Even recently when I watch the Trump briefings, I see journalists speaking as if in anger because the President is belittling them: especially when he played his compilation video: they where quick to dub it as a campaign video, and networks cut it from the broadcast: but mostly in contained clips of TV news downplaying the Covid-19 situation. No whatever the motivations of Trump are, the media seem to act self-defesively, even with anger and resentment around him. Trump may hate the press, but the feeling appears to mutual now: but really the press shouldn't love or hate anyone.
Also I see lot of journalists ask Trump a question and then constantly interrupt him while He is answering: this dose not look good on TV for the journalists credibility is my view.
Journalists play an extremely important role in keeping a check on power and as such are critical to the health of a democracy. The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make people a lot angrier than it has so far; without a good, unbiased press there is simply no way to have an honest conversation about the most important problems that a country faces and the different plans by which to address them (as is becoming very clear by the botched response to the Coronavirus pandemic).
It would make me a lot angrier if the most popular news outlets were indeed "good, unbiased press" and not spin doctors and propaganda distributors for [insert political machine].
John Gruber (of Daring Fireball, Mardkown fame, etc.) coined the term "claim chowder" and started keeping a list of dubious tech reporting. I've been keeping a mental list myself and its almost painful how often a highly circulated story obviously will have a shelf life of weeks or days before being completely invalidated. As long as it makes it through the spin cycle, though, I suppose it doesn't matter to show runners, editors, and others pushing the narrative.
When news outlets run significantly fabricated stories (sometimes for months or years) and then run a genuine story how can they be believed? When news outlets never issue retractions, corrections, or apologies for misleading the public, how can they be trusted. When they actively attempt to remove or change content from their public archives in order to put themselves on the right side of history or direct the way history is being made, how can they be treated as protectors of freedom against tyranny. When they destroy the lives of who accidentally entered their crosshairs to sell ad space, how can they be considered good.
I'd expect your summary dismissal of the mainstream media from a Trump supporter. I'm surprised to see it on HN. So please elaborate.
All those outlets are compromised expect maybe NPR. Eric Weinstein calls it the gated institutional narrative, it is on you you still consider the mainstream anything more than shadow of what they represented in the past.
* Nicholas Sandmann
* “Experts generally agree that N95 masks have little value in the community.”
* Local “news” stories that are effectively infomercials
* https://youtu.be/ksb3KD6DfSI
* allegedly CNN removing the Larry King episode from Google Play with a call from Tara Reade’s mother
* implicitly or explicitly suggesting unrelated archive footage represents the story being reported (Italian hospital footage in a story about New York hospitals, firing range footage presented as foreign conflict)
* the my pillow guy, who retooled to support health workers being railroaded simply for standing next to Trump
* the sudden and nearly universal admiration for GWB
* NYT editing an article, without notice that originally claimed HRC implied the Russians were grooming Tulsi Gabbard.
I have a terrible memory for specific details, so those just the ones I can think of recently. I primarily listen to NPR in the car. Their bias is staggering. They present opinion as fact frequently, often misrepresenting parties in opposition.
Just different halves, but being angry at many things at once is hard, mentally. But you have your wish granted, more or less. Everyone is angry :)
If a person makes a blanket statement like "press is biased" or "is a spin-doctor" for X, we need to ignore that move past it.
We tend to identify reliable sources over time, and there are plenty of reputed, reliable journalists and newspapers in the world. Just like reliable politicians. Kudos to them.
There is no one “the media”. The journalism produced by cable news opinion segments is not the same as that produced by national print outlets, which is also not the same as a local newspaper. Equating them all is something Trump and his friends would very much like you to do.
It's true in one sense that there's no such thing as "the media". If "the media" is just "the set of people who write things about current events that other people read", then I, too, am a member of the media. Groovy.
But this is an isolated demand for rigor. If you look at who's employed by "the most popular news outlets" (which can be relatively objectively determined through subscription numbers), you cannot help but notice that they are a rather distinct class. They come from particular schools, live in particular cities, have particular points of view including suppositions so basic that they often do not even realize that they hold them, understand themselves to be accomplishing particular professional and social objectives through their work, and so on and so on. None of these qualifications are strictly categorical, but as a statistical matter they are so robust as to be tedious. Which is all fine, so far as it goes, but the concept of "the media" is "a thing" inasmuch as it allows you to concisely name patterns and regularities that exist in the world. And there are an awful lot of patterns and regularities to be noticed.
Incidentally, Orwell made precisely the same point (about a distributed, decentralized press that coordinates through shared cultural background and sense of what's simply Not Done) in a proposed preface to the first edition of Animal Farm. The free, decentralized, totally-not-a-thing British media declined to print it.
Even if this were true, (which I’m highly skeptical of) why would this even a bad thing? I mean, if we’re talking about elite papers such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.. it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear a number of them went to elite universities – a number elite doctors likely come from difficult medical schools.
