>There seems to be very little news which isn’t engineered to benefit one group or another.

I'll go further and say a lot of "news" is just activism, pushing a political agenda. In some cases it's blatantly obvious, and in some cases it's not, and you have to dig a little deeper to find out. It's starting to become a problem in Denmark as well, because most american trends make their way here on a time delay - good or bad.

Eh, I wouldn't lean on it that much. Yes, a significant factor, but activism or its appearance is in many ways more an effect of finding and cultivating an audience and optimizing for their attention, and ultimately things like advertising dollars and social media likes and such.

I think there is this insidious link between people's opinions and "biased" news coverage where they are both spontaneously emerging and evolving and in effect causing one another specifically not being driven by an external activist idealism but emerging from the motivation to make money and get attention - which I think is much more dangerous and scary than if the news was being driven by some intentional agenda. Like it's this organism or disease which is evolving to take maximum advantage of human weaknesses, on one side of the publisher for the needs and rewards of money and approval, on the side of the consumer for what grabs attentions, builds loyalty, and shapes opinions. It's this monster that is shaping the human world out of control.

It is also possible that it is 2am and I have been watching too much Ghost in the Shell.

This is a pretty cynical take. I think most (not all, but most) news organizations are trying to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest.

Cynical – I don't like the adjective, turning a school of philosophy poorly understood into a generic term for being overly negative implying that negativity comes from ignorance...

My point being, I'm not just guessing. Seeing the sausage being made a few times is enlightening.

Then the questions about what motivations the reporter and source had making up every story you read become obvious and pervasive and "truth" "relevance" and "ethics" just don't seem to be at the top. Not that those things are completely ignored, just not at the top for everyone involved just looking out for their best interests. You don't have to be wildly corrupt for everybody to have each others best interests as their own best interests and what you get is mostly useless news consisting of people cheerleading for each other and some cause which isn't anywhere near that set of ideals.

That’s not at all what “cynical” means. From Merriam-Webster: “contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives.”

I intended exactly that meaning. Not “being overly negative.”

And your response solidifies my diagnosis. Do you permit no noble actions by mankind? Is all corrupt, inept, perverted? That way of looking at the world is poison.

What books or literature do you suggest to learn more about making these sausages?

One book in particular comes to mind:

Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

While the titular premise of the book is compelling and contains (and in part inspired) many of my opinions on the subject, I also found it baffling and infuriating biased version of (at the time) recent history it presented even though I am generally politically aligned with the presented bias. It seemed in extremely bad taste to write a book about media bias containing so much of its own biased version of history. I had to put it down several times and never finished it. At the same time, it is 32 years old and the landscape has changed very much.

Still quite good.

Watch The West Wing and The Newsroom, both headed by Aaron Sorkin, both fiction, but based on quite a lot of real world research in the White House and newsrooms. (while perhaps being at times a bit overly ham-fisted about their own ideals)

Otherwise, a bit of a ridiculous suggestion, get a job in the PR department of a small company or a news organization ... or make a close acquaintance with somebody who has one.

I am not sure that anybody has written the book that everybody needs to read on the subject. It would take a lot of guts and self-awareness for someone to write a memoir about their own biases or behaviours on the subject, and for people coming from the outside it would be difficult to come at the subject without more than a hint of confirming their pre-existing ideas, especially in these days of the "fake news" culture war where neither side of the political divide seems particularly interested in nuanced truth.

Here's an easy example of "news", imagine how and why the following was written. Imagine the people involved, what their motivations are, the past present, and future of the relationships between them.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/zipline-begins-us-medical-...

In short: I don't have any great recommendations of one thing to grok the situation.

I started a project to track news articles across various sites, the idea was to get multiple takes on the same subject and ideally a more informed, less partisan view.

It uh, did not pan out. Most news sites publish nearly identical articles, stuff them with ads and affiliate links and fill in the dots with a few low brow opinion pieces catered to the audience for that site.

Pretty depressing discovery on my part.

It isn't. It's reality. It's actually naive to think that news organizations are trying to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest.

Pick any news organization and go read its history. Who created it and why it was created. No news organization was created to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest. They were all created to push a political/economic agenda - aka propaganda.