I think the biggest thing that makes me distrust the news as it stands is that I feel like news reporting is far too prone to overly leveling debates. And by that I mean making both sides come across as equally credible, even when that could not be further from the truth.
The most common way I see it happen is like this:
you have a situation some group says that some totally safe thing is actually super dangerous.
There's a large body of scientific literature that really clearly shows its totally safe.
the news reports on it as such:
"While many within the scientific community state that there is no harm with X, anti-X proponents respond that the current studies are not substantial enough, and that they are simply asking questions."
This framing, does not point out that the anti-X proponents are just a group of 10 people, nor does it describe how much evidence there exists in the scientific literature showing the thing is safe. Both sides are made to sound equally reasonable, which in my mind is practically a lie by omission. Because they aren't equally reasonable.
Edit: One additional thought. I still will read news articles if they get shared to me, and I try to evaluate based off of what the source is. but another reason I don't actively keep a news subscription is because news orgs love reporting on tragedy. Because its more noteworthy. I'm just not interested in reading yet another article about how crime is on the rise. Or about the most recent fatal car crash. Etc.
I stare into the void enough as it is. I don't want another.
You're overestimating the number of people who trust scientific concensus. More people believe in creationism than evolution by purely natural selection. What's your alternative to treating both sides with equal weight without making the unscientific side feel disenfranchised?
News isn't supposed to be a democracy, it's supposed to be a hunt for truth and accuracy. If news is intentionally subjecting itself to systemic bias in the hopes of attracting people with firmly held patently absurd beliefs, they shouldn't cry "how did this happen" when people who financially supported them in the hunt for truth and accuracy stop doing so.
The news is democratic in the sense that news targeted towards the general public needs to be catered towards the general public, just like any other product. What good does framing an issue as one sided if nobody is going to watch it except people who agree with it already?
Its a long-standing criticism, where if the president suddenly announced that he thought the earth was flat, the New York Times headline the next day would be "Shape of the Earth; Views Differ".
Strong agree. There seem to be a lot of people who think that being in the middle without taking a side is virtuous in itself, as if there's a law of equilibrium keeping both sides equally crazy or competent or corrupt at any time. In reality they're just getting dragged by the Overton window as other, richer people slide it around.
ZeroGravitas says>" it's been trending down most places for decades."<
The problem is that reported crime is a political number: those in power want the number to go down on their watch and they have control of the reporting mechanism. Pressure exists at every level, from patrolmen filling out incident reports to statisticians collating the numbers for the mayor, to move the numbers downward.
There is every reason to be skeptical of reported criminal statistical trends in USA cities today.
I hear this "crime is down" theme a lot. But I see with my own eyes, in my own neighborhood, that the opposite is happening. Other people do as well and that is a big reason why the news media is viewed negatively.
Crime is certainly down, assuming you live in a developed country that isn’t one of a couple massively regressing ones.
You are displaying a bias here. Unless there is a “itbeho’s neighborhood gazette” reporting exclusively on what you see through your front window and THEY’RE saying there is no increase in crime then your complaint doesn’t hold.
My grandfather, in the US, was waylaid by actual bandits operating openly on a major US highway in the 1970s.
In some cities you couldn’t take public transport without almost surely being victimized.
Crime is very much down and that’s especially true for large cities. Maybe you’ve become overly fixated on the topic or maybe your neighborhood is an outlier but that doesn’t make the statistics “wrong”.
Not to mention problems often have many causes and many possible solutions—even framing the reporting having merely two sides is crippling to news quality
I've heard this referred to as sanewashing. You really started noticing this with Trump. Compare what he literally says to what he's quoted as saying. He likes to rail against MSM, but man, they do a lot of heavy lifting, making it seem like what he says is remotely sane.
They often edit his speeches for brevity because they don't have time in a news report to post the full hour long ramble of tangents off tangents off tangents even doing that makes his speeches seem considerably more coherent than they actually are if you watch the whole thing.
One problem is that the most distrust toward "traditional media" is from people who completely trust to even more dishonest resources. It is not that traditional media would be perfect, but their faults are not the actual reason for the fall of trust.
Instead, it is well paid grifters for whom the issue with traditional media is that they do not lie enough.
I think it’s easy, too easy, to say something like “all mainstream media is biased and untrustworthy.”
The problem is, who do you trust instead? Twitter? Like that’s not biased. Actually I think it’s much worse. Not only is the editor of Twitter very biased, but it’s filled with bots and there is nobody providing any reliable fact checking. It’s very easy for motivated parties to portray a fringe idea as mainstream. It’s also easy to shout the truth out of the room. What one person tweet is just as valuable as another. Dunking on people (ratioing, etc) becomes your signal.
TikTok? Maybe less easy to influence, but now the editor is an adversarial nation state.
YouTube? If you thought msm wanted engagement, YouTube is much worse.
Substack? Respectfully, is full of people who are not trustworthy enough to be platformed anywhere meaningful, and for the few that are independent for legitimate reasons, don’t have the resources to do consistent factual reporting in anything more than a very narrow domain.
Long story short, maybe msm is imperfect, but imo it’s the best we got. And I’d rather have some source of truth that is at least attempting to fact check and get the truth right, even if biased, because when you don’t have any truth compass—when all information is equal regardless of how far from reality it is—it becomes very easy to be manipulated.
I don't trust any of them entirely (including these two) but I use Reuters and AP for world news, they have commercial reasons to at least combat bias since they provide the news to the other orgs who then add their own ~~bias~~ commentary.
In reality I think the answer is much the same as it has always been, read the same thing from different sources and apply some critical thinking to it.
Unbiased media is simply not possible, you could 100% tell the entire story about whatever story you are telling and still be biased by the stories you don't run.
As for what we do about young people, education on media literacy in schools would help though whether already pressed schools end up been responsible for yet another thing is a good idea is going to vary from country to country but we should be preparing people for the society they are going to be living in better and that always comes back to education.
Does anyone under 65 consume traditional news anymore? They don't even try to hide their own biases these days, it's kinda gross. Sure, the same interests have found their way onto social media by influencing influencers, but the expectations are lower.
