That’s when things went from bad to worse and I abandoned the mainstream media entirely.

I was never a Trump supporter, but as someone who has friends and family who are/were supporters, I resent the situation where people think like you do.

In fact, I think that attitude is part of why these people end up voting for Trump. They know what the cool kids on the blue team say about them when they aren't in the room (hell, even when they are in the room). Not to give all Trump supporters a pass, but they're not all (or even most) the cartoon character you have in mind.

And honestly being supporters of a person instead of a policy or a position is itself a psychological failing.

> And honestly being supporters of a person instead of a policy or a position is itself a psychological failing.

You'll get no argument from me on that front, but I think that's a pretty bipartisan failing.

Edit: although thinking about it more, it's the person who is going to get your pet agenda items enacted, so practically it probably works better.

Not really? Has there been any cult of personality like Trump's not only among Dems but also among Republicans, aside from him, in American politics within living memory? (awk phrasing, but I think you get the idea).

Maybe Reagan? But even then, it wasn't this level of incredibly personal devotion.

Think about it: we never used the terms "Obama supporter" or "Romney supporter" in 2012, or "Obama supporter" and "McCain supporter" in 2008. And people supporting those candidates didn't wave flags with candidate names on them, etc.

But on supporting people, I think Obama definitely had devoted fans. Bernie did as well. I don't think Romney or McCain had the kind of draw to build up a big fan base. A lot of candidates that come along just aren't very exciting to anybody but their corporate handlers.

It's not all that surprising that an Obama or Trump character gets a strong following. Both of them reached out to people who felt like nobody in power cared about them.

Yeah, we definitely have a problem in this country with limited options. I think a sizeable majority likely want at least one or two other parties in the mix.

To be clear, I'm not really on the "blue team" either. But that's a team that hasn't been taken over by the worst of its fans, nor is it motivated by things such as xenophobia, willful and prideful ignorance, and malice.

I think the view that you are advocating for basically bends morality to accommodate the fact that so many people have to do and believe x. I'm a religious person. I don't believe in changing the criteria just to avoid an unsavory conclusion about people.

Ironically, the behavior you describe is immoral in my view. I also am a religious person, and I also don't believe in bending morals or that talk will heal all disagreements. However, with political opinions, the primary reason otherwise well intentioned people support bad things is that they don't understand that they are bad. Shunning someone actively makes that situation worse. Sure you can't win people over by arguments, but you can influence them gradually, and if they are your friends, you should want to do that for their own good.

https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution...

I think it's relevant here.

Added to "don't understand" and "dont care" is a third option: "don't agree", based on different upbringings and cultural values, some of which you or I would find abhorrent, because of our own upbringing and cultural values. But I think you should recognize that there is a good chance you'd have the same beliefs if you had the same life experience.

What's the point of this line of thinking? Ok, maybe we'd also join the Taliban if we grew up in orphanages in Pakistan after Russia invaded Afghanistan. So?

The thrust of your arguments here (the article and the life experience thing) seems to be to not hold anyone morally accountable for anything.

Once you recognize that these people are human, you have a chance at maybe effecting some kind of change. Looking at them as animals means you will never effect any positive change, and you'll probably contribute to an even worse us-against-them kind of environment.

Do you pay taxes to your government? There's a good chance you're funding some evil shit (among good things as well obviously).

Are you part of a church? Some of the people involved with that church probably do or have historically done some pretty evil shit.

I think life is messier than the picture that you're painting.

Your examples are so many degrees removed that I do not think they are apposite. For example, people who supported Trump did so with full knowledge of his attitude towards immigrants, asylum seekers, etc., his rhetoric about building the wall (which many of his supporters cited specifically as their reason for supporting him), his "birtherism" re Obama, etc. Thus, they can much more strongly be said to affirmatively support those things than, for example, an American taxpayer whose money goes to help the Israeli government bulldoze Palestinian homes, or do any of a number of other foreign policy things that qualify as "evil shit".

Compare actively supporting "birtherism" to passively supporting blowing up brown kids with drones.

I think you're better off looking for common ground with the people around you, rather than putting up barriers based on which politician panders better to them.

Edit: Case in point: we disagree here. I don't hate you for it, I'd hope you don't hate me, and I think this is a fine conversation to have. The alternative is we could each say fuck you and go our separate ways, and the world is a slightly worse place for it.

