> I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything.

The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it.

It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.

For those that have been alive long enough to witness the transition, the internet shift to clickbait is just continuing a trend that was ushered in by 24 hour news cycles.

News being "all the time" is the true villain here. When news was infrequent and on a schedule, stories had to compete for relevance and often wouldn't dominate airtime and our thoughts nearly as much as today.

Yep, “breaking news” used to mean “major disaster” or item of major import.

Now it just means “something we found out happening now and don’t have a lot of information about, but a couple of Tweeters “report” blah blah blah…

I'm of the belief that news networks shouldn't be legally allowed to call their channels "news" for 18 hours out of the day.

I disagree. I think that the 24-hour news cycle does contribute to the problem, absolutely. However, the critical aspect you're forgetting here is that the internet conditioned us to not pay for content because the ability to distribute content became commoditized. Once that happened, one of the largest sources of revenue for print publications disappeared, which forced print publications to rely more on ads, and therefore stories with headlines that drove more ad impressions (i.e. clickbait).

Newspapers were always funded mostly by ads. You could argue that internet ads are worse than print ads because tracking, but I don't see that argument here. Newspaper headlines, particularly on the front page, have always been designed to catch the eye. Cable news has many of the same features.

Classifieds were a big portion of income. Craigslist effectively killed that in the mid 90s. It's been a slow steady decline to stay solvent. They had to switch to the "print what your audience wants to read," type of infotainment. Emotion, particularly fear is very effective to keep asses in seats (and eyes on screens).

I occasionally like to go back 10 years or so and read some of the ridiculous fear mongering of the time, now that it's well out of context.

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...

I think you nailed it.

Everything was moving to this direction for a long time, but having 24 hours news let people optimize such headlines faster than before, and the internet made it possible to optimize millions of headlines.

This is a trend that’s been existing for a while, and since now we have better tools to experiment as a society the progress of this trend is accelerating.

Yup, they should all be abolished. We're not meant to know what is happening on the other side of the country. We don't need to, otherwise it takes up precious mind space. Being "well-informed" is a lie sold to us by these channels.

This is also my suspicion, although I've heard that NYT's subscriptions are doing as well as they've ever done and while I wouldn't describe NYT's journalism as "click-bait", they've certainly engaged in more than their share of overt ideological propagandism (which isn't unique to them, but part of a landscape shift away from aspirationally objective reporting).

> overt ideological propagandism

As an outsider watching from across the ocean, the 2016 election (the race itself and its media coverage, I'm not talking about the result) really hurt you guys.

The NYT still does world-class journalism, but not even a paper with that kind of rock-solid journalistic tradition fully recovered from the moralistic crusade it had become.

I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.

IDK if NYT has ever touched on a subject where you have insider knowledge, but it did to me. They framed and flavoured politically and event which was a result of purely technical decisions.

NYT has also published pieces about my country that I'd hardly could classify as any other thing than undisguised activism.

So I remain very skeptical. It seems to me that there's a wave of new journalism culture in all the west that it's not being challenged from the inside.

Here in Spain journalist make their ocassional reunions, interviews and stuff and they moan of the low consideration people have about them, then they go back to their seats to write or record what is basically political activism.

When I was in high school, I was near proximity to some kids that CNN did the same thing to. They took what would've been potentially a decent, local, investigative story and juiced it. How? They baited kids, who didn't know these other kids or the events they were involved in, directly outside of my high school into saying something for the news report. The average viewer would never know all those kids they interviewed had no knowledge of what they were talking about and it has since flavored how I receive these "nightly reports".

Same thing for me, except with the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Italian, I know full well what you're talking about, I have zero sympathy for "the public doesn't trust us" type of lamentations because, guess what, it's their own fault.

What I'm saying is that papers like the NYT were at least trying to separate facts from opinions in their reporting. It's just painful to see such a healthy tradition become overshadowed by the political trend du jour.

But are they? I dont read NYT often but everytime I do I'm able to identify the frame withouth much difficulty.

