That's a great way of phrasing it, because it speaks to the economic reality.
You don't get hired as an independent or investigative journalist anymore, at the start of your career.
You do get hired as a content magnet for eyeballs.
This has always been a tension, but it's been exacerbated by the destruction of traditional news funding models and substitution of Facebook and Google ad networks.
So quite literally, the job is fanning the flames of culture war, regardless of how you feel personally. Because that's where the money is. And that's what you're being paid to do.
Bias exists in media to be sure, but one "side" in this country is completely off the rails; assaults truth, trafficks in conspiracy theories, and has generally adopted the fomenting of distrust, fear, hate and anger as its MO in its efforts to accumulate power.
Any effort to counter their disinfo or merely state the truth results in accusations of bias and aggressive attacks.
At the end of the day, any remedy relies on some degree of good faith on the part of the actors and, thus, some adherence to a social contract.
Otherwise, everything (including things meant for the public good, like objective broadcasting) gets ground through the culture war machine. And that's where we are in the U.S.
I’m a liberal American, and our public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) absolutely do have a liberal bias. It’s not as extreme as some outlets, but it’s certainly left-of-center (relative to the US political spectrum).
> Bias exists in media to be sure, but one "side" in this country is completely off the rails; assaults truth, trafficks in conspiracy theories, and has generally adopted the fomenting of distrust, fear, hate and anger as its MO in its efforts to accumulate power.
I agree with this as a statement of fact (though I frame it as an epistemological crisis brought on by the aggressive politicization of left-dominated institutions) but I really hate how my side uses it as an excuse to backslide. “We only have to be a little bit better than the other side, no need to move forward, blame everything on the Republicans no matter how tenuous.” This sort of race-to-the-bottom thinking is exactly what is wrong with American politics. The Republican side is broken and the Democrats will deflect any constructive criticism by pointing at the Republicans (and similarly progressives/liberals deflect to conservatives). We have to destroy the Republicans before we can consider improving/restoring ourselves.
> You do get hired as a content magnet for eyeballs
I get the idea and can imagine it, but I wonder what the reality is. Do you happen to be in journalism?
Journalism as a field maybe can help us arrive at some truths eventually, but it's an iterative process of correction and evolving understanding that never ends. However, individual journalists being arbiters of the truth is just not what part of their job description. How could it be? They cannot collect all the facts, and even if they could, they couldn't report them all to the public because there are too many. So by definition journalists have to decide which stories to pursue and which facts to report, and also how to report them. You can say they should do so in as unbiased a way as possible, and I agree, but the very nature of their job involves making biased decisions.
Also, not all journalists are reporters, just as not all programmers are webdevs. There are all kinds of journalists including editors, curatorial journalists, investigative journalists, opinion columnists, photojournalists etc. Yes straight facts are nice, but I also need some analysis to help me form a nuanced opinion. A fact can tell you something, but it won't lead you to all the implications of that thing.
I think photojournalism is a great example of what I'm talking about. On its face, a photograph is a straight fact. It's a picture of a thing that happened. But the framing, composition, and editing of a photograph essentially encodes a bias, and can equally obscure or reveal the truth. And that's a good thing IMO, I want to see through the photojournalist's perspective when I look at their work. But it's still just one perspective, so I realize it may not be the truth. Recognizing that bias exists, all people have it, and to some degree it always comes through in their work, is part of finding the truth.
So, if there were two sides in a story and, say, an investgative journalist unearthed and presented some fact that resolved the matter, then you might loosely say that journalist was an arbiter of truth on behalf of the public by simply presenting the fact. This was true even as little as a decade ago. And it might have even been considered pedantic to distinguish between journalist as presenter or arbiter.
But this is no longer the case. We are now in an age where people actively refute facts and deny reality itself. They sell the idea that the audience can choose what's true. So when the same journalist presents a fact, he is then accused of bias and becomes a part of the story. Thus, even simple truths have now become debatable to the point that merely presenting them can be cast as arbitration, as if these facts are subjective, thus there is still some matter to be decided.
It's just the Northeast of the US: NYT, WSJ, Washington Post; and of course NY is the center of journalism (as with many things), and Washington and NY are the leading centers of power and therefore news. There are no equivalent west coast or southeast news sources.
However, don't forget that the largest 'publication', or publisher, is Murdoch: Fox, Wall Street Journal, etc. And that is right-wing and the most biased.
The influence of the coasts has been remarked on for a long time, but I think with the Internet it's actually a much improved situation: People easily get news from all over the country and the world. Everyone can read the BBC and much more (including Russian sources, without even knowing it! :) ), and they also get their news, for good or ill, from random people worldwide! :P
> journalists for the largest publications are overwhelmingly far more left-wing than the rest of the country
That assumes the personal political beliefs have a large effect on their jobs.
Now a days, it’s become a circle jerk on who can get the most twitter likes, they follow and retweet people of their same political side, get multi million salaries, have zero idea of what the common peasant is going through, journalists sit in their ivory tower and look down upon the peasants for not doing the same “sophisticated” things. Smugness and being condescending is a norm in journalist circles.
The best journalist of modern world is rotting in a prison cell in the UK being extradited to the US while the journalists carry water for politicians and how mean tweets is somehow a threat to their press freedoms of lies. They lie and flip flop on all issues and then when the facts come out, they act as if they were never wrong and corrections are printed ignored by everyone, damage is already done.
"The battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive." - Michael Malice
I won't dispute that someone like Assange is good to have around, but I'm not sure I would ever consider him the best journalist in the world. Part of being a good journalist is looking at the motivations of your sources and looking for and examining the information you're not getting as much as the information you are. To accept and release everything uncritically while also hiding sources reduces some of the useful information that people would use to slot that information into where they think it should go.
For example, if CNN were to start regurgitating information directly provided by Google's or Apple's PR departments without criticism and people found out, they would be justifiably upset with those organizations for failing to do their job. That's why it's important that information from those entities is attributed to them.
That's not to say I think confidential sources should be outed, just that Wikileaks ended up inadvertently scrubbing a lot of this information from the data presented. Presenting everything you have is a noble goal, but only really works as intended when it's what you've uncovered yourself, and not what someone else gives to you.
Employment and salaries in journalism have dropped precipitously.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/347691-matt-lauer-and-and...
https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/highest-paid-news-anchor...
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/don-lemon-chris-cuo...
Also not exactly salary but the operating budgets of these corporations is massive.
> “The Atlantic needs to make $50 million in annual subscription revenue in order to break even, according to Thompson. Hitting that target has become more complicated since Trump left the White House and the pandemic let up. New subscribers are coming in at about a quarter of the rate they did last year (10,000 a month, on average), and the magazine faces challenges keeping some of its existing audience, which may have less of a need for The Atlantic’s journalism in a post-Trump, post-Covid world. Without Trump or the pandemic, the path to $50 million is significantly harder. Since February, the magazine has brought in about 10,000 subscribers a month — roughly analogous to its growth rate before the pandemic. Meanwhile, its retention rate for existing subscribers is about 75 to 80 percent, Thompson said. The net result, according to Thompson’s presentation, is not growth. It’s a static or slightly declining subscriber base.”
> the operating budgets of these corporations is massive.
> $50 million
$50 million is not a massive budget.
Younger journalists are less likely to see their job as being a neutral arbiter of truth and more likely to see themselves as part of the culture war.
I'm a liberal but just as the ACLU is not the same organization it was 20 years ago, neither is The Gray Lady.