One thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes from other officials/politicians saying the opposite. As an example, how many times has the strait of Hormuz been declared open by the US, when it turns out it really wasn't? And every time these low-effort articles just echo that statement without even trying to evaluate if that is true. I mean, the transponder data on shipping is publicly available, there's a dozen websites you could use to actually see passage through the strait to verify the claim. If you don't do even the most basic follow ups, is that even a news article? Or is it just a more elaborate form of re-tweeting?
Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people.
Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.
I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.
Whenever I encounter someone who jumps at the first opportunity to criticise "mainstream media", I ask them what their preferred outlets are. I tend to not get a response, which to me is quite telling.
I think a mixture of BBC, cnn, al jazeera, economist, will get a casual reader to a decent spot, and they're all mainstream media. Possibly guardian but emlarhically not their opinion pages (I agree with them, but even so they're gratingly opinionated, hate to think what a die hard conservative will think of them :)
I used to defend CNN as decent, but it’s almost entirely sensational OpEd talk show type stuff these days. The stuff I criticized FoxNews about. Although, CNN does lean liberal, they sometimes still invite a person from the conservative camp into the discussion. I never see that on FoxNews. They double down and have right and far right takes in their discussions as far as I can tell. It’s effective for brainwashing a populace.
I personally don’t think the 24 hour news cycle is healthy. I pretty much abstain from it except it’s so prevalent in our culture there’s a lot of second hand exposure.
The CEO was placed by the conservative party in 2017 ending decades of impartiality. He is a hack with a background in tabloid news, which has slowly swept into BBC entire ecosystem.
Their entire political reporting side is headlined by Laura Kuenssberg who is on her best day mediocre and on her worst actively participatory on the decline of democratic principles in the UK. Her "mistakes" such as giving her questions to Boris Johnson ahead of time, would be fireable offenses in any other high stakes job. But despite repeated mistakes all somehow helping the more radical, anti democratic, side of the conservative spectrum her position has never been in danger. She also hosts far right parties 500% more time than their current seats in parliment and is directly responsible for the cleaning of image of repudiable characters such as Nigel Farage.
So if becoming a slightly less abrasive Daily Mail while being paid with public money is not worthy of being called Trash, then idk what is. Its becoming the New York Post but without slurs
The BBC doesn’t have a ‘CEO’ if you mean the Director General, there wasn’t one appointed in 2017. Tim Davie was appointed in 2020, with Matt Brittin appointed recently.
Possibly you mean David Clementi who was appointed in 2017 as Chair of the BBC, but he was a financier, with no background in journalism tabloids or otherwise, so not sure what you are talking about.
Laura Kuenssberg hasn’t been political editor since spring 2022. The political editor is Chris Mason.
I’m going to take the rest of your comments with a pinch salt.
> 've heard rightwing people call BBC absolute trash for not covering the rape gangs.
yeah so the story about that... its mostly a right wing hoax.
The real story is as follows, many police departments refused to help working class people specially women. This was repeatedly reported and demanded to eb reformed multiple times.
A woman finally got the story through in the early 2010s. Which led to a big trial.
Due to reporting laws in the UK, newspapers couldn't report on it. Names are sealed until the trail and a bunch of other protections.
However Facebook and Twitter were blooming. And a man by the name of Yaxley, now Tommy Robinson, decided to make the case about race before any news could report on it. He spent years calling the case "Asian Grooming gangs" without any news reporting due to trail muzzle laws in the UK.
By the time the case was out in the open, the name had made the rounds and newspapers like the Sun and Daily Mail used it from day one.
Most cases found had white perpetrators, but the ones with Asian men got all the headlines due to the Tommy Robinson years of shit stirring.
The most famous case found that the police had been investigated twice over their lack of helping vulnerable girls. A judge had ignored a video of a girl being taken advantage of, saying "this girls like it". No prior investigation found race to be a reason why they weren't helped.
In 2016, the chief of police was fired because he was found to be responsible in part for the 17 years of abuse this girls suffered as something he actively ignored.
