As an aside, it's been fascinating reading the comments here about news media.
People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified.
They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters; never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Morale is not low amongst journalists because the job is tough, it's low because they're being fired all over the place, pay has decreased, and corporatism is making the whole thing pretty mediocre.
I think there some jobs where community acknowledgment of "oh wow you do THAT job, thank you" can make up for lower pay. I think in states that have low teacher pay, for example, many think it's worth it so long as it comes with acknowledgment of the hard work and dedication -- which, of course, it often doesn't.
The counter-argument is probably that if it were truly acknowledged, then the pay itself would be higher. But I don't think it's the case that the average person in Florida thinks less of teachers than someone in New York. (I'm including cost of living adjustments in making this comparison btw.)
I don't disagree with the items you lay out, and maybe the ones you list are most important. But I do think "respect" belongs on the list, too.
"corporatism" - come on now. The reason why news was decent and the job was decent for a good amount of time was that newspapers were a natural monopoly. Fat, juicy profits and "owned" cities meant the owners could just say "I don't really care, just print approximately the truth and don't alienate readers across the broad spectrum that we have".... "oh, and I guess pay the journalists decently too, because I'm swimming in money"
What on earth are you talking about? Most major cities have had multiple papers in cutthroat competition with each other for decades. If the New York Times got a story wrong, the Wall Street Journal would happily take the opportunity to correct them and vice versa. In smaller cities with one big paper (like Baltimore with The Sun), the local tabloids (like The City Paper) would relish any opportunity to embarrass the paper of record if they got something wrong.
The era of monopolistic journalism is the new thing, not the old thing. The corporatism GP is referring to is conglomerates like Sinclair and Tribune Online Content (Tronc) buying up tons of local papers and broadcast stations and “cutting costs” by shutting down things like investigative reporting.
Major cities had more than one - the rest did not. The major cities had 2-3, so a duopoly. They all minted money for decades before the internet.
The local newspapers in question have terrible economics now because of the internet. The competition has come from the internet. Sinclair is dying, because they have bought a bunch of dying/dead assets. Tronc is the same. There was nothing to do here, the newspaper business as it worked previously is dead with a few exceptions.
The business is dead. The people involved aren't getting paid well, the owners are losing money, it's all bad when economics go bad.
Renting time on a printing press is not exorbitant.
Buying out local printing presses (and/or getting exclusivity in return for your business), is anticompetitive and sometimes illegal, but it's definitely not natural.
Newspapers tended to own presses. On top of that, the vast majority of their other costs were fixed costs. It's a natural monopoly, a stock standard example and the US government had to step in with the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970.
Colorado has had over 1,000 papers. The tactics of the largest paper during the mid 20th century included cries for attention that no dignified monopolist would try.
Pre-internet, "Colorado" wasn't a market. Dozens of markets existed in Colorado. If you don't understand that, it's fine, but stay out of the conversation.
Look up "newspaper joint operating agreements" and the "Newspaper Preservation Act". They were literally government sanctioned monopoly/duopoly structures from a business perspective to save newspapers from going to 1 paper towns. Ie, the government stepped in to help what was a process towards natural monopolies all over the country. The seattle times, the denver post were effectively monopolies via JOAs, and the san diego union tribune was a monopoly in its day (without a JOA). There are endless small city / large town examples.
You are clueless about newspapers in their heyday. It was like 60 years ago. No need to go around correcting people on a topic you know nothing about.
Because the vast majority of towns and small cities had 1 main newspaper. Bigger cities had 2 or 3. It was money as far as the eye could see for the owners.
A referee is a perfect analogy. We love to rate an umpire's call as "bad" after watching the slow motion replay 25 times, not based on the split second one-shot of information they had when they made it.
Yeah but sports aren't essential to society, and it really doesn't matter who wins, beyond fanning the flames of tribalism and religious proxy battles and advertising endorsements and gambling and hooliganism.
But education and journalism are deeply and essentially beneficial to society.
Referees could just as well be replaced by a coin toss or AI or participation trophies (like FIFA Peace Prizes), and society would be just fine without them.
Their salaries are much better spent on journalists and teachers, and schools should spend much less on their sports programs and scholarships, and much more on their faculty and research and writing and journalism programs, to actually benefit students who are there to learn instead of just playing games.
If all you have to live for is sports, then you desperately need more education and better journalism and mental health care.
I'm not saying get rid of them, and I didn't mention art or music or exercise, which are far more useful and enriching than sports.
Just don't sacrifice much more important things for sports, like so many high schools and colleges and universities do.
