The negative outcomes you describe are fairly independent from the training curriculum in school though. An equivalent would be saying that computer science degrees are worthless because sometimes people become parasites who work in adtech or fintech.

Agreed. Those are all straw men, rather than the the natural consequence of a journalism education.

I'd argue that the "evils" of modern journalism are more a consequence of economic failures in their employers than journalist themselves.

As came out in the Dominion v Fox News discovery, even the most political journalists are still disgusted by the things they have financial and management pressure to peddle.

Not disgusted enough to leave their job even though many are wealthy to extremely wealthy. Not disgusted enough to stop supporting Republicans.

I can understand someone who works at a newspaper and makes 70k a year so they have to report on sensational stories but Tucker Carlons net worth is $380~ million.

The key people at Foxnews were shocked and mad at the outrageous claims but for them the ends justify the means.

People do what they must to live. Like many other professions, some people are paid to do things they probably would rather not.

There's even more insidious influences on how narratives are built and propagated than just lying or not. Saying things that are "not even wrong" but redirect the discourse so severely that good faith discussion breaks down on inflamed, sectarian lines due to the shaping of the zeitgeist around this or that topic.

Yes it's been bad for a long time. I recall the "George Bush encounters barcode scanners" story back in the day. YEARS later, working in data-capture technology, I learned the truth. It wasn't a run-of-the-mill supermarket barcode scanning system. But that wouldn't have made as 'good' of a story that matched the papers pre-conceived notions.

https://apnews.com/article/61f29d10e27140b0b108d8e12b64b839

Here's a (free gift) link to the original NYTimes story

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/05/us/bush-encounters-the-su...

It's certainly one of the more misleading stories I've read in a national paper.

A newspaper is not a single entity. In its life it will have hundreds or thousands of employees with a range from good to bad.

Here a more recent article from the NYT examining the original reporting about the Bush scanner story showing how it was mostly misleading.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/us/politics/fact-check-pr... (See EDIT at bottom for pastebin link)

For any single news organization over a period of time a certain amount of articles will be inaccurate sometimes purposefully. The NY times has been around for 100+ years now.

What matters it is how they deal with it and the number of stories that were accurate. The NYT times is probably responsible for more breaking news and investigations than any other paper in US history. Stories we might not have have known about otherwise without the resources they allocated and their sources (like contacts in the government)

I don't think trust is black and white and that people who claim it is may have an anterior motive. If you dismiss news organizations based on having a few misleading stories without considering what they have accomplished you wouldn't trust any news organization. This of course would greatly benefit corrupt governments and businesses.

EDIT: Here's a pastebin link to the section of the 2018 article where they examine the original reporting

https://pastebin.com/VKHyGARK

I gave up on the NYT with the Judith Miller WMD non-sense. The NYT failed the United States during the run up to the Iraq war. All they had to do was honestly report what they knew.

(it was a then-uncommon combo scanner/scale with error correction)

I remember that and thought George H.W. was a busy guy and probably only got out to the supermarket in Kennebunkport. Where they mail the bill at the end of the month.

A lot of "yellow journalism" these days comes from editors, who are actually a different profession than journalists, though I think people reasonably don't care about that.

The NYT editors are the ones who write all the headlines like "The economy is great - here's how that's bad news for Biden".