I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.

It's a big problem for the regular press too. Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph after they suppressed negative reporting on big advertiser HSBC: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...

I think people reading opinion as news is part of the problem.

> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.

[1] Public Opinion, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456.html

> There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways. There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's. His version of the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street. And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which stains the white radiance of eternity.

I recommend giving the book a read at some point if you have the chance (there's also a free audio book up on YouTube). It's a very thought provoking journey through how public opinion gets formed, and the myriad of different elements at play shaping them.

Some support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare#Seattle_Genera... "Even before the strike began, the press begged the unions to reconsider. In part they were frightened by some of labor's rhetoric, like the labor newspaper editorial that proclaimed: "We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country ... We are starting on a road that leads – NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!"[6] Daily newspapers saw the general strike as a foreign import: "This is America – not Russia," one said when denouncing the general strike.[7] The non-striking part of Seattle's population imagined the worst and stocked up on food. Hardware stores sold their stock of guns.[8] "

> The underlying trouble appears in the news through certain easily recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike, disorder. From the point of view of the worker, or of the disinterested seeker of justice, the demand, the strike, and the disorder, are merely incidents in a process that for them is richly complicated. But since all the immediate realities lie outside the direct experience both of the reporter, and of the special public by which most newspapers are supported, they have normally to wait for a signal in the shape of an overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter. Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these feelings. But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings. Their feelings may be that their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping goods they need in their work, that there will be shortage and higher prices, that it is all devilishly inconvenient. These, too, are realities. And when they give color to the abstract news that a strike has been called, it is in the nature of things that the workers are at a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to say, of the existing system of industrial relations that news arising from grievances or hopes by workers should almost invariably be uncovered by an overt attack on production.

It brings in contrast the public response to workplace shootings, or even the rarer instances when the entire staff of a workplace quit at once.

We quickly found out about a bunch of the nuance of the Half Moon Bay shootings, and appear to be doing things to make those workplaces and living places better. And I think most readers get a vicarious sense of justice out of mass quitings. But yeah strikes, and unionization in general, make bystanders nervous.

So that makes me wonder how this is getting out. Is it a news organization such as an opposing organization, or outspoken journalists? Is it democratized news reporting via forums and social media?

Journalists on the other hand are often side characters to their stories. Their stories come with a point, sometimes called a narrative, that's available to guide you in a certain direction of thinking. Journalism is largely what makes people distrust the news. Omitting, minimizing, or highlighting a fact are all ways journalists and editors play to the narratives.

Gallup regularly does these kinds of surveys and they publish them by default. They almost always get posted in the AP. If you look at the AP version of this article it's almost word for word the same. That's to say, it's posted on fortunes website, but it's not a top headline. They're not suddenly, after many years of this criticism, having a "reckoning with truth in journalism". This is the medias version of, "These are not the droids you're looking for"

Even your definition of 'reporting' can be (and is) easily abused to play to narratives, by the simple and necessary act of determining what is "newsworthy". Reporters will go by their biases and beliefs on deciding e.g. which homicides are "random" and not worth reporting, vs. which are indicative of systemic issues in society, and so require national attention.

Cherry-picking.

Reporting would say: "3 people died in car accident this morning."

Journalism would say: "3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%. And the federal government is looking to roll back more regulations, which are expected to increase fatality rates by 6%."

See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your premise which proves with any certainty that the increased speed limits are the cause of the change in accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it as part of the basic record of events we call "news", rather than as part of the opinion discourse.

This was even a good faith example. If you were trying to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.

I think this idea that we need to somehow strip all news of even the vaguest hint of a perspective is actually pretty condescending to the average news reader, imagining that they are so stupid and credulous that merely seeing a bit of bias is going to immediately warp their brains.

The question when becomes whether there is any value in publishing these most likely faulty narratives compared to simply reporting the facts. I would argue that there is actually negative value in the former, because the audience ends up less informed than if they had never consumed that piece of media.

This is why journalists will often attribute cause and effect interpretation of facts to expert sources.

But Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that educated, informed readers readily fall victim to, so it's clear that the media seems to have some kind of privilege of credulity.

I wonder if it's really an effect of people reading media primarily for entertainment - isn't there some old saying about "people who read the Times are less I formed than people who read nothing at all?"

"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents overall have jumped 12% since AG John Smith added driving-without-a-license to the city's informal do-not-prosecute list."

In our toy example, all of these could be simultaneously true, and the data given does not support one cause over the other. Note that the "due not" need not be present, the intended implication is still clear. (For bonus points, read these examples again, imagining that overall driving increased by about 12% due to people working from home less.)

The idea that the journalist should present only the directly related "bare facts" is so silly that I can't even take the suggestion as coming from a place of good faith.

Knowing stuff is hard, reporting on stuff is hard, understanding what is read is hard. The solution to these problems is not, nor could it be, restricting one's attention to the "bare facts." Indeed, these are often quite hard to identify and agree upon. We should expect and cultivate a little sophistication in ourselves and our fellow citizens.

"A person who our reporter spoke with who went by the name of Bob Dylan and claimed to be the coroner of James County, said that three individuals passed away recently, and he said he believes that they died due injuries similar to those involved in car accidents. Our reporter also asked the James County Sherriff's Department to corroborate, and a person who claimed to be the spokesperson for the James County Sherriff's department said that there were three individuals in a car accident last night, and they were taken to the hospital."

Anyways, I wasn't trying to write a rigorous example for each, I assumed that the reader could fill in the detailed. I just aimed to give the gist of what it should look like. You'd talk to experts, cite papers, etc.

Hasn't Trump been talking about the 'fake news media' for 5+ years? And don't half of Americans lap that stuff up?

I know broken clocks and all, but just because you disagree with someone most of the time it doesn't mean that they are wrong about everything.

Fox and Friends and Tucker Carlson are lying to viewers every day.

I mean, yeah? His version of "fake news" is calling EVERYTHING that doesn't kiss his ass and lie to make him look good fake because what he actually says and does is so utterly ridiculous he wants to confuse everyone.

I'm not going to give you specific examples because that part of my brain is now closed off, but literally he would do X or say X on twitter. Then the media reports on it, in a very factual manner, and he just denies literal facts constantly.

So let's not use him as an example for this. Also, he would never call Fox News fake news.. so, that tells you everything you need to know. He calls anyone who doesn't do exactly what he says and report favorably on him "fake news".

Actually, he did call Fox News fake news at one point, although yes it was due to them running a story about polls that were unflattering to him.

However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.

> However, he is still fundamentally correct about the issue that the media deliberately misleads or outright lies consistently enough to not deserve our trust, be it Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR.

That doesn't make him, or any other source of information, more trustworthy than the corporate news media.

> The term “fake news” became mainstream during the US election campaign, when hundreds of websites that published falsified or heavily biased stories sprung up to capitalise on Facebook advertising revenue.[1]

> Mr Trump and his supporters then adopted the term to describe media coverage critical of the President, especially that of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.

1: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2017/10/09/donald-trum...

Seriously though, within a city, they had morning and evening editions (12 hour lag) hundreds of years ago. For national stories, the lag was more like a week, then dropped to 12 hours when the telegraph was invented. Also, back then, there were orders of magnitude more newspapers (multiple in each big city, and at least one in small towns), so most modern censorship techniques simply would not work. Yeah, Elon Musk would have owned a paper, but (by law) only one, and multiple other wealthy tech people would own papers in the same market.

It would be great if you could provide some, as I am not from the field. Thanks.

"Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers the presidential election as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Operation Rescue abortion protests.[1]"

* As Russia changes its aims, the definition of "winning" changes. This is a separate way Russia can win: declare victory with whatever territory you have seized and call for peace negotiations.

If Matt Taibi get Keshloggied it would not amaze me if his former colleagues bury the story or even spin it as a good thing. I don't predict he will actually get killed but ask yourself, would you be surprised if he did or does a part of you half expect it at this point?