Our society is NOT existentially suffering from a lack of referees, as much as a lack of good teachers and journalists.
Get your priorities straight. It really doesn't matter if your sportsball team wins or loses, but it does extremely matter if your children are educated and informed or not.
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
There's some cases where I rather someone put their name up or I don't want to hear it, the only exception is give me some damning proof? Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said.
Regarding this specifially, I don't care enough, I am more curious about the legal case and how it will play out though.
> Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said.
This is where journalistic reputation comes in. Do you trust the journalistic entity providing the story? Do they have a history of being correct? Has information from anonymous sources in other stories proven to be true?
Such stories are notable and egregious because they're rare. They definitely do happen -- the NYT carrying water for Bush's Iraq war agenda to preserve access particularly bothers me. Perhaps a small number of such events are "too many", but they aren't common in reputable media.
> the NYT carrying water for Bush's Iraq war agenda to preserve access
Judith Miller was not a politically neutral journalist trying to preserve access, she was a deeply, actively involved long-time Iraq hawk doing propaganda for her ideological faction.
I was involved in writing a history book of an organization, and we used what was termed "journalistic integrity."
We couldn't put something into the book, unless it was corroborated by three separate sources (this was before the current situation, where you will get a dozen different sources that basically all come from the same place).
The onus was on us; not the people we interviewed. We were responsible for not publishing random nonsense.
Sure, but a lot of major news orgs publish things that are later found to be patently false or incorrect, so the onus is on the facts presented for me and many readers, the journalistic integrity angle is dead in my eyes.
At least since 2016 and beyond I've seen insanely verifiably false claims from mainstream media if you just look up raw sources. Starting with the Covington High Schoolers, within minutes of the story dropping I was able to validate that CNN a major news corporation was in fact lying, why?
Then there was a lot of shenanigans regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. There was a headline from a letter written by Intelligence Officers that made it sound like the actually forensically valid laptop itself was faked Russian disinformation, but it turned out to be valid.
When it comes to politics every major news org fails misserably. Their inability to contain personal biases is astounding to me. I want raw facts if you're going to make political assertions or its just propaganda. I don't care which side is doing what, if they're doing wrong expose them all, but use facts and evidence, not just TMZ / tabloid level shenanigans. Everyone is behaving like teenagers whenever politics is brought up these days.
Well, that may be, but that's still on the news outlet.
We currently reward outlets that spew out junk, right off the bat, and penalize outlets that take the time to validate the data. Some outlets almost certainly make it up, on the spot. No downside.
Back in the 1990s/early 200s, Michael Ramirez (a political cartoonist) posted a comic, showing three pairs of shoes.
On the left, were a massive pair of battered brogue wingtips. Under them, was the caption "Cronkite."
In the middle, was a very small pair of oxfords; both left. Its caption was "Rather."
The right, was captioned "Couric," and featured a big pair of clown shoes.
As far as the anonymous sourcing goes, that has to do with the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible.
There is a real trust problem Journalism will need to overcome and some of it is self inflicted
Fake sources (outside the gossip and celebrity columns and a couple of cheap tabloids in any given country) is essentially a non-issue even now.
“non-credible” anonymous sources: that’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It is in any government’s interest to downplay the authority of any off-the-record leak source, but political parties that rail the hardest against anonymous sources generally have more to hide, and generally those stories prove substantively true in the long run.
It is still rare for any newspaper to predicate a story on a single uncorroborated anonymous source.
Bloomberg has come out with the linked story in 2021. They have never provided any other detail; no other journalist has been able to corroborate anything advanced in the story. Through grapevines, we've been able to ascertain that Bloomberg based the whole story on a single source that they massively misunderstood.
That story is the worst case scenario, and thank god, it's extremely rare to find such a blunder. Reading the comments here, you'd think half the reporting in the world is exactly as wrong as that one single thing.
And you’re never going to get all the angles from a single source. So short of paying a couple thousand dollars, and still getting ads, many people become cheap in exchange for the cheap experience pushed on them.
Are you sure that a lot of individuals hold those contradictory positions?
Or do the contradictions only exist across multiple persons?
(Tangent: anyone know if there's a term for this fallacy? I.e., claiming that an attribute exists for some/all of a group's members, when in fact that attribute only applies to the collective itself?)
Teachers: parents expects teachers to deliver personalized instruction to a classroom of 30+ while adhering to standardized testing targets. They are expected to act as surrogate parents yet threatened with lawsuits and suspensions when they attempt to enforce discipline. They are asked to spend their own money on supplies, but I think we've had enough levies to raise funds for our local district, haven't we? They are treated as lazy, agenda-driven agents by their community neighbors. They get the summers off, so I think I've heard enough about their "burnout".