After he was fired, he repeated a twitter talking point "we didnt help because we were scared of being accused of being racist". This was repeated by other fired member in the 2020 report, but somehow didnt show up in the 2011 report, the 2007 report or the 2001 report. All of which highlighted ignoring girls for being poor, drug users, sex workers, or coming from foster homes and nothing about the race of the abusers.
So its funny how right wing people complain about the bbc not reporting about the gangs, when its a conspiracy made up by a neo nazi felon, in active contradiction to every police investigation from before twitter narratives and which is now a talking point in most far right circles.
So I dont think it averages out, making up shit to be angry about when police reform is something they have opposed for decades is not warranty to keep an incompetent far right spokesperson in the most important political journalistic office in the country.
Rotherdam is the most famous case yes. But there are dozens in the UK sadly, and most were not commited by people with any asian heritage.
However they also got a fraction of the news coverage.
The Rotherdam police had been investigated 3 times before 2013, and they failed all the inspections.
The Sarah Everatt investigation found serious deficiencies in UK policing.
The last 300 page comprehensive report on UK police found systemic mysoginy, classicism and racism at all levels across the ranks and had very direct improvement plans all of which have not even began to be implemented.
So the hoax is it was a singular big pakistani rape gang + unrelated cases, and there is no evidence of a racially motivated coverup?
EDIT no, wikipedia says plural "gangs" also. I have zero idea what a rape gang even is, an organized crime group providing access to foster home girls?
2) that the cases were uninvestigated because of race
Neither is true. Dozens of cases all found commonalities, and they were working class victims and police lack of professionalism.
> I have zero idea what a rape gang even is, an organized crime group providing access to foster home girls?
Its an umbrella term for multiple men, having a system to take advantage of women. In some cases its offering access to drugs, in other cases is giving them gifts, sometimes its using an attractive man as bait.
A famous case happened recently in france where a man was basically drugging his wife and when she was passed out allowing men to come to his house.
Every case its a different type of horrific nightmare. People who try to make it about race instead of finding proactive solutions (like investigating how a judge in Rotherdam with video evidence in front of him ignored it) give 0 fucks about the victims.
And its unsurprising that in protests against this cases, 70% of the men attending had domestic abuse cases. Because protecting women is not their cause, hating brown people is.
Oh, I thought it was rape-rape, not giving foster home girls drugs and gifts in exchange for sex they might or might not have enjoyed. Thank you for doing the dirty work of debunking.
i don't agree that I should do all the work to prove something while the person (GP) whose naked opinion I was responding to is not asked the same about his opinion. This leads me to believe on the basis of evidence that you are selective and share his bias.
so yeah, let's pick one, you: How are you not biased?
I am extremely biased. I have an entire world view and like everyone else I tend to believe things that concur with what I already believe and reject things that are inconsistent correctly or incorrectly. For instance rejection of "mainstream media" is often correlated not with thoughtful analysis but rather with blatant anti-intellectualism common among right wingers.
Asking "are you a dumb conservative bigot" is offensive and shuts down dialogue even when the person wasn't. Better to ask for the fellow to expand on their comment
That is a weird accusation considering the fact that the BBC is still hiding an internal report they made about their Israel / Palestine reporting after they were accused of antisemitism in the early 2000s.
If the report exonerated them, and showed they even have a Israeli bias, why would they spend 50k in lawyer fees (disclosed so far, real number is probably higher) to hide that report?
There is obvious distrust on western sources of the conflict and the UK active participation in the creation of the 2 state solution, as well as its alliance with America all taint the possible impartiality or accuracy of the BBC. But the accusations against them for antisemitism and anti israeli bias go back decades
The BBC's "impartiality" is frequently it's biggest downfall - It's a very standard UK joke that if the BBC was discussing if the earth was flat you'd get a 5 minute interview with a top geographer or physicist from Cambridge followed by an equally credulous 5 minute interview with a madman in his basement claiming it's all the work of the lizard people.
