Why would they bother with it when what they're doing is way more profitable? They also have a reputation for being the partisan press. They'd have to completely rebrand to get into a less lucrative area.
The long form journalism that the partisan press produces, both sides here, amounts to little more than fan service. It's incapable of investigating things out of public interest without it relating to their kayfabe. MSNBC can produce thousands of hours about Trump/Russia, but the for the Snowden leaks you get a few seconds of a professional talking head telling you how Snowden is a bad man.
The WSJ on the other hand has excellent investigative journalism which is usually well separated from conservative partisan commentary - see Carreyrou as a good example.
There is, but if you're ever exposed to it it's probably in the context of brutal point-by-point debunking. On account of how it tends to be hilariously bad. Like that recent Mules "documentary" from D'Souza, or various Sinclair must-run pieces. Typically they're just very-slanted advocacy masquerading as investigative reporting. Or they take the form of popular opinion-jockeys running special "exposé" episodes that are also mostly or entirely easily-dismissed-with-public-info BS. Collectively, these seem to sate the conservative demand for conservative-flavored investigative journalism, and are all much cheaper than doing actual investigation, especially since you'll always find something to "expose" and there are never any dead-ends wasting time and money (since there's no need for actual substance behind the whole exercise).
If you mean from actual newsrooms, sure, those don't do much investigative reporting, but then there aren't a lot of conservative newsrooms. And it's not like the non-conservatives ones do much, either, with a few exceptions.
They're often good material. But they are way way way fringe. 60 Minutes especially is probably only still around because it would be a public embarrassment to kill it.
I mean, the heavy metal sonic aesthetic is not well suited for Mariachi music. The fact that Metalachi exists and has a following doesn't disprove the hypothesis.
Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay.
Anybody who took money from these people is not a victim.
Yes. Being discussed now on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593234
> And more generally, how do you square this stance with the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too biased against tech companies?
Cynically, they give negative coverage by default to encourage "charitable giving". When the org starts "donating" money to journalists, the tone of the coverage flips.
It's not a "defense", it's just reality. When it snows, do you say that sounds like the "triple point defense" of frozen water?
People are by and large fallible. I am. And we're wired to prioritize our immediate family over nebulous ideas like The World Must Know The Truth. I am full of nothing but admiration if you are the rare exception who is doing only the post principled of things, with complete confidence that everyone you work for is upright, and that you have optimized your labor to produce the most good for the world in general, not just you and yours.
But I honestly don't blame those "Yuppie Nuremberg" people, and if you see shallow news reporting as the moral equivalent of lobbying for tobacco, I can't really disagree. I just don't have the energy to pass moral judgment on everyone, so I'm content with understanding the phenomenon.
It's even worse. 50 years ago that's still what they were, but they had the "power" of defining reality. Politicians, millionaires, and other actually powerful people had to suck up to them or with the narrative-shapers against them they would have real problems.
But that reality is breaking (if not totally broken). Social media, feed algorythms, recomendation engines, etc, are taking those narrative-shaping powers from them. So they get less respect.
Correct answer.
People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish.
Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The business being covered will issue a press release and it gets rewritten into articles.
The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything about whether X is true or not.
But of course this would be expensive to operate, difficult to insulate from corruption and compromise, and unlikely to be popular with advertisers, whose objectives constitute the epitome of conflicted interest with such an outlet's stated core principle.
As you shade over from news to analysis, there are outlets like that. The Economist comes to mind; I don't think I've ever felt that their content was written from press releases. But it's also at least a day, usually a week, later than the actual news.
There's probably a project management style triangle here: fast, accurate, and, um. Some third thing. Pick two.
I think it’s entirely possible that an industry with low competition and high nepotism could just be doing their jobs poorly.
Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?
You say this as if it's an inherently bad thing. There's nothing wrong with some MSG as a flavor enhancer.
They're not trying to be gourmet food, they're trying to be fast food. They were very bad by even that low standard, and they became better by that standard. I'm still not a fan, but to give credit where credit is due, they did improve.
So yeah, some credit, that's fair. But I think the lesson is that good management recognizes when quality is falling off the bottom of the bottom rung, and makes adjustments to get back on that bottom rung.
We can both recognize the limits of mass market news and think that, eg, CNN is delivering a product below that standard.
How is Rogan an an example of good journalism? He doesn't do background research or push back on guests.
Vass you dere, Charlie? [1]
Misinformation/disinformation may, I suppose, have always been pretty much this bad, but the writing quality and intelligence in the mainstream media was not.
"Journalism" today reads like an assignment written by a near-illiterate freshman engineering student in the compulsory English class, by the standards of the mid-90s. At best.
And I think the reason is obvious - modern advertising technology proved that decent writing adds essentially zero value and forced everybody to accept it.
So the people with liberal arts degrees are not wrong to hate techies. But once, even techies wrote better.
We used to live in a world where elites guessed at what ordinary people wanted, and once the data-driven creed took over, it turned out they were mostly wrong. But optimization taken too far is evil.
Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time.
So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” is the answer, but it’s not entirely fair. Kind of like saying the cooks at McDonald’s have always been this bad; in fact it has never been their job to do world-class work.