Though I think the real problem is if you are somewhat knowledgeable about any topic, the news will always get important details incorrect when they cover it. I believe there is a famous quote about that, but I definitely noticed it when I was a teenager in the 90s. I think this is the real reason Jon Stewart is the most trusted news figure for people of a certain age, and why social media/streamers/whatever are more trusted for younger people. That is, if you present things in a less authoritative manner, we're more likely to forgive factual errors.
I am not sure if this scepticism is exclusive to the teens. I think a lot of people are more and more sceptical about news media and the close ties it has with the establishment - especially the way we have seen different platforms "manage" the news on behalf of the establishment.
The way the US media handles news the same way throughout their network is very scary and it's hard to believe anything they say when they repeat word for word what everyone else says.
On the surface this feels right, "Oh look, the kids can see through the bullshit".
But this assumes that the kids have a stable honest reference point, and from there are calling out the bullshit.
That is almost certainly not the case. What is far more likely, is that kids are getting their news from random tiktoks that are farming views with credible bullshit, and from that totally deranged reference point, the kids are calling the news bullshit.
You will find few people more hostile towards contemporary journalism than me, and you will find no one more hostile towards "self proclaimed social media news producer" than me. I could write essays about the people in my life who left behind journalism produced news to go completely off the deep end getting "the truth" from tiktok.
Its everything, there are kids that have gone back to the primary source and are reading the science or primary materials and you have people believing grifters on tiktok and everything in between. Traditional journalism forming one version of the worlds collective reality has fractured and in its place is a lot of different sources many of which are worse.
I remember the same sentiment when I was a teen and the sentiment was common among my peers.
The times have changes significantly, and what is available to teens is very different now than what it was even 5 years ago.
That said, the teen brain likely has not changed much in that time. (trying to assert independence, be different than their parents, do what they want, trust what they want, etc)
There's no such thing as government funded independent media.
And there's no accreditation for journalists except in authoritarian states like Zimbabwe. Journalists use the same freedom of speech as everyone else.
> There's no such thing as government funded independent media.
That is just ridiculously false. Take for example the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which was recently forced to shut down due to losing its federal funding.
And I'm not talking about accreditation for individual journalists. I'm talking about funding reputable and honest publication groups.
With more funding to improve local coverage and access, we not only get better diversity of reporting, we also help cover local events and topics better for people.
That's true, but government funded media has different incentives than private media. To be honest, at least in the past few decades where media has become so concentrated, we basically have state media anyway but it is profit driven and sensationalist. Public media would at least allow investigative reporting to come back and provide an alternative choice in the market that is less sensationalist.
The bbc was recently caught splicing trump clips together to make it sound like he said something else.
Mind you I don't like Trump but the BBC is often touted as the best example in the anglosphere and repeatedly shows it isn't immune to these issues.
I do think it's good that there's a well funded option tho.
I'd love it if they also focused on non opinionated documentaries since private media gutted ones like NatGeo and such.
How journalism and media evolve is key to democracy over the long run. Its inability to change and adapt to the times has already caused grave damage, but the damage it will cause going forward could be greater. Social media and the supposed advantage to having a camera in every hand did not pan out at all and in fact became a negative.
According to the news media, we have been living in perpetual crisis, closing in on apocalyptic times for the last 10+ years. Constant fear and negativity through Radio, TV, Internet throughout every day, from the moment you wake up.
Yes, they are just doing their job, but here's the thing: Hardly any of it is relevant to me. Everyday its TRUMP this, that. Please tell me why should I care? Why are you putting this shit into my mind, how is this my problem?
It's getting harder and harder to disconnect from all that garbage. Unsolicited attention grabbing is what it is. Like a dumb movie everyone has to watch.
It wasn't always like this. People didn't care much about politics, sometimes you caught the news of a plane crash or something tragic, but for the most part they had their own life's to live. Now everyone is hopelessly addicted to the spectacle.
And social media isn't making it any better. I don't know if I'm seeing too grim, but please tell me you feel it as well, when you see people just regurgitating the latest dumb shit wherever you go.
Then you visit a poor country for holiday, outside the western/anglosphere, and see all those people just living their lives, not fully consumed in some narrative.
A lot of it is hilariously outdated looking. A man in a suit and a woman with a $300 hairdo saying innocuous things feels like time travel to the 1990s. It would be like designing a car with real chrome bumpers that rust.
Even on YouTube, if I start playing a documentary and it's got dramatic background music and a stentorian voiceover, straight to YT jail.
I like how you provided examples both proving that some things were better in the past (real chrome bumpers) and that others were measurably worse (the news theatrics).
> None of the students — even in an elective course about media — confessed any interest in becoming a journalist. A few could name news organizations they trusted but others said the news came to them through social media or what friends shared or what they overheard as their parents were watching television.
> A little less than half (45%) of teens said journalists do more to harm democracy than to protect it.
These kids? Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite. People have been trained to distrust institutions because that makes them manipulable by even worse actors.
All true, however almost all of the students respond with interest in becoming influencers (don’t have the survey on hand, it’s been done a few times). And influencers include the TikTok age equivalent of journalists. For better and (definitely) for worse. Some of them are functionally the same, many are far far worse.
The kids just don’t have any interest in big news organizations which is understandable even if it’s going to make things worse.
I am not young, but I have never seen a major institution (including governments) caring about citizens in aggregate in my lifetime. To me, this is an artifact of the 50s or 60s, some bygone era (which is funny, because the government did not care about citizens in aggregate back then either).
I can only imagine how the younger kids see things. They're bombarded by public knowledge of nasty things institutions did in the bigoted/ignorant past, underhanded things they're definitely doing now, an anger/fear inducing news cycle and endless social media conspiracy theories (some of which end up being true) engineered for clicks. Extreme cynicism is a logical conclusion.
Precisely this. The idea of trusting that a news corporation (or any other corporation) cares about you is just utterly absurd in 2025. We all know now, and have for some time, that, factually, this is not how things work, and profit (or funding) has to come first, or the corporation does not survive. It isn't even cynicism, just a recognition of the economic realities of contemporary society.
This is just cynical brain poisoning. My health insurance company isn't a person who cares about me, but that was never the deal. Their interests are aligned with mine. I'm in a blue state and can get the covid vaccine for free despite the federal level fuckery. That is because my insurer cares about profit, which means they act on the science of it without the culture wars and demagoguery. They know I'll be net healthier with the vaccine, therefore more profitable to them.