Doctors: patients demand certainty from a science based on probability. They expect empathetic listening but it must come within the fifteen-minute slots insurance and healthcare network financial officers dictate. Any story of a missed diagnosis is evidence of idiocy or contempt. Patients want pharmaceutical fixes for decades of poor lifestyle choices without side effects or changes to habits. They're all just paid for by the pharmaceutical industry anyway, so better if they just give me the prescription I saw a TV ad about. And why won't they just do what ChatGPT said they should do, anyway? Besides, they're all rich, right?
Also doctors: Patients want schedules to run on-time but come in with a laundry list of concerns and will expect to be carefully listened to for 30 minutes during their 20 minute appointment. Medical systems insist on a 20 minute appointment even for complex cases or instances where translators are needed. Patients are non-compliant with discharge instructions and then get re-admitted which penalizes the MDs who discharged yet insurance pushes hospitals to discharge ASAP. I could go on and on...
> Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Almost all, to varying degrees, with the expectation increasing the more you deal with people that are outside that field. People seriously underestimate the challenges and difficulties of things they have little experience with while overestimating their ability to do it.
'How hard can it be to ask someone who knows what's going on and write that anyway?'
That's their problem. They're trying to give people what they want instead of being objective. They're supposed to be objective. What's that you say? Their objectivity is not rewarded? Well, neither is this.
Journalistic ethics speaks about impartiality, not objectivity, and that has always brought me comfort. I'm dismayed by young uns talking about a joke being objectively funny, or one movie in a series being objectively better than another. It is an Anti-literate trend.
Is this your cheeky and coy way of saying that objectivity is not possible? What's really the difference between impartiality and objectivity in this context? Sounds like you're just being a wordsmith.
Correct, objectivity is not possible. Human observation is never perfectly neutral.
What we call "objective" is usually just invisible judgment that aligns with our priors. An observer's choices about what to include, exclude, measure, or frame shape reality long before conclusions appear.
Scientific facts are just theories that haven't been proven wrong yet.
I want journalists to try to answer the 6 W's and make an effort to represent the stated positions of all parties mentioned. At least with that effort, you can have at least a chance at seeing what bias is in play. Most "journalism" fails on this metric by a wide margin.
That’s because the journalists of today that work for corporate outlets frame stories in ways that benefit power and police area agents of power, namely the business owners.
That's a function of time and technology, and our demands as consumers, not journalistic skill.
If a journalist has an entire day to gather facts and write the story before it's published in the newspaper the next day, it's going to be a lot more accurate than the realtime demands of "we are hearing reports of a bomb threat in the vicinity of..."
> People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified.
Not contradictory. People want information to be verified quickly. That's the job. The person who can do it the fastest gets the scoop. Publishing unverified stuff isn't doing the job faster, it's not doing the job. You can get away with cheating for a bit, as you can probably guess what's going to wind up getting verified most of the time, but that's all the more reason to punish cheaters when they eventually are caught.
And even then, publishing rumors and speculation are fine so long as they are clearly noted as such. It is only when unverified statements are treated as facts that there is a problem.
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
You're not supposed to cite an anonymous source saying there are bodies buried; you're supposed to learn where the bodies are buried from the anonymous sources and then show the bodies as evidence. There is no need for an appeal to authority when you have proof. If a story relies on cited sources they should be named, and if no one is willing to go on the record then you shouldn't be relying on cited sources.
Also we should be pushing for strong whistleblower protections, especially reporting when whistleblowers are retaliated against.
> They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters
Who is asking for either raw data streams or that the news act as filters? People expect evidence (ie things that can be verified) and analysis (ie context for the evidence presented). Omitting unreliable evidence is fine, but people complain when the standard for reliable evidence changes without good reason.
> never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
If you publish actual facts, they will remain facts no matter what new facts emerge. Truth never contradicts truth, it only expands the story. It is perfectly fine to have incomplete facts, you better have a damn good reason if you have false facts.
> They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
No one wants neutrality, they want integrity. You can enthusiastically report that your side is right any day of the week so long as you're also willing to report when they're wrong. It's when evidence is chosen to fit the narrative rather than the narrative developed around the evidence that there's a problem.
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low.
Morale should be low in an industry driven to compromise it's standards and race to the bottom, and the worst offenders are the most highly rewarded. This should be an impetus for change.
People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified.
They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters; never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?