I’m also not convinced “they” all share the same beliefs, not convinced of this at all. I mean, if you want to declare that media sources who prefer the Democratic party exist, sure but for every single one of those there’s at least one Fox “news” equivalent. The simple fact of their existence doesn’t mean certain people have a monopoly on information. This argument would be as ridiculous as when people in 2017 were screeching (US) liberals run the world all while the president, both congressional houses, and the supreme court were conservative... the concern wasn’t based in reality, at all, and it’s the same with their panicky “liberal news” conspiracies, I see no evidence which shows conservatives voices aren’t being heard, none.
Anyway, I’m dubious about the idea that almost all news people come from the same class, same schools, and same cities. Unless you’re simply saying elite journalists come from the best journalism schools, at which point it shouldn’t really surprise anyone.
Columbia
Harvard, Harvard
UMich
N/A (the art design guy)
Notre Dame
Princeton
Yale
Columbia
Tufts
Stonyhurst, Oxford
UVA
Are those results out of line with what you were expecting? I can't say that they are for me. If anything, I consider it exceptionally broadminded of The Gray Lady to hire an ND grad.
Please recall that I never claimed this was a good or a bad thing. In some sense I regard domination by elites as inevitable, but I do think it's preferable to be explicit about it, and failing to recognize "the media" as a coherent social category tends to frustrate that recognition.
The political affiliation of journalists is a well-studied topic. Polls consistently find that Democrats outnumber Republicans and liberals outnumber conservatives by wide margins, ranging from 4-1 to 20-1 [!] depending on survey methodology (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3279453). A study which compared rates of citation of various think tanks by media outlets, vs. by Congress, found that every media outlet surveyed except Fox and the Washington Times stood to the left of the Congressional median (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25098770?seq=1).
Again, I'm not making any normative claims about any of this. I'm just surprised at the resistance to taking it for granted.
I'd argue most of what is sold as "the press" is not that. Click-bait, PR mouthpieces, unverified "news", inflammatory news and padding are the majority of what people see.
Bye!
Why? He hasn't said it should be restricted in any way, he's said it's been biased and doing a bad job. That's a completely fair criticism.
A lot of people are purposefully blurring the lines here and it's really dangerous. The same argument could be used to say that the press has undue influence, and should therefore be regulated in what it is able to say or how it is able to report.
The press in America has the same freedom of speech as individuals do: near unlimited. They come together. If you start picking and choosing, free speech is no longer a right.
Similarly, the press give up the right to say any foolish claims without substantiation when they assume their official roles as journalists. They promise to back what they say with evidence and facts; that stops them from making baseless claims. Is that restricting their free speech? Free speech does not exist in a vacuum.
I think you do have a point. But consider what you're trying to apply it to here. The president is not saying "I think we should nuke Korea" or "the press should be abolished." He says "CNN? That's fake news." It's a criticism leveled at an organization that has had a rampant hyperbolic partisan slant and has printed fake news, making the criticism accurate.
Calling the media out for this behavior could be seen as holding it accountable. These types of criticisms mean nothing in terms of any meaningful action that could restrict the press.
I think more people need to question from where they have gotten the perspective that these attacks are particularly threatening towards a free press in the US. Was it from the press?? Go figure.
I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.
> I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.
I don't believe this at all.
[0] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11142215334617907...
If you were one of the Central Park Five, wrongly accused of rape, or if you were a climate change activist, facing climate-denying articles, and said "the press has got it all wrong and are the enemy of the people" how would you interpret that? As anger, representing a valid critique that should be explored? Or that this person is literally calling for the end or restriction of journalism as a practice? It seems obvious. The only way to interpret it as the latter is to interpret it in such bad faith that it borders on malevolence.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/freedom-press/donald-t...
As a matter of fact such statements are borderline incitement of violence when you look at some of his heavily armed, but not necessarily smart supporters.
What you argue here is borderline historical revisionism.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/07/donald-trump...
edit : clarification
If literally everything you said was twisted in a way to misrepresent you don't you think you'd get a little tired of it, roll your eyes at it, and shrug it off sometimes too? That's not an absolute defense for doing this exclusively, but he doesn't do this exclusively. He calls it out, then answers.
But this is altogether besides the point of what I was responding to, which is that this kind of talk is existentially dangerous to the press as an institution. You could claim Trump is a liar and a deflector and is doing bad things and says a one-liner instead of justifying, and that would be a fair criticism. But then it would be a danger insofar as it means we have a lack of responsibility and accountability in our leadership, not insofar as it poses a threat to the freedom of the press.
he does not answer shit. He spews nonsense. He does not speak coherently about facts at all.
The quality of the hard-hitting journalism seems to be winding back, maybe Trump wore them down?
Something something turtles all the way down.
Where do this come from? There is EXCELLENT journalism all over the world. Even in places with high censorship (which are the exception, not the rule) there a great and brave journalism.
Most of what they do is not Big Stories, but things like covering the city council meetings in a way that TV stations don't.
Their disappearane has a real financial effect
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-news...
It is highly insulting and arrogant to assume there is no brave journalism there where people have lost their jobs or their lives by reporting inconvenient truths.
You need more street.