4y ago
  On why only half of Americans believe this in 2023: It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled. -Mark Twain
• vlark 4y ago
  [flagged]
• yalogin 4y ago
  There are good and bad parts about the media, just like everything else. Unfortunately the current political landscape just accentuates the bad and just hammers it down into people's minds. The perception that media is biased is more important for politics than nuanced observation and we are here because of that. People should always be skeptical about what is fed to them but taking these kind of blanket mind alterations are just bad for society. Not sure how to fix it though once someone is on that slope.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• kthejoker2 4y ago
  To me, "news" is different than "journalism" (and obviously way different than "opinion") but most media orgs go way out of their way to just completely blur these. Every "news" article (an election, a shooting, an earthquake, a new science study) is wrapped in spin - why this is bad or good for America, why it's racist or a sign of moral decay, how you should feel, what these other people think about it, who agrees with it. I gave up and just use primary sources - reading the actual ArXiv paper or gov website or watching the eyewitness video is a better use of my time.
• GolfPopper 4y ago
  A relevant idea I stumbled across recently: Gell-Mann Amenesia: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is 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 as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
• crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  Dualism is a form of misleading, and many news organizations aren't explicitly seeking to be nondualist sources, so that's a form of deliberate misleading flying covertly under the rest of this.
• ChicagoDave 4y ago
  Cronkite, Murrow, and Russert have been spinning in their graves for years. As soon as the fairness doctrine died, real journalism was crushed by corporate greed.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    That and de-regulation of media ownership, allowing unprecedented consolidation. Hard to tell which did more damage, since they came so close together. Possibly one would have been fine if the other hadn't happened.
• adversaryIdiot 4y ago
  Am I really smarter than half of my neighbors :|
• G_z9 4y ago
  The entire China narrative is a CIA psyop. Everywhere in the media you see China being portrayed as a massive threat, a looming threat to our national security. Every event in global politics involving China is twisted to fit this narrative by the media lapdogs of the CIA. Nothing could be further from the truth. China is extremely weak both geopolitically and in terms of leadership. It is the most geopolitically vulnerable country in the world besides Yemen et al. It has to import everything from food to intellectual goods. China poses precisely zero threat to us because China sucks. The China balloon thing is a good example. It was an embarrassing mistake that was a result of disintegrating leadership structure in the cpp. It accomplished literally nothing and never could have. But these huge obvious questions were ignored by the media. Questions like “what did they stand to gain?” Nothing. “Was this deliberate?” Not on the part of ping. “What does this say about China?” That they are a joke of a country. Look at mike baker on joe rogan. That’s how the CIA answered the rogan question, what are we going to do about this pesky guy who has a larger audience than cnn but isn’t a slimy media executive who would be receptive to our requests to shape the narrative around certain topics? They send in mike baker who handily fools rogan into thinking he’s just a good dude who used to be a spook. And they chit chat and once in a while, when the conversation turns to something geopolitical, mike sprinkles in some CIA narrative. Never believe anything a spook says. The CIA and FBI are behind this thrust against disinformation. Where was this disinformation frenzy at when it comes to people believing in even more wild shit like the idea that the universe keeps track of your good and bad deeds and punishes you or rewards you accordingly? Or the belief that the position of the stars and planets determines what personality your baby will have or whether or not you’ll be given a promotion? If disinformation mattered as a principle then wouldn’t these things make liberals foam at the mouth too? It’s so ironic that the liberal camp has become the exact opposite of what it used to be. It is the vassal of the CIA and FBI. https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1589606899569377282?s=46&t=T2Hlb9tdWWjQYZxiOWPFHQ https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1589606899569377282?s=46&...
• harimau777 4y ago
  I don't see how someone could not conclude that at the very least some major news organizations mislead by spinning things to fit their agenda. If that wasn't the case, then you wouldn't see such radically different takes between, for example, Fox News and MSNBC on the same issue.
• irrational 4y ago
  I would really like to know more about the half that don't believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them. Anyone who has had personal experience with an event and then reads the news coverage of it knows this is true. And it's not a new thing. I was traveling in the Middle East back in the mid-90s. I was eyewitness to an event. When I got back to the states I checked what various newspapers had to say and was shocked at how they misrepresented it (though, I found that news sources from Europe were accurate, I'm not sure if that still holds). I guess I'm fortunate I learned that lesson early in my life.
• LetsGetTechnicl 4y ago
  I mean it's easy to see why, just consider the trash NYT publishes in the opinions section, or manufactured consent in general
• JohnClark1337 4y ago
  [dead]
• c3534l 4y ago
  Its true, though. Pick half a dozen news articles from 2+ years ago, then find the current state of information we have on what happened. Its pretty obvious that journalists lie, embellish, misrepresent what their sources tell them, or simply never did basic fact-checking. I realized this a long time ago and its only gotten worse. No one wants to pay for news, and they certainly don't want to pay for news that consistently causes them cognitive dissonance on top of being boring. But thats exactly what the world is: uncomfortable and technical.
