I get the "free speech" argument, but I still cannot understand why we don't have rules about who can and cannot call themselves a journalist.
Coming up with these rules might be tricky, but shouldn't we try? Or have we and I'm just uninformed?
How do you safeguard the political independence of the licensing of journalists? How do you ensure that a future government doesn't abuse the licensing regulations to suppress political criticism?
In the US, how do you reconcile this with the first amendment? How can you justify silencing people because they lack the 'correct' qualifications? If the only restriction is on the title 'journalist', what stops people from calling themselves a blogger while doing exactly the same things that a journalist does?
I think the methods applied are what needs accredited, not the results themselves. If an organization calls itself news or whatever nomenclature we agree to, they are claiming to follow accredited guidelines that we collectively trust.
At the end of the day, it comes down to heuristics around trust. It's not the message I want to validate, it's the means of preparation that bother me more. I can draw my own conclusions if I can trust the method.
Looking at it this way, would that resolve some of your concerns? Open auditing and accrediting do not need to involve censorship at all. You never lose the ability to say what you want, just to call yourself a "certified whatever". I dunno.
Note also that journalism is the only one of your mentioned professions that is specifically called out for protection in the Constitution.
Which ones don't?
The freedom of the press is the same thing as free speech, it applies to all of us. Correct me if you are referring to something else and I'm misunderstanding.
There are best practices in journalism, no? Disclosure, ethics, etc. How can I know if someone I rely on for information follows these rules. That's all I'm asking.
Doesn't canada do this? Aren't there requirements for calling yourself a news agency?
I contend that none of them do.
No. They are respectively a blogger, a blogger, and a Twitter user.
I don't think that anyone would be proposing restricting speech in this way, but on the same note, papers such as Weekly World News maybe couldn't pump out more stories about Bat Boy while attempting to call themselves journalists...
This raises the question: can the term "journalist" even be controlled?
Even the threat of it can affect what is / is not covered.
Once the government has significant power over journalism, you end up with Russian state sponsored journalism.
It's not perfect over here, and needs much improvement. Access is contingent on certain rules. It can get much worse.
Because once your government is the arbiter of "electrician", anyone who thinks the rules are ridiculous (they are frequently way over the top) will be marginalised (and unemployed)?
Because once your government is the arbiter of "programmer", anyone who can hack a few lines together but is only 12 and not permitted to license will be marginalised (and uneducated)?
It is getting much worse. Not only is little freedom left but it's been taken away under the guise of the exact opposite, and the façade is widely, and often violently, believed.
I've mostly plumbed, entirely wired and partially built my own house. I can see better ways to do what I did, of course, and much much worse ways to do what I did. The boiler installer I hired was, thankfully, top notch (I am ridiculously careful with gas).
Oh and I also installed the fibre, installed an ethernet and wifi router, protected it all with a firewall and integrated a server and VPN.
And I grow about ⅔ of my food.
I do all of this without being qualified to do any more than make a coffee and people who are actually 'qualified' (or, more realistically, licensed) have mostly congratulated me on my work.
Should I have done none of these thing because Whitehall thinks erroneously that I'm too stupid? Fuck those cunts. My daughter is safe, has good friends, is well fed and well educated despite their bureaucracy, not because of it.
If anyone thinks I should not have done the plumbing or the electrification, despite being unlicensed, explain why growing my own food and configuring my own internet are OK. Or try and convince my that I should sacrifice my router to my government. And if you attempt (and you will fail utterly) to do that, prepare to be told to fuck right off.
The trades are here to protect other people from me asserting my skill in electrician-ining, when I have no such skill but represent to others that I do.
Who is the ISIS of plumbing? I'm confused by that assertion.
If you screw up a router install you have no internet. Screw up a diy plumbing job...
>Coming up with these rules might be tricky, but shouldn't we try?
Russia has basically done it. Any web resource with more than 3000 monthly visitors gets the "mass media" status with additional rules and restrictions and related punishments. I'd not say that this is a good thing to say the least.
Even better- "software engineer"
Don't got your iron ring? Not an Engineer.
The thought of firmware or software in my body at some point scares the bejesus out of me, and it would bring me peace of mind to know there are accredited and audited standards for developing my pacemaker warez
It was so strange to see Reagan feted as he was upon his death. One could argue that, other than Nixon, he did more to accelerate the downfall of America than any other president.
Pundits are just loud mouths. Truthiness is irrelevant.
Propagandists knowingly lie, distort, omit, whatever.
I have no problem with opinion pieces or punditry, but don't try to disguise it as journalism.
We should not romanticize journalism of the past too much either. The "old news" subreddit gives some perspective (obviously, it's biased towards funny or unusual stories) https://www.reddit.com/r/OldNews
This may not be what you meant about romanticising, but modern newspapers have deteriorated significantly.
Part of this deterioration is because of competition in journalism (click bait, a race to the bottom). Part of it is a perverse sense of and fundamental abuse of the term Equality. The abuse of the term equality has then lead to unprecedented gender bullying and some extreme revisionist history that largely remains unchallenged. If you pick up a reasonable paper from 1970, you will realise how sexist we have become! The issue today is that you won't find a reasonable (eg. non sexist) newspaper - there is no choice! Sexism and gender bullying ARE the norm.
