The average journalist thinks they value the truth, accuracy and fairness. Observed behavior is very different to this flattering self portrait which is why they aren't trusted.
Actual behaviors of real journalists that create distrust which can't be blamed on advertisers or editors:
- Accepting large grants from billionaire foundations that are tied to pushing specific agendas and views. Example: look at how much money the Gates Foundation gives out in journalism grants tied to his personal agenda.
- Publishing stories that contain obvious "errors" (invariably convenient for their pre-existing agenda). Example: the NYT published a front page that consisted solely of the names of 1000 people who had supposedly died of COVID. It was meant to scare people and it took some rando on twitter about half an hour to notice that the 6th name on the list was of a person who had been murdered.
- Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory.
- Point blank refusal to challenge certain types of sources because they think it's immoral to do so. Example: the BBC decided some years ago that climate change was "settled science" and that it was morally wrong to report on anything that might reduce faith in the "consensus". This is the opposite of the classical conception of journalism (challenging authority, digging up scandals, get both sides of the story etc).
- Relying heavily on sources that are widely known to be discredited. Example: Fauci stated early on in COVID that he lied about masks in official statements to the press, specifically to manipulate people's behavior. This did not stop the press using him as a trusted authoritative source. Another example: the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.
There's way more.
Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization.
Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.
But you don't have to be biased every time to be biased. Trust is based on consistency.
On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal).
Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative:
> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
The Columbia Journalism Review is about as reliable on media matters as you could want, and Jeff Gerth is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with decades of investigative journalism experience at the NY Times.
He lays out an extensive case showing that there was an effort to mislead the public.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
These bonafides aside this particular piece has faced a mountain of criticisms [1] and from a quick read doesn't pass the smell test for journalistic integrity itself. It makes Trump sound like a victim, a saint and a martyr all at once.
> Trump, unaware of the coming tornado, including the most salacious contents of the dossier, set out to form a government and make peace with the press. He made the rounds of news organizations, meeting with broadcast anchors, editors at Condé Nast magazines, and the Times.
> Trump’s longest sit-down after the election was with the Times, including the then-publisher, editors, and reporters. For seventy-five minutes Trump’s love/hate relationship with his hometown paper was on display.
> At the end, he called the Times a “world jewel.”
> He added, “I hope we can get along.”
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerth#Career (last paragraph)
Congratulations on relying on Trump's own strategy of declaring any critical reporting, no matter how well sourced, to be "Fake News".
> It makes Trump sound like a victim, a saint and a martyr all at once.
This is laughably false to any fair minded person who has even skimmed the article.
For example in paragraph six:
>At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth. (The Washington Post has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements.)
Throwing away the public's trust in the media because you're unwilling to stick to factual reporting on Trump's screw ups is the very definition of "You're not helping."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-bi...
Russia's known to want to disrupt elections anywhere they can however. They'll even spread in the media the _appearance_ that elections were distorted to muddy the waters further even if no election interference took place.
If you see the world as indecipherably muddy other than Russia has some otherworldly electoral propaganda power, well then it isn’t clear why you comment.
When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.
Edit - one other point, so many articles are also sourced from Reuters and AP that the Media, while different companies all have the same source material.
The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level.
Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.
> the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.
Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not if they are not specialized science reporters.
> Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not
Yet volunteer bloggers regularly manage to not only read papers, they find specific problems with them.
The core problem here is that journalism as a field culturally accepts very low standards, and has no interest in raising them. Journalists are trained not to think too hard about anything and to distrust anyone who does, which is why independent journalism has such a different flavor to it. During COVID you could go to the legacy media and read a headline like "Lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives" which would quote a press release from a university. Then a few hours later you could go read some blog by some random anonymous dude and get a list of five massive and obvious methodology errors that rendered the underlying paper deceptive propaganda, problems of the sort that you didn't need any expertise to notice.
Normies see this and think maybe people who can't pull off amazing feats of investigation like reading publicly available PDFs shouldn't be journalists?
In journalistic culture not only won't they do things like this, they train their readers and each other to systematically ignore such investigations because they aren't "credible sources". But that's so wrong. They are credible sources, because they systematically prove their claims and over time that creates more credibility than whatever photocopier for academic opinions is being presented by the newspapers today.
It takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to research a short news article in a topic that I'm familiar with. For topics I'm not an expert in it's multiple hours.
I simply don't have time for it. Family, work, and sleep already occupy much of my day.
One solution is to recognize that, unfortunately, in that case you don't have much reliable knowledge about the world and therefore your default position should be to not try to influence it. Practically that means things like not judging other people, not voting, or alternatively voting for libertarians who don't believe in imposing rules on other people (because if you voted for specific rules, you'd be doing so based on unreliable information).
Luckily you don't have to actually research every single article. It's OK to generalize over time. Rules can also be shared. Here's some of mine: ignore any story about Russia because they're always unreliable especially since the war, ignore any study about science or public health, ignore any claims made by (ex)-intelligence agents, ignore any claims that appear to support woke narratives, ignore any statistical claims about China, ignore economic predictions or really anything that depends on academically developed statistical models.
You'd think they wouldn't do this. Probably they do it because they know most people will take factual claims at face value, or the journalists are so sloppy/confused that they themselves don't realize the claims are wrong.
What makes the citation correct or trustworthy?
Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?
Yikes.