He certainly won't be working a corporate gig anytime soon. Where will his income come from in the future? Nevermind what is he going to do to make ends meet, how will he afford going places to interview people and perform research? You can't realistically be a journalist sitting around at home in your underwear (unless you work for the NYT writing provoking social criticisms about something you just watched on Netflix).

And this is a very famous award winning guy with published books to his name from a time when people still used to read and pay for books. What is going to enable more people like this going forward? Seems like a pretty stressful life actually.

His detractors are mostly doing far less journalism than him.

I watched a debate panel with several journalists who were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had full access to everything because an engineer sat in the room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to believe that the database couldn’t have possibly been pre filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the journalist literally claimed that they couldn’t have possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase myocarditis that quickly.

I know we’re in tech and have a closer understanding of technology than experts in other fields but it was kind of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the data they were being shown could be manipulated and I feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their credibility.

Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.

You are right though that there is a certain level of trust here in Taibbi's reporting and fact checking.

I’ve also read the Twitter files and the stated summaries on the tweets routinely didn’t match the linked evidence, or stretched it to the weakest but still technically possible conclusion.

> Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.

While calling this out as a conspiracy is kinda laughable given the content of the Twitter files, I want to make it more clear that I was appalled by the journalists being certain that the data couldn’t have been manipulated and then giving examples of how it would be impossible that were actually relatively trivial to implement. They also claimed they had access to “all” the data when that was patently not true. They had access to a gate kept version of the data which they could not verify, and I think that’s an important point given that one of the major critiques they have about Twitter 1.0 and the government is a lack of transparency. I also found this suspect when Musk and the journalists involved like Taibbi claimed they were going to show “everything” and instead of a database dump they keep linking excerpts of documents. Maybe they’ve finally done a database dump but after the first 5 or 6 Twitter threads where it was all cherry-picked I stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt

His Twitter lovers and haters mostly haven't, and are generally making judgments based on "social group" rather than the factual record.

I understand that you feel he is getting rich but do you have knowledge of his personal finances to make this assertion? Or even some sort of a basis for this intuition you can point people towards? Please enlighten me with some napkin math.

Meanwhile, the slacks and emails he posted are certainly real.

> He needs more eyeballs than that to justify his existence.

As opposed to journalists who don't need eyeballs to justify their existence?

You are correct. Its a hardscrabble life.

There is no payoff, except for the duty of the profession.

This is unfortunately the one thing that society seems to be lacking dramatically these days. From policemen that don't rush in to rescue children in danger of being murdered by psychos, to administrators that feel that doctors should get time off to "reflect" on X person getting killed by a cop (cancer doesn't take days off... grandma's back pain doesn't take the day off). Duty is severely lacking across all layers of society.

The tone from the top seems to be encouraging this. Now, "its ok to be soft" instead of "power through, people depend on you"

We need more Taibbis and Intercepts, willing to do their duty.

Fixed it. There are historical evidence that this has gone on in some form or fashion in ancient empires (e.g., Roman, Egyptian, Chinese), be it written or the town crier.

There have always been people who knew this was going on, spoke up, but were considered crackpot, conspiracy theorist, or simply beheaded.

[To be clear I actually agree that sociology is the appropriate academic descriptor regarding the study of what forces influence media that influence people. I am simply pointing out that sociology goes rarely uncriticized on HN as capable of deriving legitimate conclusions, and asking why this is the exception.]

This particular example is playing both sides in a generic way. Half the people say "oh yeah, Fox spreads BS", while the other half is saying the same about NBC. If they called out one or the other, it just turns into a shitfight.

HN isn't dumb. Some discussions tend to get off the rails, sometimes badly, and on some topics it happens more often than on others. But this is not a random public Facebook group or a Twitter pileup either.