What would all these people objecting to this do if they were in a time and place where some real shit was going down? Lynchings, genocides, etc? I guess they'd stand by and be ok with it and rationalize those things.

Just look at some of the numbers for casualties in the middle east as a result of US adventures over there. And most of us are standing by and funding it.

Trump is distasteful. But castigating people who feel like he has something to offer them where nobody else does isn't doing anything to improve things, it's just further galvanizing them.

Only in a moral framework where not wanting people who speak a different language to move into your neighborhood,[1] makes you more of a bad person than writing software that gets kids hooked on social media that's bad for their mental health, or exporting jobs to China, or figuring out how to dupe people into buying more cheap imported crap they don't need, etc.

[1] Or insert any other worldview common to ordinary people from Ohio to Mexico to India.

You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people, as if they have no other motive than to do evil. I didn’t like him either, but give me a break and try to let go of that media narrative. His supporters were just people. Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight

There's a saying that Americans vote with their pocket-books. It does appear to me that whatever other policies they claim to espouse, when it comes to the crunch they vote for tax reductions.

I suppose that's partly because of pork-barrel politics, and the huge tides of money that wash around US election campaigns. If all the politicians are bought and paid-for, then they can't be trusted to handle taxpayers' money properly.

We really need to stop this cycle of hate. I want to feel safe in my neighborhood and get along with folk. We don't need to agree, but we need to recognize that we are Americans and on the same damn side in the end.

So? You judge the moral and intellectual merits of things by how popular they are? That's your call. I don't.

> Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight

Not really. Only one set of nutjobs actually stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election. You've bought into a narrative that minimizes what is an insane fact.

The Republican party is the party of conspiracy nuts. If you don't like it, then kick them out. But you can't, because a significant percentage of your group would be gone, and a larger percentage don't disagree with much of what the Q-tards believe.

Also I’m not a Republican so

I literally just googled "what percentage of republicans believe in qanon".

This is the first result:

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...

Stop being so fucking obtuse.

It's easy to see why such a large portion agree with that CENTRAL TENET (capitalizing so you can read it when you skim this).

If you actually go into the study you might even see that compared to the 25% of republicans, 14% of independents and 9% of Democrats are also QAnon believers. So to say that it's solely a Republican issue is disingenuous no matter how the media paints it (even the article you linked over exaggerating its source).

Don't be so fucking obtuse and learn to read past headlines

> the central tenets that is mentioned in the article being a pedophile ring in the government

The central tenets (plural) of the study the article references are as follows:

-The government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.

-There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.

-Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

Quite obviously that's significantly more extreme than your ridiculously watered-down interpretation of the survey's questions.

More interesting tidbits:

-43% of QAnon believers are Republicans, compared to 19% of Democrats.

-QAnon believers are 2.7x as likely to be conservatives than liberals.

-QAnon believers are 4.6x to get their news from far-right sources than from mainstream news outlets.

QAnon is predominately a right-wing problem. Trump rallies were rife with Q imagery. It also permeated the January 6 riots.

In your mind, "both sides" is valid. In reality, "both sides" is complete horseshit. The right is full of morons and assholes, and imo intentionally obtuse and/or disingenuous people such as yourself fall squarely into the latter bucket.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/marjorie...

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...

They represent all conservatives who vote republican. Literally, in congress and as our last president. If you vote for a qanoner you can't say they don't represent you.

> QAnon nuts aren't all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals.

Logical error here; your point would make sense if someone said "all conservatives are QAnon believers".

The problem isn't "black and white thinking"; it's somehow shrugging your shoulders at the fact that a former president of the US incited a mob to storm Congress in an attempt to stay in power, as if this is some kind of third-world country. "Oh but don't hold people voting Republican accountable for that", you argue. Why not? Party hasn't even held him accountable and are likely going to nominate him again.

Know why?

Because Capitol Hill and the Mall are secured six ways to Sunday. It is the seat of the US global empire. Congressmembers and high officials are common sights all around DC and they move around pretty freely. It is common to see them around town. It would seemingly be easy for extremists to find these people and intimidate of harm them, and yet this almost never happens.