• miroljub 4y ago
  Honestly, I'm surprised only half of Americans thinks that the media misleads them. That's the whole purpose of those media.
• m3047 4y ago
  Early in the internet SPAWAR ran a web site named Planet Earth. Always the best place to get international news, first. Not kidding.
• fuckyah 4y ago
  [dead]
• bhaney 4y ago
  Only half?
• politician 4y ago
  Only half?
• no_wizard 4y ago
  Is anyone else concerned that this sentiment may ultimately lead to unshakable seeds of doubt in the general populace? That would be a real thread to our democratic institutions. We see this with all the attacks on voters, voting, and election results. News, while not a direct wing of the government (usually), is an important core to the social and political well being of a nation, yet in the US it seems there is no counter balance to this trend. I can't even say I blame people either, its not just "right wing nut jobs" or "out of touch leftists" that feel news organizations are untrustworthy or mislead the public. Its starting to become more common among moderate to slightly left leaning political normals. IE, the average population (in aggregate). That should really bother people more I feel like. This is a pretty serious problem in the modern age and there's no good answer on how to move forward to get real trust back. Having a government sponsored non partisan news source will immediately get rejected by pretty significant portion of the US citizenry, and private corporations and non profit foundations have their own issues, namely around how they get funded. Seems there is honestly scant little we can do here, I honestly don't see how you roll this back
• mola 4y ago
  Written in fortune.com where they sell their brand to anyone to publish their scam articles Gee, I wonder why ppl don't trust the news. I would say ppl don't trust anything anymore, because most businesses are about scamming and gaslighting their customers these days.
• adolph 4y ago
  Ok, I see Chomsky/Hermann and Astral Codex mentioned here, but no Martin Gurri yet. Gurri spent years surveying the global information landscape. Around the turn of the century, he noticed a trend: As the internet gave rise to an explosion of information, there was a concurrent spike in political instability. The reason, he surmised, was that governments lost their monopoly on information and with it their ability to control the public conversation. One of the many consequences of this is what Gurri calls a “crisis of authority.” As people were exposed to more information, their trust in major institutions — like the government or newspapers — began to collapse. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the-revolt-of-the-public-global-democracy https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the... Blog: https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/ https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/ Book: The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium: https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public
• mjmsmith 4y ago
  Another media post, another HN comments feed where more people are upset about Hunter Biden’s laptop than a president cheerleading an insurrection and trying to overthrow the results of an election. Less credibility than the media you despise.
• kornhole 4y ago
  I am only shocked that half of the country does not believe MSM has deliberately misled them. We have much more work to do to reveal this to them.
• w0m 4y ago
  honestly shocked half of Americans don't think they're being misled by their medium of choice.
• rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  I have believed this since 1993. I was a student in high school and did interviews for both a local newspaper and television station. In both instances they misrepresented what I said, editing or rearranging my words to construct a different narrative, or in the case of the newspaper they just made up things. The stories weren't even about anything serious, just local hometown feel-good filler stories and the actual, literal, lies that the journalists willfully constructed were inconsequential and actually made me look good. But I figured if are willing to lie about something so trivial as what they lied about, then it was highly likely the entire system is a sham.
• mark_l_watson 4y ago
  Only half? That might actually be correct though. I have friends who are republicans who just think that MSNBC are elite-class shills; and democrats who just think that Fox News are elite-class shills. Only some people I know have reached understanding that any corporate news media has serious propaganda agendas.
• celtoid 4y ago
  Albert Einstein alluded to the issue in 1949. "Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, >>private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education)<<. It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." [0] [0] https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
• hackeraccount 4y ago
  If your goal is to lead people than you end up misleading them. I understand that it's probably impossible to simply report the news ; that the very act of picking what you're reporting is an editorial act. That said, I also think that most of the people who go to work in news do that because they have an agenda they want to flog; the only distinction is that some of them admit it to themselves and the rest don't even understand that they're trying to do just that.
• dokem 4y ago
  We gotta pump those numbers up ..
• clarge1120 4y ago
  Half seems low, but then again, I am in the 50% that believes news organizations deliberately mislead for biased gain.
• frankreyes 4y ago
  https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10693146/cnn-settles-nick-sandmann-lawsuit-covington-catholic-kentucky/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10693146/cnn-settles-nick-sand... >CNN settles $275million suit from MAGA hat-wearing Covington Catholic student after stand-off vid I'll always remember this moment as a statement of fact that news organizations deliberately mislead us.
• globalreset 4y ago
  Still so low?
• seydor 4y ago
  Including Fortune.com? I think we are learning that the more communication we have the more manipulation we have and it's dark . Unity and common purpose require a sence of naivety and lack/assymetry of information. When most people have the facts , it matters more who is promoting something than what it is, and it s full of partisanship from then on.
• vt85 4y ago
  [dead]
• EricE 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • epakai 4y ago
    Then there are people dismissing it despite the evidence... Trump's campaign staff activity stands on its own. They actively courted Russian influence even if they didn't go so far as to "collude".