There is no cynicism or brain poisoning here, health insurance is in no way comparable to news. The economic incentives for news media putting the truth first are simply not there. They can't tell blatant, obvious lies too often, yes, or they will lose trust and thus profit, but nothing really prevents them from lying by omission, and if, e.g., fear mongering, clickbait, and pandering leads to more profits, this is where they must and will go.
If people demanded truth, we might see a different story, but it is clear that enough people want other things more, often enough.
The institutions they distrust are controlled by bad actors. How is it good to trust sources of propaganda and lies? Yes, there’s worse stuff out there. There’s also far better.
No there isn't. There are individual sources that are better, but there isn't any group that's better. There are individual podcasters that are better than mainstream media as a group, but popular podcasters as a group are far more manipulative than mainstream media. And you could say the same for any social site, or any other group such as politicians or religious figures or ...
> No there isn't. There are individual sources that are better
You immediately contradict yourself here. My impression is that anyone intelligent and informed under, say, about 40 or so only trusts particular individuals, whether they are podcasters, bloggers, substackers, or particular journalists active on e.g. Twitter or whatever other social media platform.
> but popular podcasters as a group are far more manipulative than mainstream media
This is false logic, because no one follows the entire group, they only follow individuals. It remains to be seen whether this is more pernicious than mainstream media, but I heavily suspect it will not be, as it is easier for mainstream media to be controlled than it is to control every single individual that can say something without the support of some controlled mega-conglomerate. (Though obviously de-platforming could easily render this the same, eventually).
This is not true at all, bubbling is entirely a function of the diversity of the sources, and new media has far less diversity than the diversity that exists among small sources.
It is far easier for an individual to abuse trust than it is for a group. I don't think those "intelligent and informed" people are as intelligent and informed as you think they are.
No one follows a single individual, that is the point though. A collection of individuals not united by a corporation (e.g. social media) a priori is less controllable than a collection of individuals controlled by a corporation (e.g. news media). I think there is far more diverse information available today than there was in the days where all news was from corporations, and it remains to be seen whether this results in more bias or not. My money is on less bias though.
Either you're trusting a large number of individuals and therefore haven't done proper vetting, or you're trusting a small number of individuals and are vulnerable.
I was very upset when I found out how the NYT was manipulated to shill for the Iraq war.
I was also very upset when one of the bloggers I followed went crazy slowly and it took too long for me to notice. I also had another I trusted who turned out to be a biased corporate shill.
I don't trust the NYT, but I trust the process of their checks and balances in their organization and the presence of inside whistle blowers more than I do any individual blogger.
> Either you're trusting a large number of individuals and therefore haven't done proper vetting, or you're trusting a small number of individuals and are vulnerable.
I don't think this is right at all.
A corporation (or organization) I know must necessarily put profit (or funding) first, before truth, if it wishes to survive for any duration. Ultimately, I know there is no real possibility for them to ever care about truth first. I can't vet a corporation, because the people controlling it are individuals who remain mysterious and inaccessible, or it is controlled by complex financial ties which are generally inscrutable. However, with how intermeshed things are, I can generally have faith that the financial and political pressures on large organizations will be more homogeneous than those on a collection of individuals not under the thumb of such an organization. Corporations and groups often don't even have a clear "personality" which one can make judgements on. You can notice a blogger going slowly crazy more easily than you can notice a large group being slowly corrupted by hidden influences.
By contrast, weird autists that seem to actually care about the truth can in fact be found blogging or on other forms of social media. They too have their biases, but, collectively, their biases seem to me to be far more diverse than the biases of large groups, and, in many cases, you do have reason to believe these people actually care about the truth.
It is, in my opinion, far, far better to follow a small number of weird autists than to trust a few large news corporations. Also, the wierd autists will tend to talk about what the news corporations are saying often anyway, whereas the reverse is not true.
I think that since a key part of your trust of the NYT involves whistle blowers, that this contradicts your basic position as well.
EDIT: To be clear though, I do think there is still a lot of value in news organizations. This whole dichotomy of "which should I trust more" is silly, since both have their advantages. I do hope news media sticks around and remains something that is somewhat trusted sometimes, and that people do like what I presume you and I do, relying on a mix of news media and particular individuals. Insofar as now that news media is no longer the only game in town, some decline in trust is warranted as the trust re-distributes somewhat, but I definitely hope that trust of the news media doesn't go to zero.
> You can notice a blogger going slowly crazy more easily than you can notice a large group being slowly corrupted by hidden influences.
The former is a very private affair totally hidden. The latter is something happening between a large group of people, many of whom are very inclined to quit the anonymity of the large organization, write a book about it to become individually famous.
A significant number of those autists you espouse can be bribed by surprisingly small amounts. Politicians are far more vetted than bloggers, and yet a significant number of them have been caught changing their votes for $2000 or similar amounts.
You might be able to sway a NYT reporter for a similar amount, but they have processes to catch that.
Bribes are one thing, but individuals operate independently and may post unpredictably on certain topics. Their posts don't have to be "cleared" by higher ups. They can be harder to suppress precisely because of this. I don't rely on people whistle-blowing, because that means risking a job or even career. How many stories are quietly squashed that no whistle-blower ever revealed? We'll never know. This is IMO far more hidden than the "private" affair of a blogger going crazy.
My bet is that news media organizations are easier to control than it is to control a bunch of unpredictable, independently operating individuals (though it is far easier to control a single individual, no doubt).
I am worried about things like deciding on a narrative at the corporate level. E.g. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/1643786/new-york-..., or, say, CDC and news outlets flip-flopping on things like mask mandates / COVID lab leak and the like. Whenever large-scale incentives are involved, I do not trust news media, and especially think that what individual bloggers and other people are saying will give you a better perspective on things. Whereas when there aren't clear incentives in any direction, or when one requires a reporter "on the ground", there can be good reason to trust news media over individuals.
News media are also broadly incompetent when it comes to reporting on areas where expertise is required (e.g. tech, science), and there, specific individuals again are far, far more trustworthy. Heck, most news media is too lazy to even cite much of anything they say. As I said, this isn't an either/or thing, but for sure trust in news media should decline as people recognize the areas where other sources are more trustworthy.
> Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite.
Which means that the institutions should do a lot better, which they don't. The demos is always right, that's why we live in a democracy (or at least we strive to) and not in a technocracy (where, presumably, the institutions are right by default).
Yes, most of the issues in journalism come from extremely low diversity of thought.
I laugh when I occasionally listen to NPR and within a few minutes hear an absurdly framed commentary that clearly hasn’t steel manned alternative viewpoints.
>Yes, most of the issues in journalism come from extremely low diversity of thought.
Journalism runs on the same "expensive degree -> unpaid intern -> low pay jobs -> stick it out long enough you'll do alright selling your influence" model as Hollywood and DC. Hence it has the same people problems.
Bullshit. The demos is so goddamn stupid it can't be helped, it must be led. Explaining things to them does nothing. People will sacrifice freedom for convenience and short term profit every single time. They vote with emotions. They make decisions that impact entire nations without even trying to gain even a superficial understanding of things. The demos is completely responsible for the horrible status quo. Their ignorance and passivity is exactly what leads to their oppression. Trying to help them leads to nothing but pointless martyrdom. Nothing changes because change depends on them and they are unwilling.
> not in a technocracy
We're literally in the technofeudalist era. We have trillion dollar corporations running digital fiefdoms with users as the serfs tilling the artificially scarce fields. They have so much money it's unreal, and they have woken up to the wonders of lobbying.
They won't. We've given them a absurdly concentrated garbage news media that there's no reason to trust any part of, but it isn't like they're getting anything else. They're going to be the most ignorant generation in US history.
I remember being shocked when I found out that most Vietnamese young people were mostly unaware of the Vietnam war. But if nobody tells you, you don't know. The media was bad before 1996 (Ben Bagdikian would put out a book every year about how dangerously concentrated media was getting: only 51 owners owned 90% of the media lol), but at least we could go to the library and find out what actually happened. They'll just have continually-revised ebooks and AI.
Just to play devil's advocate with some pointed questions:
What is so important about the Vietnam war for the day-to-day of the Vietnamese young?
It's the generation that have fallen prey to today's social media and garbage news outlets telling us that history is important -- why should the young be credulous to the gullible?
If the old adage "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is to be acted upon, it is without a doubt not to study history and try to remember the past because clearly we're always repeating it.
So what is important and constant across time? Those that have empathy (or fake empathy) for the masses and can galvanize them have the power to drive society. Perception is reality more than facts are reality in all but the sciences. If the world were to reset and humans were stripped of all tools, they would re-invent math, science, biology, physics. I doubt that our laws, traditions and zeitgeist would be replicated.
Is there an irony in this? The negativity cognitive bias often used by news media to increase the salience of their output now affects the perception of their product.
I mean, the heyday of print news was almost a century ago and televised news decades ago.
Basically all digital news outlets, outside of just a few notable outliers, have no money to produce anything but low effort articles that are just a vehicle to show ads. And some of those are active propaganda outlets for basically nothing but evil interest groups.
What is there to have a positive view about...?
Society stopped paying for journalism and we got what we paid for.
It's a race to the bottom in this AI slop world we now live in. That's the problem with trying to get eyeballs in a mass alternatives universe. To stand out you need to get more radical and extreme to keep your audience. Eventually the general population click and realize that the alternative media is generally trash. That's when people start looking back at quality media. It's just a vicious circle.
Ironically this is something I see in media a lot and dislike. Things like "80% of people think country going in the wrong direction".
Well while you're polling them, ask which direction is correct. Because 40% wanting less Trump bullshit and 40% wanting more Trump bullshit is totally different than letting your average reader assume 80% agree with their own assesment of what's wrong.
I want people to have strongly negative views on Fox News and the even worse variants of that kind of propaganda.
"The Onion" is a long sold-off brand that has nothing to do with that very funny midwestern free paper. It doesn't even have anything to do with that national media success of the 2000's.
It was first mostly sold off to the head of Strong Capital Management, moving to NY, then moved to Chicago under the editorship of "Cole Bolton - a Brown University graduate of business economics, former associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and research associate at Harvard Business School." During that last move, 85% of the staff resigned. From there it was sold to Univision (the tv channel) and merged with Gizmodo. Then it was sold to private equity group Great Hill Partners, then sold off again to the founder of Twilio under whom Ben Collins was put in charge, former NBC "disinformation expert"/twitter troll and worst person on the planet.
That's just a quick summary of the 4K words offered by Wikipedia about the ownership history of this brand. Brands aren't actually things anymore, their purpose is to conceal things.
How reductive! I don't know what your qualms are with TikTok, but I can't imagine that decades of news media driven primarily by soundbites just as short as your average TikTok video can be seen as a superior "narrative delivery vehicle" ...unless you really place a premium on a corporate media bias influenced by pharmaceutical companies and the military industrial complex.
> decades of news media driven primarily by soundbites just as short as your average TikTok video
That's dying quickly. The NYT has more subscribers than CNN has viewers. Once you add the number of people who read NYT articles for free, the difference is massive.
Everyone complains about the media, but few offer solutions.
My favorite type of solution is something along the lines of taxing organizations whose viewers are more disconnected from statistics on the ground (by a bipartisan independent board choosing the types of knowledge sets that a well informed population should have). We could also subsidize organizations that are doing well informing people.
This is a way of dealing with the externalities brought about by people having so much misinformation in their day-to-day decision-making.
The news media is heavily biased to the far left. This is due to the bias of ownership, as well as the low salary cost of young reporters who tend to lean left.
If you look at media in the US, they will actually bend over backwards to explain away what Trump is saying or doing. They will present "both sides" on equal footing when one side is legitimately insane. And, when they refer to his speeches and policy, they actually make it sounds much MORE reasonable than it is.
Like, when they play clips of trump speeches, they always leave out the 30+ minutes of rambling. And when Trump says something obviously racist, they, I'm sure in an effort to give the benefit of the doubt, explain it in a way that is not racist. Oh, maybe he said that they're eating the dogs and cats because he's misinformed...
The problem is normal people get only neutral benefits from the benefit of the doubt. But bad actors can, and do, abuse the benefit of the doubt and get much more out of it.
