A few bad apples spoils the bunch. You can have thousands of apples in a barrel, but a couple of bad ones can quickly make the whole barrel worthless.
For example, the New York Times makes the right call on integrity vs profits, access, etc dozens of times a day for years. Then one time 20 years ago they make the wrong call vis a vis Iraq weapons of mass destruction, and they've almost completely destroyed their integrity. Seems unfair, but as a consumer we can no longer trust them, and probably never should have.
This is probably one of the most commonly-used fallacies I see people used to deal with cognitive dissonance caused by information that might make them uncomfortable.
I just scanned his twitter feed and I don't see anything terribly problematic, so I'm not even sure what you're referring to that would make you ignore him.
Are you claiming that none of us has integrity in our professional work?
Articles are not written by institutions. They are written by individuals. Just like the code I write every day. For money.
I would say 99% of them want to be paid.
And that 99%ish of them realize that they need to at least look like they have integrity to be paid.
And if asked, I’m sure 99% of them would admit that the best way to keep getting paid and look like they have integrity is to actually have integrity.
usually where the problems happen is when they can’t see the disconnect between their day to day actions and the long term goal, or when they hit a challenge where they can’t do what they need to do - and then can’t take ownership of what they did and instead hide/project/deny, etc.
I’m guessing less than 90% would really have actual integrity, and the rest should hopefully be kept in check by fear of discovery or whatever. But things slip through regardless.
Otherwise you're saying "can't trust the status quo, can't trust the alternative" - noise, at best.
If you think about the Iraq war whenever your read a piece by a journalist in the NYT, even if that journalist wasn't even out of their diapers at that time, then you may need to re-adjust your grudges.
This doesn't follow. I'm not a fan of the mainstream media by any means, but trust is not an all or nothing thing. It is entirely possible to develop a relatively sophisticated relationship with news media and to assign different levels of trust to different elements of what is encountered. Indeed, one might even vary their level of trust on a sentence by sentence basis!
The idea that the media must be entirely correct and entirely unbiased is jejune. It isn't the world we live in, has never been the world we live in. Take a little epistemological responsibility.
Lets try again: almost all journalism is written to influence readers. No hyperbole, no derogatory term, still what GP (I think) wanted to say. Thoughts?
That is to say, every human act is political whether you acknowledge it or not because it either maintains the current system or attempts to change it. So we should question the motives of anyone who is structurally incentivized to give you information that benefits the owners of the periodical.
Such a derogatory statement detached from reality. It's like saying all health professionals are out there to get your money by keeping you as sick as possible. Or all teachers are out to indoctrinate your kids. Or all firefighters are arsenists.
I have quite a few journalists as friends or acquaintances, and many of them are the most honest people I know, with strong ethics and admireable ideals.
Of course there are bad apples out there. In any profession. But your statement is just ridiculous.