Journalists have to write about everything, and they arent experts at anything. My hypothesis is thqt the lazyiest of em just become activists and make this a way of life.

If you have any doubt about this, write any of the most common names in major publications in google and try find their twitter.

Having good information is very difficult, and it typically involves paying for it, or accessing specialist publications, or niche ones.

It is one of those unconfortable truths.

2015-2016 was the breaking point for me. Not an ounce of impartial journalism, they just wore their political ideology on their sleeve with no shame and did everything they could to support their position. They weren't reporting news, they were just pushing whatever propaganda they needed to prop up their ideology. I haven't watched mainstream media a single time since sometime in 2016, and don't plan to again. They lost my trust and I assume it would be many years and would require fundamental changes before I'd consider listening to them again, they're completely corrupt at this point in my mind.

> I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.

Cheerleading the Iraq War did it, for me. Especially for the NYT, but media generally. I sincerely wish them all the worst.

Then again, journalists as stock characters in fiction have been morally grey at best for just about all of the 20th century, at least, and I think to a substantial degree before that, too. I'm not sure where the idea that journalists have typically been, or been regarded as, forthright and virtuous, in the past, came from. The whole thing seems like a fiction built on a very few examples from a narrow time period (Cronkite's usually cited, for example)

I hear a lot of variations of "the media was never perfect", which is true in a strict sense, but dishonesty comes in degrees and that's what we're debating. In particular, while I did grow up with the media cheerleading the Iraq War, mostly that was just citing "intelligence sources". Now the media overtly lies about the contents of publicly available content (e.g., the Damore "Google Memo" or the Covington Catholic video) or it has a journalist wearing a gas mask standing in front of a burning police station with a "Mostly Peaceful Protest" caption underneath.

Maybe my formative years were part of a relative anomaly in journalistic history--maybe journalists were always ideologically homogeneous propagandists and the last decade is naught but a return to form. In whichever case I know from experience it doesn't have to be that way and I emphatically reject the backslide.

2016 is when the majority of US news stopped trying to have any pretense of objectivity. I'd put the start of the slide closer to 2005 as a response to Bush winning re-election and calming of the post 9/11 fervor.

Shortly after Trump won, there was a round table interview with different journalists from various media on NPR. They essentially all agreed that it was their duty to make Trump look as bad as possible, though they worded it slightly less audaciously. I distinctly remember them saying that they should no longer be objective.

I think to those on the right the last few years really opened their eyes to how much bias there is in journalism. I wish more people on the left noticed it as well, though I’m sure some did.

Either way, I’m surprised nobody has taken the opportunity to start a news source that actually attempts to be objective. Maybe it’s impossible, or maybe people just don’t want it…but I do.

NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy.

And you wonder why taxpayers have to foot their bills.

IMO, NPR has drifted even farther leftward in the last decade. They used to be pretty middle-of-the-road liberal, but now they strike me as some woke variety of left-wing (a person's identity is paramount, tells you everything you need to know about their experiences, etc).

IMHO, the closest you'll find is 'Real Clear Politics'.

RCP prints outrageous stories from both sides of the aisle. They don't try to find the center, they give you both sides.

> there was a round table interview with different journalists from various media on NPR. They essentially all agreed that it was their duty to make Trump look as bad as possible, though they worded it slightly less audaciously. I distinctly remember them saying that they should no longer be objective.

Sorry but …you're gonna to have to back that up with pointer to some kind of records of this event .

I'd love to, but this was years ago and I wouldn't even know where to look.

I share your perspective about a ~2016 inflection point, but the cracks were showing even earlier. I remember in ~2014 things like the Michael Brown shooting coverage across the board parroted activists' talking points which were invariably and conclusively disproven by the evidence (MB wasn't shot in the back as he ran away, etc). This isn't a wider commentary on BLM, although I think BLM coverage provides a really interesting perspective on media coverage. This is all to say that the phenomenon isn't fully explained by Trump, although I think the phenomenon really accelerated as a result of Trump (I'm not positing a causal relationship, if I had to speculate I'd guess it's an intense feedback loop).