It's so bad that even when Trump does something fucking stupid and doesn't offer any coherent explanation, the media will actually make up potential explanations FOR him and talk about those. They're so biased in his favor he doesn't even need to make arguments any more - they will make arguments for him that are reasonable sounding.
And, keep in mind, I'm not referring to Fox here. This is CNN and MSNBC.
Seriously, go listen to what they say trump said or did and then listen or read what Trump ACTUALLY did. It's always much, much worse.
One of the causes of the bias is that decision-makers in the media organizations preferentially hired those that shared their ideological commitment. This is easier in fields where a worker cannot prevent his or her ideological commitment (or lack thereof) from showing in his or her work product. Besides journalism, other fields with this property are the social-science and humanities departments of universities, which is why those fields were captured by Leftist many decades ago whereas other fields were captured only much more recently.
One department of the social sciences has resisted capture by Leftists, at least in the US, at least the last time I looked, namely economics. One could argue that that is because it was captured first by liberal or libertarian ideologues.
This comment is restricted to the US and Britain because those are the only 2 societies I know well enough for my observations to have any value. Also, the OP is about American teenagers specifically.
I think the biggest thing that makes me distrust the news as it stands is that I feel like news reporting is far too prone to overly leveling debates. And by that I mean making both sides come across as equally credible, even when that could not be further from the truth.
The most common way I see it happen is like this: you have a situation some group says that some totally safe thing is actually super dangerous. There's a large body of scientific literature that really clearly shows its totally safe. the news reports on it as such: "While many within the scientific community state that there is no harm with X, anti-X proponents respond that the current studies are not substantial enough, and that they are simply asking questions." This framing, does not point out that the anti-X proponents are just a group of 10 people, nor does it describe how much evidence there exists in the scientific literature showing the thing is safe. Both sides are made to sound equally reasonable, which in my mind is practically a lie by omission. Because they aren't equally reasonable.
Edit: One additional thought. I still will read news articles if they get shared to me, and I try to evaluate based off of what the source is. but another reason I don't actively keep a news subscription is because news orgs love reporting on tragedy. Because its more noteworthy. I'm just not interested in reading yet another article about how crime is on the rise. Or about the most recent fatal car crash. Etc.
I stare into the void enough as it is. I don't want another.
You're overestimating the number of people who trust scientific concensus. More people believe in creationism than evolution by purely natural selection. What's your alternative to treating both sides with equal weight without making the unscientific side feel disenfranchised?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647594/majority-credits-god-hum...
Make them disenfranchised write-offs.
And when they outvote you, cry "how did this happen"
News isn't supposed to be a democracy, it's supposed to be a hunt for truth and accuracy. If news is intentionally subjecting itself to systemic bias in the hopes of attracting people with firmly held patently absurd beliefs, they shouldn't cry "how did this happen" when people who financially supported them in the hunt for truth and accuracy stop doing so.
The news is democratic in the sense that news targeted towards the general public needs to be catered towards the general public, just like any other product. What good does framing an issue as one sided if nobody is going to watch it except people who agree with it already?
Its a long-standing criticism, where if the president suddenly announced that he thought the earth was flat, the New York Times headline the next day would be "Shape of the Earth; Views Differ".
Dems Retreat to Round Earth Bubble, Succumb to Flat Earth Derangement Syndrome
Strong agree. There seem to be a lot of people who think that being in the middle without taking a side is virtuous in itself, as if there's a law of equilibrium keeping both sides equally crazy or competent or corrupt at any time. In reality they're just getting dragged by the Overton window as other, richer people slide it around.
"crime is on the rise" is a strange example to give as it's been trending down most places for decades.
So it's a perfect example of, assuming they're not knowingly lying, focusing on random noise in the signal to generate misleading stories
ZeroGravitas says>" it's been trending down most places for decades."<
The problem is that reported crime is a political number: those in power want the number to go down on their watch and they have control of the reporting mechanism. Pressure exists at every level, from patrolmen filling out incident reports to statisticians collating the numbers for the mayor, to move the numbers downward.
There is every reason to be skeptical of reported criminal statistical trends in USA cities today.
I hear this "crime is down" theme a lot. But I see with my own eyes, in my own neighborhood, that the opposite is happening. Other people do as well and that is a big reason why the news media is viewed negatively.
Crime is certainly down, assuming you live in a developed country that isn’t one of a couple massively regressing ones.
You are displaying a bias here. Unless there is a “itbeho’s neighborhood gazette” reporting exclusively on what you see through your front window and THEY’RE saying there is no increase in crime then your complaint doesn’t hold.
My grandfather, in the US, was waylaid by actual bandits operating openly on a major US highway in the 1970s. In some cities you couldn’t take public transport without almost surely being victimized.
Crime is very much down and that’s especially true for large cities. Maybe you’ve become overly fixated on the topic or maybe your neighborhood is an outlier but that doesn’t make the statistics “wrong”.
Not to mention problems often have many causes and many possible solutions—even framing the reporting having merely two sides is crippling to news quality
I've heard this referred to as sanewashing. You really started noticing this with Trump. Compare what he literally says to what he's quoted as saying. He likes to rail against MSM, but man, they do a lot of heavy lifting, making it seem like what he says is remotely sane.
They often edit his speeches for brevity because they don't have time in a news report to post the full hour long ramble of tangents off tangents off tangents even doing that makes his speeches seem considerably more coherent than they actually are if you watch the whole thing.
One problem is that the most distrust toward "traditional media" is from people who completely trust to even more dishonest resources. It is not that traditional media would be perfect, but their faults are not the actual reason for the fall of trust.
Instead, it is well paid grifters for whom the issue with traditional media is that they do not lie enough.
I think it’s easy, too easy, to say something like “all mainstream media is biased and untrustworthy.”
The problem is, who do you trust instead? Twitter? Like that’s not biased. Actually I think it’s much worse. Not only is the editor of Twitter very biased, but it’s filled with bots and there is nobody providing any reliable fact checking. It’s very easy for motivated parties to portray a fringe idea as mainstream. It’s also easy to shout the truth out of the room. What one person tweet is just as valuable as another. Dunking on people (ratioing, etc) becomes your signal.