The top-level comment is upvoted because it (at least in my eyes, and why I upvoted it) points to social sciences backing the conclusion that's, to some HNers, quite obvious both from observable behavior and first principles. Sociology is one of the fields where you'd expect to find research on this topic. Social sciences get criticized a lot on HN, but so are in the wider academic community, and there are good reasons for it - but I don't believe anyone on HN seriously claims that social sciences are incapable of "deriving legitimate conclusions". Most conclusions may be wrong, but some are salvageable, and plenty others survive the test of time. The SNR may be worse in sociology than in physics, but the signal is there, and HN does (usually) recognize this.

I'm merely pointing out this broad inconsistency.

First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements.

Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.

> Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.

Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".

Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind of wooden interpretation of words and lazy disqualification is what leads someone to the "black and white" spin you're accusing the GP of. This falls in line with the type of _gotcha_ logic that insists: "Well you said x, and x means X regardless of rhetorical device usage." and "OP has expressed sentiment in Y, which leads me to believe he's actually Y and therefore not $CREDIBLE".

The point is, engaging like this deprives the dialogue of nuance, rhetorical freedom and grace. If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).

This is still too extreme. "Lying" requires intentionality and implies maliciousness. It suggests that people who work in media are mostly evil people with the primary goal of misleading you. It both ignores and shows ignorance of how the media industry actually works. It also removes any hope of actually fixing the media industry because the only solution according to this mindset is getting rid of all the lying journalists. It doesn't leave any room to understand or address the incentives that actually got us to our current situation.

It's dishonest. End of story.

I think it's ok to take the illustration to that extreme, given the postulation that you say someone thinks that you should destroy a person's life over one loaf of bread.

Certainly makes me feel warm and fuzzy that our news orgs are looking out for us! :)

Do you not understand how horrifying a comparison this is?

I never described "all lying as malicious". I said it "implies maliciousness" and you said it "often is, malicious". I don't see a disagreement here.

:). My apologies, I've misread what you wrote.

I think the tension we're walking here is to keep one hand grounded in the fact that words can have a discrete, objective meaning *while also* allowing for individual freedom of expression. Modernity vs unhinged relativism.

> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, ...

is exactly what you call a "wooden" statement. But even when the author meant "by and large, the media lied", the statement is a dishonest exaggeration it is. Of course there are media that can be caught lying over and over again, but there are sufficient large, conscientious news outlets to suppose it is a dirty spin.

> If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).

Discrediting all media equally is part of polarization, and letting it go isn't helpful. Discussing it as if it were true, as many seem to do, is a symptom that it has gone too far.

If you consider the decades of scolarship it takes to clarify extremely well doccumented events, like the outbreak of the first world war, it's clear that even with a mountain of evidence, and all the time in the world, the 'basic facts' can be stubornly elusive even with the best of intentions.

The idea that an accurate picture should be able to emerge before 9-o'clock, in a newsroom, in a haze of conflicting reports, seems pretty incredible to me: and historically, that's not what has happened. So 'accurate news' is neither something we should expect, nor something we have a great deal of evidence of.

Personally, I don’t watch anything. I read across a broad array of print sources and prefer to trust specific journalists rather than entire organizations. I try to get most information from primary sources, or to triangulate information from multiple outlets which are preferably maximally uncorrelated. This is much easier than it may sound. And think tanks and academics are often better information sources than entertainment news outlets.

Are you implying the NYT never publishing anything that upsets their readership? Every week #CancelNYT trends because they "platformed" something their left wing audience didn't like.

Even Fox News lost viewers because they dared declare the 2020 election free and fair, and in favor of Biden.

Interesting, I worked in Saudi Arabia for awhile...most of the Africans and Southeast Asian laborers were all 100% convinced that professional wrestling was real. Pro wrestling is HUGE in developing nations.

But propaganda is tricky you need people to keep paying attention which means the most overt spin is to be avoided. Done well you shift the narrative over decades not just swap positions on day one. Fox News is the most well known US example, but you don’t want to just preach to people who already believe your message.

Thus you want to control the widest possible selection of media.

The New York Post is a great example. It was the sports and bookie newspaper - they’d publish Vegas odds and have tabloid news. They slowly transformed into a giant editorial paper and funnel into the broader Fox ecosystem.