That's because DC itself is highly secured, at least where the government people live and work. Congress and the Mall are a secure fortress within a secure city. There are soldiers, air defenses, snipers, and heavy surveillance everywhere.

The J6 protesters had no guns, no supplies, no secure communications, no central command. They were no match for capitol security. The police officers who allegedly died that day are not listed at "line of duty" deaths, i.e. no one says they were killed by J6 protester violence. Capitol security shot and killed an unarmed woman protester, the only death attributable to direct violence. This was also not the first time protesters had occupied the building.

I don't claim to know what actually happened on J6, but it is quite obvious that many of the media narratives about it are highly incompetent at best.

You can only lie to my face so many times before I start to question your credibility.

It's pretty disgusting you'd make the moral choice to peg the media as lying instead of being appalled that people stormed Congress and fought the capitol police.

Congress chose to let them in because they could have stopped them if they didn't want them inside.

You probably didn't read and understand what I said.

THE CAPITOL IS ONE OF THE MOST SECURE SITES IN THE WORLD. UNARMED PROTESTERS DID NOT STORM IT. THEY WERE ALLOWED INSIDE.

That the media cannot figure something so simple out tells all.

Fuck your deliberate obtuseness.

The vile they’ll spew at someone who doesn’t adhere 100% to their views is pretty shocking.

And in terms of violence didn’t some Democrat shoot at a bunch of Republicans playing baseball a few years ago?

They're not all bad people, most are just stupid.

Labeling your political opponents as “trash” turns off a lot of people.

But delusional? Not at all. Please feel free to embarrass yourself attempting to prove that anything I've stated is incorrect.

I hope your political views mature someday to the point you realize how counterproductive it is.

My impression from this thread is that you'd make an excuse even if they started doing those things.

You really think 42% of the US are bigots who will lynch blacks and firebomb lawyers?

I think you need to take a break from social media. There is a big world out there that you don't know a lot about.

I don't engage with any social media, and I'm out there in the world plenty. I read the news, I've spoken with people. We can all hear what Trump says, we know his policies.

I have had Trump supporters say to my face that asylum seeking children getting separated from their parents and never seeing them again is A-ok and deserved because it was the parents fault for trying to escape their country and come here. Those are the people you're defending. You think speaking further with them would make me despise them less?

> You really think 42% of the US are bigots who will lynch blacks and firebomb lawyers?

Why do you think my hypothetical is about literally every single one of them engaging in those things? If the Proud Boys and such groups started getting more active and doing such things, do you think most Trump supporters would care? Or would they keep at it with their far-right politics and support for him?

I've had terrible experiences with people on the left, but unlike you I don't paint half the country with the same brush. It's not an accurate representation of realty and completely unproductive.

You're basically doing the same thing the worst people on the right do - condemning millions of people because of the beliefs of a few.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_tan_suit_controversy

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/09/why-does-bush-go....

That Slate article is actually pretty fair to Bush. But others from that time, which I cannot find, were not so fair. Nuc-u-lar versus nuc-lee-are certainly gave my left-leaning extended family reason for an hour of Bush-bashing at one of our gatherings. While I thought then, and still do now, that the whole thing was ridiculous.

Many news organizations happily threw out their journalistic integrity to "fight Trump". Honest reporting became taboo. You were either FOR or AGAINST Trump, and anyone not choosing a side was just secretly on the other side.

If anything, they didn't pick on him enough for some things—I still can't believe the man became President after suggesting his supporters might assassinate his opponent, if she won. And that wasn't spin or bias, that's just what he did, the whole thing's available for anyone to watch. When he did that and his campaign kept trucking along without a hitch was the moment I decided our democracy itself was in danger (which turned out to be very right—maybe I should join a think-tank or become a political commentator or something, I also got a ton of the course of Iraq more-correct than most commentators)

> But while you're looking, take note of how many articles were on substantive evils he was constantly committing.

The implication you are making is that it's acceptable for the media to report inaccurately or unfairly if the subject deserves it.

Trump was a birther FFS. He was part of that lovely group of people who thought Obama was the antichrist for wearing a tan suit or eating arugula. He made media worse, not the other way around. They sullied themselves by pandering to his and his supporters' insanity. This happened way before he became president.