Newspapers needed to compete with the Internet. In this respect, the article was fundamentally wrong. Failure to embrace the Internet would have allowed others to fill the void (even if you went online but charged money). More people are now used to digesting news electronically and the Internet makes the content dynamic and interactive.
People will pay good money for good news, but it needs to be good quality. That eliminates most of the market.
Think of games. You can still sell the occasional blockbuster (GTA 5 made a billion dollars worth of sales!!). However, most games on iTunes hover below a few $ and many end up free. Compare this to games 30 years ago where there was a small cheap-end market. Or, CDs. Sales have fallen through the floor, but, a 99c track sells well on iTunes. News isn't quite the same, but you can see that a paradigm shift was inevitable for newspapers with the advent of the Internet.
If there was one thing the papers got wrong, it was the increase in nastiness and prejudice. I believe society is much worse today than it has been in a long time. The caring element is what we've lost. We need a new generation of pioneers to undo the carnage.
Other than that, the paper is wire stories and advertisements.
Content algorithms seem to be putting the occasional annoying thing into my feed to keep it fresh, and I keep finding gems of brilliance out of the scope of traditional journalism.
But this is the news world we deserve :)
I subscribe to a couple digital periodicals. My last paper subscription lapsed about four months ago.
My paper subscription lapsed years ago. The local paper is actually pretty good, but I find I don't miss it much anymore.
If a news organization only exists because the Koch brothers own it and it operates at a loss, its primary purpose isn't to serve unbiased news, but propaganda.
Contrast that to a news agency or journalist whose existence is funded only through subscriptions, with zero advertising. These type of agencies are not subservient to a Murdoch, a pharma company, or anybody. They only have to interest their readership sufficiently.
Of course there is still bias. But now you have multiple viewpoints. If the only news you're getting is from papers owned by billionaires or heavily moderated forums owned by billionaires, then good luck.
I would agree with you that sending money to Fox News isn't going to help with the bias much.
Do you really think a trusted news source with corporate overlords is able operate with unlimited autonomy? I would have no issue if there was a large diversity of ownership with conflicting issues. But I don't really see sufficient conflict in corporate America.
However, today, you see a lot more blatant manipulation in the media. People are conditioned to it, which is scary.
Take a subtle example, Ars Technica almost never says Chairman, it says Chairperson, but it will say Chairwoman (which also shows their ignorance of the origin of Chairman). Ars has played all sorts of games like this. It started around the time of Casey Johnson and the introduction of strong gender stereotyping. This was from a once brilliant (and well balanced) site that has never recovered.
Today, very few people will tell you how to think, they will tell you what to think, who to vote for, etc.
True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s."
The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s (when FEW men had the right to vote, let alone women - which is always overlooked for the sake of propaganda). This is an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years, without challenge.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/9933592/Wom...
There are many areas today where people don't bother to do any fact checking. What's worse are those that purposely manipulate history. They insult and disgrace our grandmothers and grandfathers. Yet, most of us would say that our grandmothers were not wallflowers and our grandfathers not anything like modern media portrays!!!
So, in short, yes. The Internet goes a long way to hiding and misrepresenting information. The signal to noise ratio is a big part of the problem, but special interest groups and political correctness have also contributed significantly.
Where is your evidence for that claim?
Chairwoman - About 272 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairwoman+site%3Aar...
Chairperson - About 179 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairperson+site%3Aa...
Chairman - About 2,960 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairman+site%3Aarst...
> True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s."
> The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s
How does that make it false? It doesn't state that no woman voted in the 1830s, it states that some women gained voting rights in the 1860s. The only way it's false is if no women received voting rights in the 1860s.
It's not "an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years", it's simply an example of nobody who edited that page being aware that some women voted in the 1830s.
If you have legitimate sources demonstrating they did (your link states 1843, BTW, not 1830s) then edit the Wikipedia page and add/correct that info. That's how Wikipedia works.
"Readers continue to leave print newspapers, but they’re not migrating to the online editions."
Because they have more options.
Print products were often monopolies, especially in the early to mid 90s, a hey day for newspapers. There was often a single publication per DMA.
What happened then is newspaper readers increasingly became web users throughout the 90s and 00s and left the print product. In 2000, if you wanted semi-local or regional news on the web, you went to ... your newspaper web site! In 2016, you have a plethora of choices, many of them unsaddled by the constraints of a typical newspaper organizational structure (for better or worse). So you have web sites and publications producing/sharing/clickbaiting 10x the content than your local newspaper does. This leads to a spreading of readership.
What's happened is a diaspora. Sticking with the print product over the web would not have prevented this. It may have slowed the decline of print circulation, but I have serious doubts about that. The challenge newspapers have is competing with decidedly non-journalistic approaches to news; ones that give readers what they want even if it isn't done "right." Competing with platforms and sites that can churn out "content" at an unfettered rate means fundamentally changing what a newspaper does.
There's no easy answer - newspapers can accept that people will largely go to other sites to get less reliable information faster, or that their content will be repurposed on other platforms without any compensation. That will likely mean a slow constriction or demise. Alternately, they can compete in that space, which a lot are doing now. That means sacrificing the ideals of journalism.