They have a great, free product. I need to pay to read The NY Times, but Fox is free and the sponsors are all low quality high margin stuff. Radio is prostate pills, TV is old people drugs and gold, etc.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news-bias/

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/one-america-news-network/

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/cnn-bias/

The Fox issue is they conflate the two. I used to watch alot of TV news and the actual news content was pretty good on Fox on national issues, but their affiliates were usually pretty awful.

The news product produced by the networks until circa 1999 were a superior product in every way. Cable outlets have always danced with these issues as a TV channel that says the same thing all day gets boring.

The Onion does a better job than Fox.

"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."

This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.

An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court.

To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.

Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.

Your grasp of English seems fine, to me.

I think your "quite different" distinction is incorrect. The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one. There's a gradation from plain lying your face off, through mixing in a few truths with your lies, through lying by omission, through presenting true facts in such a way as to make the reader believe falsehoods.

The tactic most-used by newspapers is lying by omission. Newspapers routinely "spike" stories that aren't aligned with the paper's political agenda. You can search the paper's output, and you won't find a direct lie; but a parallel search for truth will also fail. Truth is to be found in the gaps.

There is if you look up definitions. Lying involves falsehoods. You can mislead someone using selective truths without using falsehoods. That's why the article etc was about misleading, persuading, etc and not mentioning lying (aside from the commentor I originally responded to).

If someone can't see how a person could be misleading without lying they're going to fall for a lot of bullshit.

> intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public

persuasion is not misinforming is not misleading.

This is literally the definition of lying.

You can intentionally mislead someone through the selective use of truths without using any "counter-factual" or untrue statements.

* used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression. "all their married life she had been living a lie"

Google "define lying". It says this:

tell a lie or lies.

and this

(of a thing) present a false impression; be deceptive.

---

Intentionally misleading is deceptive, even if it states only facts.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lying

But wait, let's look at the instant replay. You claim that lying and deception at the same. So why would you get involved in this conversation to say that? According to you, their use is interchangeable and makes no difference.

If you have something to add to the actual conversation and not about definitions, then please do.

There is a difference between telling a lie and being mistaken, no? If you are learning something and give the wrong answer on a quiz, are you lying? Both of those are falsehoods that aren't intending to deceive, and most people wouldn't count those as lies.

The word lie, requires an intent to deceive.

This isn't being debated.

"There is concept called a "lie of omission"."

And that's why it's a concept and requires additional words to convey. It's not included by default. This would moee generally fall under deception.

I'll ask again, anything to add to the actual discussion?

Lie of omission is an atypical use and is inconsistent with the definition that I posted earlier. You can cherry pick your definition while ignoring the one I posted and use typical examples that don't correleate to this atypical use that changes the very definition.

If I withhold information from you it may be misleading, but it quite simply is not a lie. Now please stop trolling and actually contribute to the conversation about distrust of the media instead of focusing on the very thing you complained about - semantics.

Your source is spinning the definition of lie, for some reason.

A question for you: if you make a mistake or misunderstand something then share it, are you a liar?

I don't mean like your current actions - the part where you are pretending that you have never encountered the notion of lying like this is clearly itself some sort of lie. I mean like say you apply some math rule incorrectly on a test. Should you be kicked out for lying to the teacher?

Saying something incorrect, but which you believe to be true, is no lie.

> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war ...

There is a difference between withholding information, selective emphasis, and outright lies. They are all bad, but they are equally bad. If you want to make things better you attempt to differentiate better from worse actors.

TLDR; all media, and all people, are biased, but they are not all equally biased. This bias can produce false beliefs. If you think false beliefs are a bad thing you promote the better actors and condemn the worse.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've just seen first hand (1) the real information on the battlefield (2) the public affair office's briefing to medias, which is factual although omits sensitive things and (3) the media's subsequent reporting which largely ignores what the PAO said and goes on with their made up interpretation. It's frankly sickening. They're writing fantasy.

https://doomberg.substack.com/p/railroaded

"Even though this, and all information quoted in this piece, is readily available to any reporter with access to Google, countless references to the dangers presented by phosgene are giving the public anxiety over the decision to execute the controlled burn. To pick one example from many dozens, a Newsweek story, titled Did Control Burn of Toxic Chemicals Make Ohio Train Derailment Worse?, includes the following sentence: “Phosgene is a deadly gas that was used in chemical warfare during World War I.” The report goes on to quote – and we kid you not – a TikTok video from an “entrepreneur” for more insight.