From some articles I've read[1], and discussions I've had (aka mostly anecdata) I really think that it's because views among journalists are changing. They view "just the facts" as potentially misleading because just the facts can lead to incorrect conclusions. Adding in color words that have a touch of opinion/speculation in them is ok if it helps the reader to reach the correct conclusion. Tis is also coupled with a strong sense of moral obligation on the part of journalists to lead people to the right conclusions.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-...

But that requires that the journalist knows what the right conclusions are. They're skeptical about other peoples' claims; they're not nearly skeptical enough about their own positions.

2016 was an inflection point because we had a particular candidate that built a movement that weaponized disinformation and falsehoods. Legacy media continually boosted Trump's profile as a curiosity, and was hesitant to outright call these falsehoods what they were, attempting to stick to outmoded journalistic norms that worked for politicians who only perform relatively minor deceptions.

The reckoning was indeed severe, but it was deserved.

Not sure why you were downvoted. What you said is absolutely true. Washington Post kept a lie tally for Trump and when he left office, the tally was close to 30K lies[1].

Also completely agree that the "both sides" coverage did not work as intended.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-fa...

Can't speak for others, but I downvoted because the OP's explanation is absurd. Yes, Trump's absolutely a liar, but the absurdity lies in the claim that the media's "outmoded norms" (i.e., honesty, objectivity, neutrality, etc) inhibited it from calling out Trump's lies is ridiculous. Honesty doesn't inhibit an institution from pointing out one side's lies, on the contrary, honesty demands it. However, honesty also demands pointing out the other side's lies, and therein lies the rub.

Apparently the NYT grew by 400% during Trump's presidency. They fully took advantage of the opportunity.

Correction: they actually tripled their subscribers and hired more staff from 2016-2020, not quadrupled.

> “The NYT still does world-class journalism…”

that’s ambiguously overstated. perhaps 1% of nyt journalism is “world-class”, meaning well-researched, investigative, and impactful. 99% is of the “moralistic crusade” kind of journalism, trying to influence the popular sentiment, rather than reporting on it.

and while 2016 was an inflection point, it’s certainly been on a longer slide, observable during the 2008 financial crisis and somewhat before that.

The best sign of click bait is posting obviously false, inflammatory articles and then silently putting out a retraction days later after the clicks have come in.

The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.

I think we have different notions of "clickbait". Personally I think NYT's particular brand of dishonesty is a bit more subtle than what I normally think of as "clickbait", but I won't argue the point. They are certainly and frequently guilty of publishing overt falsehoods and then quietly retracting (or even stealth-editing) days or weeks later.

Did they publish falsehoods knowingly? Every news source is going to make mistakes and retracting the story is normal.

Yes. The example that springs to mind (and I get downvoted without explanation every time I mention this, so goodbye Internet Points) was the Covington Catholic affair--the still photo of the kid in a MAGA hat apparently smugly smirking at a Native American elder (the media reported that he was a Vietnam veteran which was an outright falsehood). The whole of the media developed the same narrative around the still photo which was directly contradicted by a widely-circulated, publicly available 2 hour video. The narrative was that some racist white kids disrespected a Native American elder while the 2 hour video makes it clear that kids had been subjected to a lengthy racist and homophobic tirade.

I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:

>Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial.

and then a link to an article from the very next day[2] explaining what happened in fuller detail after more videos came out.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-hig... [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...

I'm not sure what point you're making. Your observations are all consistent with the "overt falsehood followed by quiet retraction" claim. Are you quibbling about "days later" versus "day later" with respect to the retraction?

> I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:

That was added later, hence the italics.

Perhaps the avid reader would say that they are most disappointed in papers like the NYT. You cannot really be disappointed by FOX or CNN. Different medium, but I think it still applies.

This is all true, but the key point here is that NYT is one of, if not the most, valuable brand in US print media. They had the money to hire a world-class engineering team to pioneer the print news experience online (the creator of D3js and Svelte have both held engineering positions there), but the vast majority of print publications did not. It's not really accurate to extrapolate NYT's digital success across print media as a whole.