The covererage of the Genocide in Palestine (and I'm betraying my view just by calling it that) just brings this into incredibly sharp relief as there are, to a first approximation, no real centrists in that discussion. And yet you still get the same 5 minutes of interview for a doctor on the ground in Palestine and for Ben Gvir, presented as if there's some kind of happy middle ground that everyone can broadly agree on.
I personally do astral travelling during the night and get my news and knowledge from various entities. Can't say what others are doing but so far this has never let me down.
I life in a country where we have a mandatory monthly fee for the state-run media outlet. Its roughly 2x a youtube premium. And quality of said outlet is still declining with everyone else. Pretty non-critical reporting, basically forwarding of what others have claimed. Typos, questionable headlines which get corrected half an hour later. I refute your claim. Its not about financing. Journalists have just become very lazy. Mainstream media deserves the same "I vote with my wallet" treatment as everyone else. And the state forcing me to pay for a specific outlet is just so broken, I am questioning the sanity of our politicians. But lobbying helps I guess. Instead of doing a good/great job, the new tactics is to insist that "you" are an indispensible part of democracy, even though you aren't doing any critical reporting anymore...
> News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:
The primary reason is the click metrics, they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs.
It doesn't matter how much you pay for it when they will just invest more into those things. You can see this in gaming, the more people paid for Ubisoft games the more toxic transactions Ubisoft put into them.
> they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs.
No, that’s not a new phenomenon. Tabloids and political rags filled that market well before the Internet. News organizations aren’t static entities, they come in a wide variety of flavors.
I would love to pay a penny an article read by me my AI or whatever to a host of services provided they could prove the value first. These days I'm told which thousand companies my clicks will be sold to any time I visit an article, and that's before I've gotten value.
Plenty of startups have tried the “penny per article” approach and failed. They might get 20% of the penny on behalf of the publisher - who has to get 1M pageviews to get $10k.
Hard to build a business that requires changing user behavior on pennies. Seriously, make the math and strategy work - requires a Herculean effort to hit ramen profitability for all involved.
I suspect the third reason might be that most media is owned by a handful of people. If there's no money in news, why are these companies owned by billionaires?
99% of everything is crap, even the ones you pay for. Some are good and worth supporting, like 404 Media.
everything is broadly declining, too, as we grow up taking it for granted while the older generation retires, and we also are too busy working menial jobs to pay the rent.
We have plenty of state funded public news services in Europe but they do the same. Just shallow Reuters copy paste slop.
The real deep dives are hard to find.
And I don't think only money brings quality. Hobbyists tend to do great work especially because they're not making money. For them quality can be a goal. Not getting the most money with the least amount of effort.
A lot of the content and software I value most is by people who are doing it just for fun or because they care.
And the newspaper world in particular was oversaturated. Every little town had one or more local dailies. That was never sustainable in the digital age.
News organizations have been in decline for a few decades, but the relationship of news organizations with the current US goverment has been shaped by the current president.
"Donald Trump frequently attacks the American media as having a left-wing bias and being "corrupt", and also uses a variety of insults when speaking about outlets that give him unfavorable coverage. Trump has sued various media outlets for perceived inaccuracies or biases, and has used his position as president to pressure outlets he dislikes by interfering in their business operations, launching investigations, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and cutting funding for public broadcasting."
>How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?
I mean as an Australian taxpayer I am partly funding the ABC. And its following the exact same trends.
Todays crop of journalists are more likely to repeat absurd claims from social media as true, and shop around among experts to find the one that will support the crazy assertions.
I send more letters to the editor and to politicians today than ever before. Its getting stupid.
I don't know what qualifies as "mainstream media" here, but I feel various public broadcasters have served me well over the years: CBC[0] in Canada, BBC[1] in United Kingdom, NPR[2] in America, ABC[3] in Australia, NHK[4] in Japan... switching around the world also gives reprieve from local politics letting you tune into someone else's local politics practically recreationally, which seems more and more necessary in the modern world of today. Streaming radio is one of the best things about the contemporary internet.
