> I generally forgive journalists who simply reporting on a story and get it very wrong because they usually report all kind of stories and it’s unreasonable to expect good grip on all the topics.

I generally don't. A journalists job is to report the news, if they don't feel confident in a given domain then they can sit the story out.

To give you an analog, I work on infrastructure, but I don't work on things like AWS policies every day. It generally takes me longer to craft up the right way to restrict a given resource due to that. If I left an S3 bucket open to the public "on accident" I'd expect ramifications from my employer.

That's to say, the onus is on the doer of the work. Now, if news outlets are just telling journalists to give it the old college try on domains they don't know, that's another subject.

Reporters are low paid people who are expected to pump large amounts of content very quickly. They also need to report it in a way that other people with no domain knowledge will find it interesting and feel like understand the story. If they can’t do that, someone else will do and get all the views.

It’s not an excuse for the low quality, just an expected outcome IMHO.

"A journalists job is to report the news"

Nope. A journalist job is to make clicks. That’s how their job is evaluated: how many click did the story bring.

That’s all. That’s f**ing all.

Every news outlet office now has a giant screen with the list of the stories and the number of clicks. "Journalists" are expected to competed on that metric and that metric alone.

It blew my mind every time to realize that, even in tech, people are still naïve enough to not see that. Just change the word "journalist" by "click farmers" and, suddenly, everything makes sense. (Television has "audience" instead of "clicks" but the reasoning is similar)

The problem is that bad, irresponsible, and / or wrong journalism still makes money. Newspapers rarely face consequences for their shoddy publications.

This has a name: Yellow Journalism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

That's not totally true. For instance I blocked USA Today on my Apple News stream because of the low quality of journalism and clickbait titles. The problem is that this has minimal impact but more importantly, USA Today probably doesn't even get a report letting them know that end users are doing this and probably get paid anyway so they are blissfully unaware.

I've found several USAToday fact checks, notably on COVID, by them given an air of authority using citations full of tangential (or worse, wrong) experts..

While such tangential citations were used, at most it basically discredited the article but not necessarily fully refute the topic.

A case of strong yellow journalism?

Concur.

"A journalists job is to report the news, if they don't feel confident in a given domain then they can sit the story out."

That may have been the case in the past, but "journalism" has radically changed within the past decade. Today it's more about telling the story that the media conglomerates want the public to hear, than about honest reporting.

Public distrust of the media is at an all-time high, and growing.

Is it really the case that a decade ago journalism was not telling the story that media conglomerates wanted the public to hear? Or did that just seem to diverge from what you personally wanted to hear about a decade ago?

The conglomerates seem to keep conglomerating ever-larger, leaving fewer sources of direction.

I mean, I feel this. I watched George Bush get mocked and made fun of on the news for having a stutter almost every day. I also watched them do daily reports on the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. When Obama took over they stopped reporting deaths and some organizations cheered him on while others broadcast viscerally racist shit.

So, to answer your question: it's both. It's bullshit I don't want to hear and what a grip of powerful people probably want me to hear.

> A journalists job is to report the news

In theory maybe, in practice, journalists are simply Instagram influencers with fancy degrees. They make content to draw eyeballs for an organization that sells ads.

In many cases, yes. But what baffles me is the terrible coverage of the crypto world, even from serious journalists. Stories like the Mango Markets exploit would get plenty of clicks and wouldn't take that long to write ("9-figure crypto bank theft may not even be illegal"). So why are they ignored? And why are so many publications portraying SBF like a misunderstood philanthropist when you could arguably get more clicks reporting on the many fraud accusations?