TikTok? Maybe less easy to influence, but now the editor is an adversarial nation state.
YouTube? If you thought msm wanted engagement, YouTube is much worse.
Substack? Respectfully, is full of people who are not trustworthy enough to be platformed anywhere meaningful, and for the few that are independent for legitimate reasons, don’t have the resources to do consistent factual reporting in anything more than a very narrow domain.
Long story short, maybe msm is imperfect, but imo it’s the best we got. And I’d rather have some source of truth that is at least attempting to fact check and get the truth right, even if biased, because when you don’t have any truth compass—when all information is equal regardless of how far from reality it is—it becomes very easy to be manipulated.
Now who would want that?
I don't trust any of them entirely (including these two) but I use Reuters and AP for world news, they have commercial reasons to at least combat bias since they provide the news to the other orgs who then add their own ~~bias~~ commentary.
In reality I think the answer is much the same as it has always been, read the same thing from different sources and apply some critical thinking to it.
Unbiased media is simply not possible, you could 100% tell the entire story about whatever story you are telling and still be biased by the stories you don't run.
As for what we do about young people, education on media literacy in schools would help though whether already pressed schools end up been responsible for yet another thing is a good idea is going to vary from country to country but we should be preparing people for the society they are going to be living in better and that always comes back to education.
> Substack? Respectfully, is full of people who are not trustworthy enough to be platformed anywhere meaningful
Paul Krugman has his own substack. You think he couldn't get his old job back at the Times in a second if he wanted to?
Does anyone under 65 consume traditional news anymore? They don't even try to hide their own biases these days, it's kinda gross. Sure, the same interests have found their way onto social media by influencing influencers, but the expectations are lower.
Though I think the real problem is if you are somewhat knowledgeable about any topic, the news will always get important details incorrect when they cover it. I believe there is a famous quote about that, but I definitely noticed it when I was a teenager in the 90s. I think this is the real reason Jon Stewart is the most trusted news figure for people of a certain age, and why social media/streamers/whatever are more trusted for younger people. That is, if you present things in a less authoritative manner, we're more likely to forgive factual errors.
I am not sure if this scepticism is exclusive to the teens. I think a lot of people are more and more sceptical about news media and the close ties it has with the establishment - especially the way we have seen different platforms "manage" the news on behalf of the establishment.
The way the US media handles news the same way throughout their network is very scary and it's hard to believe anything they say when they repeat word for word what everyone else says.
LWT has great montage on this.
On the surface this feels right, "Oh look, the kids can see through the bullshit".
But this assumes that the kids have a stable honest reference point, and from there are calling out the bullshit.
That is almost certainly not the case. What is far more likely, is that kids are getting their news from random tiktoks that are farming views with credible bullshit, and from that totally deranged reference point, the kids are calling the news bullshit.
You will find few people more hostile towards contemporary journalism than me, and you will find no one more hostile towards "self proclaimed social media news producer" than me. I could write essays about the people in my life who left behind journalism produced news to go completely off the deep end getting "the truth" from tiktok.
Its everything, there are kids that have gone back to the primary source and are reading the science or primary materials and you have people believing grifters on tiktok and everything in between. Traditional journalism forming one version of the worlds collective reality has fractured and in its place is a lot of different sources many of which are worse.
Have similar studies been done over the decades?
I remember the same sentiment when I was a teen and the sentiment was common among my peers.
The times have changes significantly, and what is available to teens is very different now than what it was even 5 years ago.
That said, the teen brain likely has not changed much in that time. (trying to assert independence, be different than their parents, do what they want, trust what they want, etc)
News media tends to be so macro (national) and rarely local. Why do we need so many macro details that don’t impact our day to day life that much?
We need more public funding in independent accredited digital media.
There's no such thing as government funded independent media.
And there's no accreditation for journalists except in authoritarian states like Zimbabwe. Journalists use the same freedom of speech as everyone else.
> There's no such thing as government funded independent media.
That is just ridiculously false. Take for example the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which was recently forced to shut down due to losing its federal funding.
And I'm not talking about accreditation for individual journalists. I'm talking about funding reputable and honest publication groups.
With more funding to improve local coverage and access, we not only get better diversity of reporting, we also help cover local events and topics better for people.
That's true, but government funded media has different incentives than private media. To be honest, at least in the past few decades where media has become so concentrated, we basically have state media anyway but it is profit driven and sensationalist. Public media would at least allow investigative reporting to come back and provide an alternative choice in the market that is less sensationalist.
The bbc was recently caught splicing trump clips together to make it sound like he said something else. Mind you I don't like Trump but the BBC is often touted as the best example in the anglosphere and repeatedly shows it isn't immune to these issues.
I do think it's good that there's a well funded option tho. I'd love it if they also focused on non opinionated documentaries since private media gutted ones like NatGeo and such.
This was the theory with the universities.
How journalism and media evolve is key to democracy over the long run. Its inability to change and adapt to the times has already caused grave damage, but the damage it will cause going forward could be greater. Social media and the supposed advantage to having a camera in every hand did not pan out at all and in fact became a negative.
According to the news media, we have been living in perpetual crisis, closing in on apocalyptic times for the last 10+ years. Constant fear and negativity through Radio, TV, Internet throughout every day, from the moment you wake up.
Yes, they are just doing their job, but here's the thing: Hardly any of it is relevant to me. Everyday its TRUMP this, that. Please tell me why should I care? Why are you putting this shit into my mind, how is this my problem?
It's getting harder and harder to disconnect from all that garbage. Unsolicited attention grabbing is what it is. Like a dumb movie everyone has to watch.
It wasn't always like this. People didn't care much about politics, sometimes you caught the news of a plane crash or something tragic, but for the most part they had their own life's to live. Now everyone is hopelessly addicted to the spectacle.
And social media isn't making it any better. I don't know if I'm seeing too grim, but please tell me you feel it as well, when you see people just regurgitating the latest dumb shit wherever you go.
Then you visit a poor country for holiday, outside the western/anglosphere, and see all those people just living their lives, not fully consumed in some narrative.
Traditional media is basically dead, YouTube is in the process of killing it.
A lot of it is hilariously outdated looking. A man in a suit and a woman with a $300 hairdo saying innocuous things feels like time travel to the 1990s. It would be like designing a car with real chrome bumpers that rust.