The ABC in Australia feels so opinionated and tilted to the “left” side of politics whenever I’ve watched it on the TV. And it may just have been that news show or the specific host but it makes it not enjoyable to watch when it seems there’s always an “angle” and negative undertones and people constantly having an axe to grind. I’d personally like a bit more neutral news that also leans a little more on the positive and inspiring side.
>The ABC in Australia feels so opinionated and tilted to the “left” side of politics whenever I’ve watched it on the TV. And it may just have been that news show or the specific host but it makes it not enjoyable to watch when it seems there’s always an “angle” and negative undertones and people constantly having an axe to grind. I’d personally like a bit more neutral news that also leans a little more on the positive and inspiring side.
I dont see any bias in their journalism, but they have a tendency to just accept everything at face value. They will also shop around for experts that support their opinions. One person will write an article about housing referring to housing experts, and get one view, and then a few years later another will instead quote a public housing expert getting another view. Theres never any "Lets test the quality of each expert and try and figure out whats true"
4 corners and foreign correspondant however are still absolute top tier journalism. Its a shame they dont apply those standards everywhere.
A recent, prominent example is [1] where they edited footage to make it look like a soldier was shooting at an innocent civilian. They then appointed a 40 year abc/sbs veteran to investigate the incident who unsurprisingly found no wrong doing.
All of this on a topic that isn't even super political...
Granted they are still probably the best journalists in the country, but when you can't trust them to not alter primary evidence, or admit real fault when something has gone wrong, you cant really trust them for much.
For day to day stuff I still find them an ok source, it just needs to be taken with a very heavy dose of salt.
Their biggest fault was giving back the filing cabinet.
>where they edited footage to make it look like a soldier was shooting at an innocent civilian.
In your link the ABC is claiming the footage wasnt edited by them. I mean its still a bit of weak journalism to publish it. Did that ever get resolved either way?
> In your link the ABC is claiming the footage wasnt edited by them.
I'll admit I don't fully understand what they were claiming/how it changed over time but they later issued an apology for the incident [1].
From what I can work out the thrust of the abc claim is "don't blame our journalists, the editors on multiple occasions accidentally did this for no reason at all and we then failed to catch it".
Then midway through the apology they pivot to blaming twitter, or at least that is the flow of the guardian article.
I used to listen to and read NPR. Since about 2015 they've been slipping, and at an increasing rate. After submitting several corrections, none of which were heeded, I have stopped taking them seriously. An outlet that does not correct clear-cut falsehoods is peddling a narrative, not reporting news.
I’ve also seen a trend of news organizations sane washing statements when they are too crazy, which is modifying the facts. Take this AP news article for instance[1].
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
I was glad to see a bit of a decline in the “Worrying Trend: (a dozen) People (on Twitter) are saying [controversial thing]!” type of articles filter down through whatever algorithm I was subject to at the moment, but notes they’ve just replaced it with TikTok.
This always felt like way to work around libel laws. Where they can claim "People on twitter are saying x", as an indirect way of making a claim without having to be liable for it.
I swear to God there are articles on news sites (glorified blogs, but you know) that are along the lines of "people on twitter are saying this" and then if you actually look there is literally one (or perhaps two if you're lucky) person saying it and their post isn't even that popular. It's not that I'm surprised it's just that I know 98-99% of people are just going to take that at face value, and either allow it to confirm their pre-existing notions, or perhaps they will see it and shake their heads disapprovingly. I think this over time leads to people having distorted views of sentiment on issues, sometimes leading to really weird situations where literally most people disagree but nobody wants to be the one to say it.
Yeah it’s really just depressing. It’s like every news outlet wants to be just a ‘little bit’ “national enquirer” but still have everyone take them seriously. Our news industry is abjectly sensationalist.
News is perpetually in decline just like the old perpetually fear the young will bring humanity to ruin.
Kierkegaard in the 1850s:
"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control."