>The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines.

Nah anyone old enough knows this shift happened with cable news and a shift to 24/7 news. You cannot find enough content to make that interesting without filling it full of sensationalist bs. This was an issue far before the internet was a ever a major news source.

I think it’s more than just click baits. Many Journalists have essentially become “activists”, you can see their Twitter feed and it would basically make you question whether they are some party affiliate or journalists. So in stead of telling the news as is, they would add their own twists bringing in partisan commentators. Essentially news has become so opinionated, on a given topic depending on who is covering it you would get an entirely different picture.

That has nothing to do with click bait and more to do with keeping loyal user base inflamed and plugged in. That’s why NYT doesn’t even bother how 50% of the country would feel when they blatantly call the worst pandemic in century “red COVID”. Or when Fox News cheers at the sitting presidents inability to answer a question without completely losing the thread as if it is a win for the side they are in. Real loser is the American people as always.

> One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour.

I just started watching this over the past year, not every day, but when something interesting happens and I want a mindless way to follow developments.

PBS broadcasts and uploads to various places, which makes consumption so much easier than others that are seeking profits. Between NewsHour, FrontLine, and their local broadcasts, PBS has done a great job compared to other media outlets.

No, they actually lie, distort and censor. Once you realise how insane they are, you will never be able to trust any news from the mainstream media.

Boosting, de-boosting, and narrative shifting are also intentional strategies

I attempted to list out all of the insane things that news does today at https://legiblenews.com/about/ and yes, breaking is so overused to the point of abuse.

I too like PBS NewsHour and modeled https://legiblenews.com/ off the idea of being non-sensational with no ads.

Another thing I did that this crowd would appreciate: I made sure that each page would have one and only one web request. Check it out in your network activity area in your browser—its fast!

Just CNN?

I don't think the clickbait is the real problem.

The media in America is 100% dependent on Gell-Mann Amnesia (https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/) and some have pushed it so far that it's starting to wear off.

I think this is quite relevant, but for the opposite reason that you're implying. Yes, news has always had the unreliability problem, and maybe it is especially bad today, but the corollary problem is the topic of the OP: Americans distrust the news. You claim the reason for increased distrust is the obvious one: The increased badness of the news - that reporting has gotten so incompetent and/or misleading that people are now seeing it through the Gell-Mann amnesia. My experience, however, is that more and more people are using Gell-Mann amnesia (or just general knowledge of reporting incompetence) as a blanket excuse to dismiss media that disagrees with their social/political feelings. They are clinging to this new idea that they know better than those fools reporting the news, and so they throw the baby out with the bath water to serve their preconceptions.

I don't think that's it. CNN is very broad. They report politics, world news, economics, but also celebrity gossip, human interest, lifestyle, opinion. That's their brand and they're actually pretty good at it. Their website hosts an enormous volume of content very reliably and without a paywall.

Hatred for CNN and other mainstream news is fed to a huge swath of the population by conservative politicians and pundits. They also heap scorn on excellent news sources like the NY Times and Washington Post because their factual reporting is damaging to their dishonest campaigns. Meanwhile, conservative media has shed any semblance of civility and just run blatantly agenda-driven stories. There's no both sides to this. It's almost entirely due to conservatives.

Here's a good test - if you find yourself in general almost always agreeing with / aligning with all of the stories that your favorite news source runs - that's how you know it's not a real news source. Real, impartial, objective, news, would report on everything, and give voice to other opinions than your own. They'd report things you agree with, and things you disagree with. They'd report things that further your agenda in the eyes of the public, and things that don't. They'd give others a chance to share their viewpoints as well as your own. When all you read on CNN are stories you personally resonate with, that's how you should know that you're not actually receiving the news, you're receiving an ideology.

I can guarantee you that you don't just happen to hold the "right" viewpoints across all areas, removing the need to ever be exposed to other ideas. (And no, having CNN set up caricatures of other's ideas to make a mockery of them is not being exposed to other viewpoints). The idea that you're so right and everyone else is so dumb/wrong/evil/etc. that they're not allowed a voice, is really not a good position to hold.