Before that they dumped on Bush II and Chaney

Before that they dumped on Clinton

Before that they dumped on Bush I (I remember the ridiculous attacks on Quayle)

I'm sure they did it to Regan too, and Carter before that, and Ford before that.

But I would agree that any pretense of "balanced" or "fair" reporting got thrown out of the window with Trump. It's like they aren't even hiding their intentions anymore.

Before that, there were revolutionary pamphleteers.

The Trump hysteria was a reversion to the norm.

Probably, but the main thing at that time was 9/11 and the Iraq war. Media was pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative hard, and woe be the person that disagreed.

For that to be harmful, it doesn't even have to be all journalists, just enough of them that people come across that bias often enough to be familiar with it.

I'm certain that many journalists value the truth and fairness over party, but I'm also certain that too many journalists put party/ideology over truth and fairness (in many areas), and the news organizations have become more tolerant of bias.

I have ranted to friends and family for decades about the lack of media literacy and the lack of understanding for the newsgathering and reporting processes.

I'm glad to see others continuing those rants because I gave up shortly after j school and transitioning careers.

Media literacy should be mandated in school.

Honestly though the goal is to get a good lay of the land for both how a story goes from whiteboard/notebook brainstorm to print, and the general shape of the industry.

Small but impactful example: headlines are often written by a different person than the article. This leads to a lot of conflict, which is healthy in terms of producing quality journalism, but potentially confusing for the consumer who may not understand why.

The main goals would be

- Understand the roles of reporters (gathering), editors (verification), managing editors (suits), publishers (sugar daddies) and their roles for a single given piece, and within the org at large

- Media conglomerates disproportionately dominate local news. It's not just Fox and CNN or the NYT/WaPo, and the impact is far more damaging than the more obvious corporate influence).

These days I tend to stay away from the news for the most part, in an attempt to retain sanity. You don't need 24 hours of news. I read up for about 2-3 hours a week and feel more informed than ever.

Here are a few resources who probably can get you set in a better direction than I would:

Columbia journalism review Nieman lab Poytner institute

Just try for basic literacy first.

  A Gallup analysis published in March 2020 looked at data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, 2014, and 2017. It found that 130 million adults in the country have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab.

The analogy I use for software developers is that the difference between a jr and sr developer is that a sr can evaluate 5 different database technologies and choose the right one based on the current use case. A jr developer chooses whatever is trending on hackernews.

I appreciate you sharing your on the ground knowledge and insights, but if it was more than 20 years ago I would also cautiously imagine that the new generation of journalists may not behave the same.

What the (not all, and not all the time..) media does when they bait people into moral hazard could easily be categorized as a crime (harming the informational commons) in some cases. How do we know? Imagine if the news had to publish things the same way that you testify in a courtroom. Do you think they would be more or less truthful and due diligent than they currently are?

Non-commercial speech to the public needs to be taken as seriously as it is when it's commercial (companies etc) speech to the public, and the unqualified unwarrantyable claims scrutinized just as much.

Individual journalists can be great people but the net result of systemic malincentives is a problem that's being gamed. There's a reason why rich and powerful people buy up newspapers (and politicians for that matter) and it doesn't have to do solely with telling the truth. I am not "blaming" anyone for taking advantage of it, or complaining, but we can fix it.

I always use this example to illustrate how hard it is to give a single, "objective" answer: When did WWII start?

And that's why I use the word "truthful" (spirit of the thing) not "truth" (itself) because like science, ideally we are just falsifying. Scientific truth (of everything, itself) is some asymptotic holy grail end state that we never reach, but hopefully are approaching by falsifying over time.

"But do we?" is I guess my point. There's a lot of intent and, again, determining what the "truth" (or even truthful) is that stands in the way. It's a very complicated problem I feel doesn't really have a solution. To be clear I'm not knocking you, I agree with you, I just worry about how it plays out writ large.

If one person says and insists on air that "WWII began when Germany invaded Poland," but someone else insists on air that "WWII began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria," do we force them to acknowledge the other viewpoint as valid? Do we say only one is correct? It seems a bit ridiculous I admit, but just substitute the example for something more stark I guess. Do we have to decide "well this is debate and this is other thing is fact" and see where the chips fall? Feels like we're trading problems there too.