Even on YouTube, if I start playing a documentary and it's got dramatic background music and a stentorian voiceover, straight to YT jail.
I like how you provided examples both proving that some things were better in the past (real chrome bumpers) and that others were measurably worse (the news theatrics).
I think ground news is doing good work.
maybe the kids will save us, afterall.
> None of the students — even in an elective course about media — confessed any interest in becoming a journalist. A few could name news organizations they trusted but others said the news came to them through social media or what friends shared or what they overheard as their parents were watching television.
> A little less than half (45%) of teens said journalists do more to harm democracy than to protect it.
These kids? Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite. People have been trained to distrust institutions because that makes them manipulable by even worse actors.
All true, however almost all of the students respond with interest in becoming influencers (don’t have the survey on hand, it’s been done a few times). And influencers include the TikTok age equivalent of journalists. For better and (definitely) for worse. Some of them are functionally the same, many are far far worse.
The kids just don’t have any interest in big news organizations which is understandable even if it’s going to make things worse.
I am not young, but I have never seen a major institution (including governments) caring about citizens in aggregate in my lifetime. To me, this is an artifact of the 50s or 60s, some bygone era (which is funny, because the government did not care about citizens in aggregate back then either).
I can only imagine how the younger kids see things. They're bombarded by public knowledge of nasty things institutions did in the bigoted/ignorant past, underhanded things they're definitely doing now, an anger/fear inducing news cycle and endless social media conspiracy theories (some of which end up being true) engineered for clicks. Extreme cynicism is a logical conclusion.
Precisely this. The idea of trusting that a news corporation (or any other corporation) cares about you is just utterly absurd in 2025. We all know now, and have for some time, that, factually, this is not how things work, and profit (or funding) has to come first, or the corporation does not survive. It isn't even cynicism, just a recognition of the economic realities of contemporary society.
This is just cynical brain poisoning. My health insurance company isn't a person who cares about me, but that was never the deal. Their interests are aligned with mine. I'm in a blue state and can get the covid vaccine for free despite the federal level fuckery. That is because my insurer cares about profit, which means they act on the science of it without the culture wars and demagoguery. They know I'll be net healthier with the vaccine, therefore more profitable to them.
There is no cynicism or brain poisoning here, health insurance is in no way comparable to news. The economic incentives for news media putting the truth first are simply not there. They can't tell blatant, obvious lies too often, yes, or they will lose trust and thus profit, but nothing really prevents them from lying by omission, and if, e.g., fear mongering, clickbait, and pandering leads to more profits, this is where they must and will go.
If people demanded truth, we might see a different story, but it is clear that enough people want other things more, often enough.
The institutions they distrust are controlled by bad actors. How is it good to trust sources of propaganda and lies? Yes, there’s worse stuff out there. There’s also far better.
> There’s also far better.
No there isn't. There are individual sources that are better, but there isn't any group that's better. There are individual podcasters that are better than mainstream media as a group, but popular podcasters as a group are far more manipulative than mainstream media. And you could say the same for any social site, or any other group such as politicians or religious figures or ...
> No there isn't. There are individual sources that are better
You immediately contradict yourself here. My impression is that anyone intelligent and informed under, say, about 40 or so only trusts particular individuals, whether they are podcasters, bloggers, substackers, or particular journalists active on e.g. Twitter or whatever other social media platform.
> but popular podcasters as a group are far more manipulative than mainstream media
This is false logic, because no one follows the entire group, they only follow individuals. It remains to be seen whether this is more pernicious than mainstream media, but I heavily suspect it will not be, as it is easier for mainstream media to be controlled than it is to control every single individual that can say something without the support of some controlled mega-conglomerate. (Though obviously de-platforming could easily render this the same, eventually).
It's also far easier to end up in a bubble if you only consume from small sources, even if they're high quality.
This is not true at all, bubbling is entirely a function of the diversity of the sources, and new media has far less diversity than the diversity that exists among small sources.
Which does you absolutely no good because your argument rests on the careful selection of sources.
You can't carefully select sources when there are only a few media organizations, because you have no real selection.
It is far easier for an individual to abuse trust than it is for a group. I don't think those "intelligent and informed" people are as intelligent and informed as you think they are.
No one follows a single individual, that is the point though. A collection of individuals not united by a corporation (e.g. social media) a priori is less controllable than a collection of individuals controlled by a corporation (e.g. news media). I think there is far more diverse information available today than there was in the days where all news was from corporations, and it remains to be seen whether this results in more bias or not. My money is on less bias though.
Either you're trusting a large number of individuals and therefore haven't done proper vetting, or you're trusting a small number of individuals and are vulnerable.
I was very upset when I found out how the NYT was manipulated to shill for the Iraq war.
I was also very upset when one of the bloggers I followed went crazy slowly and it took too long for me to notice. I also had another I trusted who turned out to be a biased corporate shill.
I don't trust the NYT, but I trust the process of their checks and balances in their organization and the presence of inside whistle blowers more than I do any individual blogger.
> Either you're trusting a large number of individuals and therefore haven't done proper vetting, or you're trusting a small number of individuals and are vulnerable.
I don't think this is right at all.
A corporation (or organization) I know must necessarily put profit (or funding) first, before truth, if it wishes to survive for any duration. Ultimately, I know there is no real possibility for them to ever care about truth first. I can't vet a corporation, because the people controlling it are individuals who remain mysterious and inaccessible, or it is controlled by complex financial ties which are generally inscrutable. However, with how intermeshed things are, I can generally have faith that the financial and political pressures on large organizations will be more homogeneous than those on a collection of individuals not under the thumb of such an organization. Corporations and groups often don't even have a clear "personality" which one can make judgements on. You can notice a blogger going slowly crazy more easily than you can notice a large group being slowly corrupted by hidden influences.
By contrast, weird autists that seem to actually care about the truth can in fact be found blogging or on other forms of social media. They too have their biases, but, collectively, their biases seem to me to be far more diverse than the biases of large groups, and, in many cases, you do have reason to believe these people actually care about the truth.
It is, in my opinion, far, far better to follow a small number of weird autists than to trust a few large news corporations. Also, the wierd autists will tend to talk about what the news corporations are saying often anyway, whereas the reverse is not true.