Sigh."

Lots of things are dangerous even at concentrations measured in PPM. For example, the level of Phosgene that’s “immediately dangerous to life” is 2 ppm: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/75445.html.

Maybe the point is that this 20 ppm quickly turns into less based on further dilution. But there’s a lot of analysis required to support the post’s assertions that the author just skips over.

Isn’t… isn’t that a pretty black and white spin on the idea of sociology? Do you have any studies to share that indicate “politically colored armchair philosophy”?

No, not for propaganda. If you want people to have a certain perception and position on a topic, selective reporting of topics and the presentation of them is far more relevant. This certainly does qualify as misleading.

Lies are even more ineffective since they often can be directly disproved, which biases people to belief the opposite. You want to present your spin in a certain blur.

Many prominent sociologist pretty much explain the mechanisms media and advertisers employ in detail. To say this is a fringe position is misleading too.

Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.

Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.

At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.

It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)

> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.

It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.

Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.

What a naïveté. Independent journalists are even more beholden to their audiences, if they start talking up something those audiences don’t like, their incomes dwindle. I’ve yet to see a prominent independent media figure that changed their position on any topic, regardless of real life events or evidence.

Jimmy Dore supported the official narrative on COVID when it started. Matt Taibbi just did a long, explicit mea culpa on Rogan about being wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's just off the top of my head, and those are two of the biggest.

Your comment makes no sense with Matt Taibbi's statements. I'm not sure you understand what he said and corrected.

Do you mean when he apologized for adamantly saying that Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and it was only 'dishonest types' that were pushing the narrative that Russia was going to invade? I mean, when Taibbi gets the start so so incredibly wrong in such a biased (an anti-discourse) way I kinda stop following anything old boy says so you are going to have to give me more details about what specific walk back of his you are referring to?

I see. So, when he retracts and apologizes for a mistake, he can't be listened to anymore. If he doesn't retract a mistake, he's one of the Bad Guy independent media who never corrects a mistake. The requirement then is to be 100% right about every take in his career.

I wonder how that standard holds up to the corporate media who, just as a single example, told everyone the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian op, likely changing the result of our Presidential election, whereas Hunter years later admits the story was real and the laptop was his?

> nefarious plots behind everything

The "nefarious plot behind everything" is that our government is corrupt. Just like most governments around the world, and just as has been largely the case within empires for millennia. To frame government corruption as a wild conspiracy theory requires ignorance to much of human history.

"Elon isn't right wing, give me one example of that"

- Endorsed Ron desantis

- Told everyone to vote Republican

- Tweeted out "I am a Republican"

The 'powers that be' bias is a bit different and takes mant forms.

Aka institutional powers (aka Dem/GOP), individual institutional powers (aka stop a story from embarrassing a colleague Executive), Natoinal bias (aka stories during wartime are not quite the same), 'Civil/Public' bias (aka stories about vaccines during a pandemic), Corporate Institutions (aka advertisers, don't want to upset them).

Funny enought those tend not to be the one's we get the most in a huff for, rather, we fixate more in the ideological narrative stuff because it's more visible.

You don't really see the 'national bias' at all unless you're outside of the country. You don't see the 'corporate bias' bedcause it tends to be displayed in terms of 'stories that don't exist'.

All of that said we should strive to be better.

> Many credible books on that topic to read.

Yes, exactly as credible reporter guy explained how the US blow up the pipeline. Many credible substacks!

Not just some 'substack'. I suspect some of the larger outlets would not publish it without source information etc and as I mentioned Seymour Hersh is well known for sticking to his word of "Not revealing sources".

