That is the main problem.
They no longer see themselves as a medium to disseminate events but rather shapers of opinions about events.
Like laughtracks for situational comedies, they see themselves as having a responsibility to tell people how to think of an event.
It’s like Pravda but worse. Pravda at least had the decency to not want to pit a population against itself.
Then the disruption of the 60’s happened and the Vietnam War drove a schism between official govt stance and the truth on the ground and some media personalities were famous for exposing it.
Now everything is fractured and when you dig into it you realize both side are trying to shape the narrative, so both are being selective about the truth.
By fighting over whose wool to pull over your eyes they inadvertently pulled it off entirely.
Not so sure about this, there were a lot of purges...
When was the golden age of journalism when this wasn't the case?
There tend to be exceptions to everything. What’s important is the average or the trend.
Journalism has always been shaping opinions, alone by selection aka what gets reported in the evening news and what not. The only ones who manage to pass that mark are the huge news agencies with a worldwide presence, but no reasonable human can consume all of that content.
Reporting about science is another ... hotly debated issue. It is scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and that the virus SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19, a disease that has caused the death of at least 600.000 people in the US and about 3.9 million people worldwide - but for some parts of the country, mostly on the right wing, simply the act of reporting these facts is already seen as "opinion shaping".
And finally, even reporting on events can be seen as "shaping opinions" - think of events like mass or school shootings, where the 2nd amendment crowd complains that the victims or their relatives are being interviewed and calling for gun control. Or BLM and LGBT events - some people see the mere mention of these as "political".
Some missing facts:
The CDC and Fauci recommended against masks to protect the mask supply for health providers. Media pushed this messaging.
The vaccines seem to cause heart issues with some people dying from it. Only months later is the CDC admitting supposedly minor heart issues. Furthermore they are pushing people to take it (even those who stand to lose more than to benefit from it). Media pushes this narrative.
The vaccines do seem to work for most people and seem effective against the variants of COVID-19.
Many BLM protests were peaceful but some were taken advantage of and just became opportunities to loot.
Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime.
Attempted robbery of reporters in front of Oakland City Hall in broad daylight while the reporters were interviewing a cop about Oakland supervisors defunding the police and shifting resources to his crime prevention division.
babesh is adding facts, mixed with pure opinion, of his own choosing to also further a narrative. Is "Defund the police has caused skyrocketing property crime and violent crime." a verified (or even provable) fact? If so, what was omitted from that statement that would have made it less biased. And ultimately, how is he not committing the same sin as corporate media?
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra...
https://neonnettle.com/news/14685-los-angeles-votes-for-36m-...
Which facts would you like to dispute? What are you calling an opinion?
Your sources don't even support your opinion/narrative? If anything, I'm afraid your claim to the high ground has worsened.
Look who is picking and choosing which facts to ignore and choosing to spin a narrative. Go watch all the news even of left sided news. There are a lot of complaints about how businesses and communities are hurt. There are increasing calls to fund the police and some communities are starting to do that. Even Chesa Boudin is now saying that businesses need to protected. Even London Breed is saying the same.
They just arrested a person who was on a serial shoplifting spree. Police were complaining that they would arrest people and the DA would just let them free.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/suspected-shoplifter-fr...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/san-francisco-confronts...
Here is the shoplifter that they finally arrested after letting shoplifting go on for the past year.
“ Homicides and aggravated assaults in the city has increased over the last two years. Year to date, homicide up 26.5 percent over 2020, up 44.9 percent over 2019. Aggravated assault is up 12.8 percent year over year, and 11.3 percent over 2019. Overall violent crime is up year-over-year 5.8 percent, driven by homicide and aggravated assault numbers.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-car-...
So given that you are baselessly attacking him, and the only thing that drew you to him was the facts he stated; clearly you don't want him stating them. So again. I ask, why do you want those facts suppressed? And why are you being evasive about answering the question?
For instance, CNN is left leaning and Fox is right leaning. They should just explicitly state their viewpoint so viewers can calibrate how much credence they give to unsourced claims and see past the political posturing.
I see it differently, subjective opinions aren't journalism.
It is a true statement, but it doesn’t mean that all models are equally wrong, or that all journalism is equally biased. Objective journalism is an ideal to strive for, even it if cannot be perfectly achieved.
Personally, I find the https://realclearpolitics.com model of just putting headlines from different outlets in a list to be more useful than outsourcing some sort of "bias rating" and "fact-checking" to YAMO (Yet Another Media Outlet).
I think the real subtext of this chart isn't so much to portray any particular outlet further to the left or right than it is, but rather to boost the credibility of fringe outlets.
That being said, I do appreciate that allsides uses an interesting method to blind bias surveys to help categorize. But sometimes things don't always line up.
While I agree that NPR puts out a lot content that can be described as 'lefty', NPR News feels pretty straight down the middle.
The interesting question is what will replace what we now call "journalism", and how it will work.
Interesting times ahead!
One might well call it for what it is, PR and propaganda, but in my experience one will want to retain the title "journalist" for all the positive emotional weight it contains.
I've had drinks with a few local paper "journalists" of the current, young generations and the reality of their work is shaping of narrative rather than reporting, but on the topic of job title view themselves in the same light as an Upton Sinclair. Brings to mind the early 2010s "positively changing the world" startup software engineers building Orwellian systems.
That just isn't the case. People trust you if you re-enforce their biases. The news sources that are getting the most traction aren't the most objective ones.