Imagine trying to say "coal and petroleum are bad for the environment and contributing to climate change." "Certain outlets" balk at the claim and say "you're wrong and lying and corrupt and bribed, it's not leading to climate change and even if it did it's not enough to matter." To me that's patently absurd, yet they downplay it all the time and throw all sorts of nasty allegations out there. Where's the line? Do we fine them? Censor them? Let them be because "it's a debate," even if their claim is incredibly fringe and lacking quality evidence? I don't know the answer to be honest. I'd love to pull the plug on them but that's a dangerous door to open.

I hope this stream of conscience makes sense. I'm enjoying this conversation!

For example, if every news org is pro-coca-cola, then the omission of a report on it's harms causes people to inversely assume it's harmless. In other words the low coverage is a signal so called "full-baked" media literates often fall into the trap of listening too. This is worse than the half baked because they actually believe they are informed and somehow end up less skeptical of what's presented.

At least this has been my observation of people who think its not about the garbage dump you get your garbage from, but the variety you get when picking up junk from a multiple garbage dumps.

The answer is to treat all outlets as radioactive and to by default trust none of them. Only direct overwhelming evidence from primary sources should be your guiding light.

The average journalist thinks they value the truth, accuracy and fairness. Observed behavior is very different to this flattering self portrait which is why they aren't trusted.

Actual behaviors of real journalists that create distrust which can't be blamed on advertisers or editors:

- Accepting large grants from billionaire foundations that are tied to pushing specific agendas and views. Example: look at how much money the Gates Foundation gives out in journalism grants tied to his personal agenda.

- Publishing stories that contain obvious "errors" (invariably convenient for their pre-existing agenda). Example: the NYT published a front page that consisted solely of the names of 1000 people who had supposedly died of COVID. It was meant to scare people and it took some rando on twitter about half an hour to notice that the 6th name on the list was of a person who had been murdered.

- Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

- Point blank refusal to challenge certain types of sources because they think it's immoral to do so. Example: the BBC decided some years ago that climate change was "settled science" and that it was morally wrong to report on anything that might reduce faith in the "consensus". This is the opposite of the classical conception of journalism (challenging authority, digging up scandals, get both sides of the story etc).

- Relying heavily on sources that are widely known to be discredited. Example: Fauci stated early on in COVID that he lied about masks in official statements to the press, specifically to manipulate people's behavior. This did not stop the press using him as a trusted authoritative source. Another example: the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.

There's way more.

Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization.

Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.

But you don't have to be biased every time to be biased. Trust is based on consistency.

What makes the citation correct or trustworthy?

Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?

Commentary can have such citations. Investigative journalism might have citable passages in part, but ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself (which won't be some hyperlink you can go check). Journalists create the things that others cite. If they could produce what they need mainly by reading and citing, they wouldn't be journalists.

Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of something else and stuck his name into Google. That surfaced another news report about the murder. This is basic fact checking but the NYT didn't do it. The data was too good to check, so they didn't.

If journalists can't check the claims they're making, they shouldn't make them. The fact that the NYT wanted to make 1000 factual claims on the front page doesn't suddenly mean they don't have to check them. It means they shouldn't pull that sort of stunt. The loss of trust is clearly deserved.

Yikes.

It takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to research a short news article in a topic that I'm familiar with. For topics I'm not an expert in it's multiple hours.

I simply don't have time for it. Family, work, and sleep already occupy much of my day.

One solution is to recognize that, unfortunately, in that case you don't have much reliable knowledge about the world and therefore your default position should be to not try to influence it. Practically that means things like not judging other people, not voting, or alternatively voting for libertarians who don't believe in imposing rules on other people (because if you voted for specific rules, you'd be doing so based on unreliable information).

Luckily you don't have to actually research every single article. It's OK to generalize over time. Rules can also be shared. Here's some of mine: ignore any story about Russia because they're always unreliable especially since the war, ignore any study about science or public health, ignore any claims made by (ex)-intelligence agents, ignore any claims that appear to support woke narratives, ignore any statistical claims about China, ignore economic predictions or really anything that depends on academically developed statistical models.

You'd think they wouldn't do this. Probably they do it because they know most people will take factual claims at face value, or the journalists are so sloppy/confused that they themselves don't realize the claims are wrong.

On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal).

Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative:

> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-bi...

