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.