Real news is not subjective. There is no agree or disagree. News outlets running stories on climate denial, election lies, covid denial are driving an agenda of untruths. Most of my point of view is driven by an aggregate of credible sources. And I don't generally watch or read opinions.

> Real news is not subjective. There is no agree or disagree.

That's not actually remotely true. People Are Subjective, and "real news" is written by people, and often about people. For one example, they gave Sanders less coverage than Clinton in every single week of the Dem primary; about 2/3 overall.

Their visuals, style, tone and presentation are meticulously crafted to give the impression that they're trustworthy and patriotic; that things are simple. That really ought to give you a clue that they're selling you something.

Tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies

You're confusing editorial bias with inaccuracy. When CNN says there's a fire in California there's probably a fire in California. That list of very subjective allegations of bias or mistakes out of what's probably tens of thousands of stories they run per year. And I'm fully aware it is a for profit business run by fallible human beings. What I'm saying is that it's a fundamentally ethical and reliable source. One that almost always gets their facts straight but is not able to cover every angle. That's why I read a variety of sources.

I'm not comparing them a mythical platonic ideal media organization. I'm comparing them to outlets that are willing to push blatant falsehoods like birtherism or vaccine denial while giving "equal time" to climate deniers or the Laffer Curve economists. Fox was run for decades by a guy who loved conspiracy theories and was not bothered by colluding with politicians on one side and not the other. OAN and Newsmax are worse.

And on top of that a lot the hatred towards CNN is based purely on politically motivated lies. Trump hated them and told his supporters to hate them for spurious reasons. He would accuse them of lying about "the Russia thing" without citing an actual bad report as a way to distract from the factual reporting that made him look bad. Spreading mistrust of the media was part of his playbook to control what people believe and it worked extremely well.

Fundamentally ethical and reliable? Wow. It says a lot that Fox and OAN are your basis of comparison.

Search CNN.com for Donziger and see how many results you get. I'll save you the effort; it's ZERO.

Here's a CNN page full of facts on the kids in border camps - https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/04/politics/biden-a...

People will read that, and think to themselves, oh what an even handed tone. What a large number of facts, and nice graphic breakdowns. But the crucial context is missing - who is running those camps, and what are their contracts like? Those people are making money hand over fist, on the back of the misery of children in tin-foil blankets drinking water out of toilets.

Same with their "fast facts" section on Assange - an exercise in misinformation. The information might be "factual", but it's carefully selected to give a particular impression. Crucial information isn't there, such as the US' key witness admitting he gave false evidence, or Nils Melzer's observations.

Yes, a search for Nils Melzer yields TWO articles - compare to a search for 'Kardashian', which yields 1,700 hits. There are more stories about the Kardashian's shoe line than the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

A search for 'Chomsky' yields 7 result; none seem to be about him or his observations. Yes, SEVEN, the single digit number. 'Zizek' yields ONE (and 'Žižek 'yields zero).

'Snooki' yields 116.

That's not News bud; not any more than Fox. That's entertainment. If you want to learn about a fire in California there are hundreds of ways to do it, and they're probably mostly better than CNN.

That's basically all your personal biases on display. Chomsky is certainly not news. Nor do I expect them to cover absolutely everything. Like I said, I use multiple sources but even still my head can only hold so much and CNN only has a finite number of reporters. Like I also said they certainly have editorial bias because they have to choose what to cover given finite resources. The fact they miss some of these tiny stories is expected. That doesn't make them unethical or inaccurate.

CNN is "fundamentally ethical and reliable", but I have my "personal biases" on display ... "Chomsky certainly isn't news"... "Tiny stories", like Donziger and Melzer.

... Wow. Well, enjoy following the news CNN choose to tell you, I guess. Those Kardashian shoe lines are much more news than anything Chomsky has to say for some people, and I guess you're one of them. lol

Similarly, for product reviews skip Verge, MKBHD, etc and head straight to Mobile Tech Review (yes strange name). Zero bs, all content: https://www.youtube.com/user/mobiletechreview