Russia's known to want to disrupt elections anywhere they can however. They'll even spread in the media the _appearance_ that elections were distorted to muddy the waters further even if no election interference took place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

If you see the world as indecipherably muddy other than Russia has some otherworldly electoral propaganda power, well then it isn’t clear why you comment.

The Columbia Journalism Review is about as reliable on media matters as you could want, and Jeff Gerth is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with decades of investigative journalism experience at the NY Times.

He lays out an extensive case showing that there was an effort to mislead the public.

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...

These bonafides aside this particular piece has faced a mountain of criticisms [1] and from a quick read doesn't pass the smell test for journalistic integrity itself. It makes Trump sound like a victim, a saint and a martyr all at once.

> Trump, unaware of the coming tornado, including the most salacious contents of the dossier, set out to form a government and make peace with the press. He made the rounds of news organizations, meeting with broadcast anchors, editors at Condé Nast magazines, and the Times.

> Trump’s longest sit-down after the election was with the Times, including the then-publisher, editors, and reporters. For seventy-five minutes Trump’s love/hate relationship with his hometown paper was on display.

> At the end, he called the Times a “world jewel.”

> He added, “I hope we can get along.”

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerth#Career (last paragraph)

Congratulations on relying on Trump's own strategy of declaring any critical reporting, no matter how well sourced, to be "Fake News".

> It makes Trump sound like a victim, a saint and a martyr all at once.

This is laughably false to any fair minded person who has even skimmed the article.

For example in paragraph six:

>At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth. (The Washington Post has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements.)

Throwing away the public's trust in the media because you're unwilling to stick to factual reporting on Trump's screw ups is the very definition of "You're not helping."

> the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.

Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not if they are not specialized science reporters.

> Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not

Yet volunteer bloggers regularly manage to not only read papers, they find specific problems with them.

The core problem here is that journalism as a field culturally accepts very low standards, and has no interest in raising them. Journalists are trained not to think too hard about anything and to distrust anyone who does, which is why independent journalism has such a different flavor to it. During COVID you could go to the legacy media and read a headline like "Lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives" which would quote a press release from a university. Then a few hours later you could go read some blog by some random anonymous dude and get a list of five massive and obvious methodology errors that rendered the underlying paper deceptive propaganda, problems of the sort that you didn't need any expertise to notice.

Normies see this and think maybe people who can't pull off amazing feats of investigation like reading publicly available PDFs shouldn't be journalists?

In journalistic culture not only won't they do things like this, they train their readers and each other to systematically ignore such investigations because they aren't "credible sources". But that's so wrong. They are credible sources, because they systematically prove their claims and over time that creates more credibility than whatever photocopier for academic opinions is being presented by the newspapers today.

When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.

Edit - one other point, so many articles are also sourced from Reuters and AP that the Media, while different companies all have the same source material.

The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level.

Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.

Journalists are welcome to burn their own reputation, it is theirs. But don't blame others.

Notably, the OP doesn't mention "cultivating sources" in their bullet points and that's a big source of corruption of individual journalists.

In more detail: one of the most valuable thing a given political reporter on either a local or national level can get is "scoop", the opportunity to break a story first. The valuable source of scoops is ... the very people in power at whatever level the reporter is operating on. So a reporter wants to have these powerful people like them. And that effort to be liked can easily result in the reporter spinning a story to the liking of these people.

This dynamic is discussed fairly often in analyses of the press I think.

You describe a mountain of problems _inside_ your own industry, and yet you walk away with the idea that it's the public that needs extraordinary change to account for this.

I appreciate your point of view, but I think your conclusion is horribly biased.

After learning the Bayesian way of thinking I feel more and more certain that this whole “objective news” idea is just plain wrong. There simply is no objective description of reality at that level of abstraction.

Note though that this is not the usual postmodern viewpoint: reality is not a social construct, or at least that construct is heavily constrained. There is still untruths and outright lies.

If someone thinks that's not true, ask yourself: do you really think that reporting on vaccine anomaly data, or Ukraine corruption will get you more or less upward mobility than reporting on shooting hot air baloons or whatever media orchestrated distraction is happening at the moment in the NYT?

At this point the news companies are all desperately concealing the fact that they barely have reporters, and are mostly getting news from a wire feed or parent company.