While the history of news quality has been cyclical, I think there’s some objective truth if you’re starting reference points is 1970ish-1990ish and on. The internet broke their financial model. They had an integrity and editorial standard; long abandoned. And, the fairness doctrine was abandoned. Fast forward a bit and the industry has or is devolved closer to what it was in your quote.
I’m sure there was still some funny business going on. They didn’t report so heavily on tabloid stuff and probably protected people in power more. But there was absolutely some level of investigative journalism in every article.
How can we measure if things are worse now? Potentially asking/training an LLM on news stories from different eras might be a fairer comparison than human intelligence at this point.
I suspect this is more due to cost cutting and the fact that context would likely paint the people who own these media outlets in a bad light. Keeping their readers underinformed is win-win for them.
Look at how many times the current government has tried to shut down reporting that didn't tow the current party line. Selective access, prosecutions, lawsuits, threats to block mergers, comedians being cancelled while the administration cheers, there's a (s)hitlist of journalists on the whitehouse site, etc.
It probably has something to do with the decline of quality journalism.
The Pro site is all self-curated by the user, and forth.news is a series of LLMs doing grouping, summarization/headline writing, measuring urgency, categorization, etc.
isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases.
Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y.
Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-depth research and risking your own rep every time you put more than 'facts' out there just don't give any incentive to do more than pick out the quotes you want to use.
Exactly. As the saying goes, if one side says it's raining and the other side says it's not, it's not the job of the journalist to report both. It's the job of the journalist to look out the fucking window to see if it's really raining or not.
This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.
Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.
This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.
That view tends toward sophistry and relativism. It can't be true that no event has a neutral subset of facts. If I'm reporting on some discovery in astronomy or math, what biased facts would I be choosing? There would need to be some sort of controversy about the discovery where choosing some subset of the facts supports one side over the other. But this assumes both sides have an equal claim on the facts, which is often not the case.
And while humans can't be without bias, there is a big difference between trying to be factual while leaving your biases aside, and having an agenda or outright reporting propaganda.
> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases
No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.
> half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort
that is EXACTLY what i want in news.
i do not want your summarization opinion out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet.
I want my news to say, "politician say x; and is a liar, here is the evidence." Nobody should want a propaganda parrot. If I look into it and the politician is not lying, I know to trust the source less.
I think a lot of it has to do with the desire and pressure to publish as fast as possible. Online, EVERYTHING is rushed and even published before the facts are known. The story may or may not get updated as the situation develops.
Outside of tech because it affects my work, I've stopped reading online news altogether. There's a bookstore down the road from me which sells the daily and weekend editions of a couple papers. On a slow weekend I'll walk over there, buy the weekend edition of some reputable paper, and peruse it over coffee. The stories are invariably better than anything I see online, as well as in the daily editions. None of this stuff is urgent. I don't need up to the minute. I just need to kill some time, preferably with higher quality information.
Honestly the old ways were better in this case. Just stop reading online news. Grab a weekend edition of a paper when you're bored instead. Couple bucks. No subscription. Better. They haven't changed much.
I follow the New York Times, as well as being an avid news follower and have found them to be of poor reporting quality a handful of times over the past year.
If it had been a lab leak, how would that change the behaviors that everyday people would have had to take? The social distancing, masking, handwashing, quarantining would have all been identical.
Maybe it wouldn't change general hygienic practices, but it might have a impact on voting preferences to find out who was funding the research that led to the creation of the virus and the leak.
I mean, people did try to discuss it. YouTube and Facebook actually deleted content discussing it, in possibly the most blatant act of political censorship in recent memory in this country, and barely anyone knows that.
Not that the US government has any credibility left after current admin, but the statements in here are factual, they really did take down youtube videos that were speculating about lab leak. I saw it happen.
That whole timespan… the absolute nonsense the “trusted media” and their “experts” were pushing with nary a single trace of critical thinking absolutely boggles the mind. How about PCR test results, “opening dates”, death counts, the almost intentional mixing of terms like IFR vs CFR, etc. the list goes on and on and on.
>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline
Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.