It's pretty clear that to get to the bottom of this we either need some leak or enough politicians in Congress who take this seriously, and get people to testify under oath. (Of course it'd be a good start to hold accountable those who lie to Congress, like Keith Alexander and James Clapper.)

[0] https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1626176420648026113

What is your evidence such a system exists today?

I had been taught that The Times was the most objective news organ here; it did carry an aura and style that seemed objective. I realized that what the objective "facts" are turns out to depend on your point-of-view, and it's harder to know what that point-of-view is if the organ is pretending to be "objective".

Ever since, I've preferred to get my news from sources that wear their bias on their sleeve.

It's not one uniform block, it's thousands of people with different intensions and knowledge.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranFhYpq6UE

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ

The US has over 7000 stations

What a disingenuous argument. Proceed, I won't stop you.

It’s pretty easy why trust in media has eroded in my lifetime (I’m a 40 something). We deregulated and allowed for consolidation of ownership of print, broadcast and eventually online media.

That changed the dynamic. People will always correctly call out right wing talk radio as an example but the problems with media are more subtle as well. Broadcast news changed from a public service obligation to entertainment. If you were around in the 90s, you’ll remember how the OJ Simpson drama was a transformational event - which would not have happened in 1982. Serious journalism gave way to circus.

Our wiser predecessors learned in the 1920s and 1930s of the danger of mass media. Right wing nutcases like Father Coughlin, demagogues like Huey Long, America First, and more extreme left wing labor activists bear a strong resemblance to the characters in modern media.

One of my numerous objections to the BBC is that they compete for viewership rankings as if they carried advertisements (which they don't in the UK). As a consequence, far too much of the coverage is non-news - vox-pops, crying grannies, stories about celebrities' indiscretions. Hard news is hard to find.

But the problem is way more insidious and pervasive than performative partisan issues, which are generally manufactured culture wars. Those issues serve two purposes:

1. To make people angry and keep them angry. Angry people are "engaged"; and

2. To sow division and prevent class solidarity.

one of th emost wildly successful examples of propaganda is the idea of the middle class. This serves to demonize the so-called "lower classes", typically labeling them as lazy, criminal, morally bankrupt and drains on the state.

There are only two classes: labor and capital owners.

Yet propaganda has been so successful that labor will defend the interests of billionaires to the detriment of their own interests. The number of people who would die on the hill of opposing Musk and Bezos paying slightly more taxes is depressing.

Media is a key tool in this endeavour. It's why you see wall-to-wall coverage of the China balloon (which literally does not matter at all) and a virtual media blackout of the environmental catastrophe and massive corporate failings that underpin the East Palestine train derailment.

Media represents and advocates for corporate interests and systemic interests.

Believe or not, a decade or two ago a newspaper's worth was measured by its integrity and ethics & the quality of journalism (think investigative stories and ground-breaking exposés).

In the years before the internet we had newsletters and amateur radio. https://media.tenor.com/9k_DNT8tBA4AAAAd/simpsons-i-wish-to-...

Today it's quite difficult sorting fact from fiction from speculation. Even among the non-postal "decentralized" distribution protocols. The old saying that people become leery of media reporting when they see how their own specialty is botched applies to even the credentialed bloggers when they step out of their lane just a bit.

I've personally noticed fact reporting biases when, for instance, reading a story on the same event from Fox News and CNN. But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.

That was never easy. The only thing that changed is that there isn't one specific fiction pushed with incontestable power anymore.

The thing is that people are used to that incontestable fiction. With it gone, many people never learned to healthily distrust their information, and many are unsettled that people can not agree anymore.

> But the basic facts reported agree when they overlap.

Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.

Definitely agree. But it's also difficult to fact check even if you do distrust. Even educated bloggers and readers can have difficulty accurately interpreting information, and what that information indicates, if technological advances make their knowledgebase outdated.

> Yep, and that's manufactured. The way those media run, the basic facts agree by construction and the real world is irrelevant for that.