    • EricE 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • epakai 4y ago
        This is just bad trolling. The Mueller report points out numerous issues within the campaign. I highly recommend reading its executive summary (~7 pages) if you think it doesn't. Disappointing having to rehash this stuff years later, but then again there was a concerted effort by Trump to rewrite these past years as a witch hunt and a rigged election. The election claims fell flat, and Durham's investigation produced very little to back that narrative. After all that hubbub I have no faith in these attempts to rewrite russiagate as just a political campaign attack.
• rhacker 4y ago
  The left/right divide is really bad for our country. The profit motives behind maintaining the divide only encourages it to get worse. CNN wants to shock you with whatever the GOP is doing to put a gun in your baby's crib. FOX wants to shock you with whatever crime is under reported. To make things worse, the mechanisms and new types of media (YT, social media, etc...) make it so that you essentially cannot escape the media grasp any more. So we're thinking 24/7 on how the left or right is going to ruin the country. All of it is profit motivated.
• say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
  What would you call The New York Times's 1619 Project? Historians tore it apart. Non-historian and simply rational human beings did as well. The entire project is a propaganda piece with a goal that requires deliberately misleading the public.
• atlgator 4y ago
  I recall in elementary school being tested on whether a sentence was a fact or an opinion. It seems to me that most people now would fail such a test, as journalism has become little more than upsold editorials. Any type of conclusion drawing or motivation attribution is highly subjective opinion, yet taken as gospel by viewers.
• ChickenNugger 4y ago
  After being in a story that was reported on and being misquoted even if it's not deliberate they still get things wrong. Also: >“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is 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 as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” ― Michael Crichton
• HybridCurve 4y ago
  This is a known problem with cable news, relevant info from the FCC: https://www.fcc.gov/broadcast-news-distortion https://www.fcc.gov/broadcast-news-distortion Spreading disinformation from politically aligned media sources is a fundamental authoritarian strategy. Politicized news is used to generate outrage which excites the electorate into participating in elections. There was a good episode of Freakonomics on NPR concerning negative bias in the media and why people respond to it. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-u-s-media-so-negative/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-u-s-media-so-negativ... You can't fix negativity, but you can better regulate media to be accountable without infringing on free speech. There has been a very sharp downturn in factual quality and impartiality of information provided by news organizations over the past two decades in the US and we are overdue for a course correction.
• amoruso 4y ago
  Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.” ― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
• EGreg 4y ago
  That's why I started https://rational.app https://rational.app We are currently building it and will be rolling it out to our 10 million users around the world in a few months. If anyone wants to be involved, you can contact me by filling out the form on the bottom.
• janjanmax 4y ago
  Propaganda is not something that happens to other people. It is happening to you now. It is in the movies, tv, and mass media. CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, OANN. They Are their own palatable version to their own captured audience. Each viewer believe the opposing political network is the one with crazy propagandized viewers. They are emotional manipulators. The music, colors, graphics, tone and speech are to mislead. Try watching the news on mute and think what you are not feeling and supposed to feel. Do it for a week. 9 hours of news on mute see the opposite side from your believes too. You will be surprised what you will find.
• BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  "Deliberately mislead" implies a level of knowing competence that does not exist in most organizations.
• ouraf 4y ago
  The bombardment had a funny effect, though: instead of outraged, most of the audience is just desensitized to unchecked bias, fake news, twisted citations and the like. It becomes case of "believing this lie until someone i like with more viewers says a different lie". Feels very demoralizing.
• glonq 4y ago
  ...the other half of Americans deliberately want to be misled
• slowmovintarget 4y ago
  Now we just need to open the eyes of the other half.
• monissiddiqui 4y ago
  Maybe if Noam Chomsky was a pop artist instead then people would have figured this out before.
• RickJWagner 4y ago
  [flagged]
• mbrochh 4y ago
  I'm kinda worried about the other half. What can we do to wake them up from their hypnosis?
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Has global warming been systematically suppressed by pro corporate media for 50 years? Yes. So really, the news is that it isn't 100% of Americans.
• stcroixx 4y ago
  Good progress. As we approach 100%, we can do away with them entirely and work on our priorities rather than theirs.
• mancerayder 4y ago
  Shouldn't the number be closer to 100 percent? Who the hell doesn't understand profit motive, advertising sponsors? You don't have to be Noam Chomsky to have a hunch that something is off.
• cyanydeez 4y ago
  Which half is looking at which half
• barfingclouds 4y ago
  I am in that half
• raymond_goo 4y ago
  Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms-news-reporting-objectivity-diversity/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms...
• Friedduck 4y ago
  I fully recognize that media is a business like any other, subject to pressures and the biases of its participants. (It’s a product, said a CNN producer friend.) With that said, is it any wonder, with certain politicians demonizing media at every opportunity, and certain outlets actively seeking to misinform, that confidence has fallen? I wish I knew the answer. We’re at a dangerous point in the US and also the world where we need to be able to discern the truth and act to pull back from what feels like a precipice.