I feel that there's a sort of wide-spread cynicism that has far overshot its mark: people routinely disparage journalism, even though the better publishers (NYT, Economist, WSJ, etc) today are in my impression far better than ever before.

They are, for example, exemplary in terms of correcting errors quickly and transparently. I rarely come across errors these days, and the ones I see corrected below articles are almost always very minor, such as spelling errors in names.

In some circles, such as HN, it also seems to be en vogue to consider all media biased and unprofessional, every politician to be corrupt, every business leader as optimising (short term) profit with no regard for other considerations, every scientific study underpowered, and every headline clickbait.

I guess gratuitous negativity is often mistaken for expertise or intelligence. But in reality, it just renders any actual effort useless: why not be corrupt/lazy/incompetent/etc, when that is the charge that will be levelled against you, no matter what you do?

Right? I see Chris Cillizza deliberately drop the concluding sentence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' comment to deliberately take it out of context[1] or a single CNN journalist fabricating sources for years[2] (not to pick on CNN too much, I don't think they're any worse than most news orgs, and they're better than a good few). And I think, there are some problems there, this deserves addressing, but to take that and scream FAKE NEWS in tweets every third day; that's just stupid.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/424190-ocasio-cortez-accu... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/media/claas-relotius-spiegel/...

You don't need it to be a "well-researched psychological concept" if you've personally experienced it, but that does absolutely nothing to convince me, and further, you should carefully weigh your own anecdotal experience versus others' experiences. Maybe the reporting in your particular case was just really, really bad? How would you know? Maybe 99.9% of journalism is completely accurate and you just happened to fit into the 0.1%... if you can't definitively disprove what I'm saying, then I don't think you should be so confident in your conclusion.

As for "it would find any traction if it didn't ring true with a lot of people." A lot of people throughout history have believed a lot of unscientific things. I don't believe we've reached a point of enlightenment where we no longer do that. Science not infrequently finds the truth is not what we expected, not what our intuition would lead us to believe.

Maybe you've never experienced it because you've never read an article about something you're an expert on? Nobody said that everybody experiences it.

What part of that responds to anything I said? I haven't even said (1) whether I believe the effect or not or (2) whether I have or have not experienced that effect myself. You're assuming I've made a statement one way or the other.

In the absence of scientific research, the "theory" is as true and useful as any saying "two in the hand is worth one in the bush", "a penny saved is a penny earned", ...