In some cases, such as when the source of particular facts all originate from the same person, sure. Or when everyone's article is just a rewrite of the AP News or Reuters release. But in the general case we all can know who won the superbowl, and by what margin and what plays.

All US news stations covered Hilary's campaign at least 5x more than Sanders.

That's without even getting into the hit pieces, the lies, the questions sneaked to Hillary in advance.

That style of narrative warping is repeated across every topic that might hurt corporate profits. There's facts, and then there's repetition, presentation, sentiment.

Look at how US media covered the Northern Southern train derailment - one story on page 20, with no context linking the accident to Biden's strike breaking, no context about Northern Southern's $10 billion stock buyback last year, no context about their lobbying against the very regulations that would have prevented this. The vast majority of corporate news ources didn't even name the company.

US media is absolute unequivocal dogshit across the board. It's utterly indefensible. That half of American's have any faith at all in corporate news is astounding. Trust them for sport coverage, sure - but that's entertainment friendo, not news.

And all of the investigative journalism sites that would report in this detail on events like this are asking for donations to keep going. The advertiser support isn't there.

I actually don't think it's possible to solve the problem of funding being able to influence journalism. Although there are independent journalists like on substack (which could be what you mean) I am not convinced that is much different from corporate media except the journalist is more like an LLC or sole proprietorship.

I make an effort to get my news from a wide variety of sources, both inside my country (USA) and from around the world. As a result, the Democracy Now organization seems to most closely agree with these sources, mostly because they cover some topics that are effectively censored in the USA.

Often MSNBC and Fox News are not so guilty of lying as they are guilty for strongly filtering what information they surface.

Some of them have been at it since podcasting since day 1.

They have been saying things that are deemed unacceptable or inappropriate by the powers that be. Yet they are still around with crowdfunded sources.

So I don't buy that you cannot do good reporting and also make a honest living. Its just very very hard, and there is no upside.

Trickle through to HALF the population. Frankly it's shocking that 50% don't think information they receive is a component of some narrative.

Which ones prove systemic, deliberate deception?

But most sociologists are totally in on the game. It used to be that the mainstream media narrative was opposite of what the sociologists preferred people to believe, and at the time you had academics talk about Manufactured Consent, and False Consciousness etc. These days, the press is more aligned with academics, so they prefer to keep it shush.

Here is an explicit example, published just a few weeks ago:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X2211509...

> The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents

From the abstract:

> Low-income Black fathers have been portrayed in the media and in research as uninvolved and disengaged from their children. The current study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 2578) to examine adolescents’ reports of relationships and interaction with their biological fathers. The results showed there were no significant differences among Black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, and Other fathers for adolescents’ perceptions of closeness or interaction with fathers.

Authors “debunk” the “myth” of lack of involvement of low income black fathers from lives of their children. Anyone who has knowledge about basic statistical facts of low income black society in US will immediately be wondering how they could possibly show the lack of involvement of black fathers is a myth, when fully 80% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.

The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.

Imagine reading a paper which “debunks” a “myth” of lack of involvement of women in corporate boards or C-level position, which simply excludes companies that have zero women on boards or as C-level officers from consideration. It would be hard to view it as anything other than deliberate deception. This sort of ignoring of obvious factors is, however, extremely common in published sociology research, and the academic community is extremely good at pretending to not notice deliberately lousy scholarship, when it aligns well with political opinions of 90% sociologists, and attacks anyone who tries to bring attention to it.

There's the immediately obvious point that marriage != involvement, which appears to be one of the main considerations of the study.

> The answer is rather shocking: the authors simply ignore the children, whose fathers are completely uninvolved, and only consider children with at least minimally involved fathers.

Where is the actual description of this? I don't have access to the linked paper, but the underlying study [1] it is based on doesn't appear to say this.

[1] https://ffcws.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4356/files/d...

The sociologist notes will note that the media serves the interests of the powerful while still reporting some number of facts. The most extreme of the scandalized public will say "the media lies - they say X so Y must be true and X must be a plot". This produces a whole of truly bizarre thinking (often on the right but no doubt on the left as well).