I think that since a key part of your trust of the NYT involves whistle blowers, that this contradicts your basic position as well.
EDIT: To be clear though, I do think there is still a lot of value in news organizations. This whole dichotomy of "which should I trust more" is silly, since both have their advantages. I do hope news media sticks around and remains something that is somewhat trusted sometimes, and that people do like what I presume you and I do, relying on a mix of news media and particular individuals. Insofar as now that news media is no longer the only game in town, some decline in trust is warranted as the trust re-distributes somewhat, but I definitely hope that trust of the news media doesn't go to zero.
> You can notice a blogger going slowly crazy more easily than you can notice a large group being slowly corrupted by hidden influences.
The former is a very private affair totally hidden. The latter is something happening between a large group of people, many of whom are very inclined to quit the anonymity of the large organization, write a book about it to become individually famous.
A significant number of those autists you espouse can be bribed by surprisingly small amounts. Politicians are far more vetted than bloggers, and yet a significant number of them have been caught changing their votes for $2000 or similar amounts.
You might be able to sway a NYT reporter for a similar amount, but they have processes to catch that.
Bribes are one thing, but individuals operate independently and may post unpredictably on certain topics. Their posts don't have to be "cleared" by higher ups. They can be harder to suppress precisely because of this. I don't rely on people whistle-blowing, because that means risking a job or even career. How many stories are quietly squashed that no whistle-blower ever revealed? We'll never know. This is IMO far more hidden than the "private" affair of a blogger going crazy.
My bet is that news media organizations are easier to control than it is to control a bunch of unpredictable, independently operating individuals (though it is far easier to control a single individual, no doubt).
I am worried about things like deciding on a narrative at the corporate level. E.g. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/1643786/new-york-..., or, say, CDC and news outlets flip-flopping on things like mask mandates / COVID lab leak and the like. Whenever large-scale incentives are involved, I do not trust news media, and especially think that what individual bloggers and other people are saying will give you a better perspective on things. Whereas when there aren't clear incentives in any direction, or when one requires a reporter "on the ground", there can be good reason to trust news media over individuals.
News media are also broadly incompetent when it comes to reporting on areas where expertise is required (e.g. tech, science), and there, specific individuals again are far, far more trustworthy. Heck, most news media is too lazy to even cite much of anything they say. As I said, this isn't an either/or thing, but for sure trust in news media should decline as people recognize the areas where other sources are more trustworthy.
> Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite.
Which means that the institutions should do a lot better, which they don't. The demos is always right, that's why we live in a democracy (or at least we strive to) and not in a technocracy (where, presumably, the institutions are right by default).
Yes, most of the issues in journalism come from extremely low diversity of thought.
I laugh when I occasionally listen to NPR and within a few minutes hear an absurdly framed commentary that clearly hasn’t steel manned alternative viewpoints.
>Yes, most of the issues in journalism come from extremely low diversity of thought.
Journalism runs on the same "expensive degree -> unpaid intern -> low pay jobs -> stick it out long enough you'll do alright selling your influence" model as Hollywood and DC. Hence it has the same people problems.
> The demos is always right
Bullshit. The demos is so goddamn stupid it can't be helped, it must be led. Explaining things to them does nothing. People will sacrifice freedom for convenience and short term profit every single time. They vote with emotions. They make decisions that impact entire nations without even trying to gain even a superficial understanding of things. The demos is completely responsible for the horrible status quo. Their ignorance and passivity is exactly what leads to their oppression. Trying to help them leads to nothing but pointless martyrdom. Nothing changes because change depends on them and they are unwilling.
> not in a technocracy
We're literally in the technofeudalist era. We have trillion dollar corporations running digital fiefdoms with users as the serfs tilling the artificially scarce fields. They have so much money it's unreal, and they have woken up to the wonders of lobbying.
> Extreme and reflexive distrust of institutions is as harmful as the opposite.
If anything people are not radicalized enough.
Not exclusive to teens, but people are increasingly from somewhat biased fact based news to commentary based news that sounds agreeable to them.
They won't. We've given them a absurdly concentrated garbage news media that there's no reason to trust any part of, but it isn't like they're getting anything else. They're going to be the most ignorant generation in US history.
I remember being shocked when I found out that most Vietnamese young people were mostly unaware of the Vietnam war. But if nobody tells you, you don't know. The media was bad before 1996 (Ben Bagdikian would put out a book every year about how dangerously concentrated media was getting: only 51 owners owned 90% of the media lol), but at least we could go to the library and find out what actually happened. They'll just have continually-revised ebooks and AI.
Just to play devil's advocate with some pointed questions:
What is so important about the Vietnam war for the day-to-day of the Vietnamese young?
It's the generation that have fallen prey to today's social media and garbage news outlets telling us that history is important -- why should the young be credulous to the gullible?
If the old adage "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is to be acted upon, it is without a doubt not to study history and try to remember the past because clearly we're always repeating it.
So what is important and constant across time? Those that have empathy (or fake empathy) for the masses and can galvanize them have the power to drive society. Perception is reality more than facts are reality in all but the sciences. If the world were to reset and humans were stripped of all tools, they would re-invent math, science, biology, physics. I doubt that our laws, traditions and zeitgeist would be replicated.
Is there an irony in this? The negativity cognitive bias often used by news media to increase the salience of their output now affects the perception of their product.
I mean, the heyday of print news was almost a century ago and televised news decades ago.
Basically all digital news outlets, outside of just a few notable outliers, have no money to produce anything but low effort articles that are just a vehicle to show ads. And some of those are active propaganda outlets for basically nothing but evil interest groups.
What is there to have a positive view about...?
Society stopped paying for journalism and we got what we paid for.
For TV news, can you even watch real news anymore outside of local news?
Everything everybody around me watches is just talking opinion heads.
It's a race to the bottom in this AI slop world we now live in. That's the problem with trying to get eyeballs in a mass alternatives universe. To stand out you need to get more radical and extreme to keep your audience. Eventually the general population click and realize that the alternative media is generally trash. That's when people start looking back at quality media. It's just a vicious circle.
Feels weird to lump all media together.
Ironically this is something I see in media a lot and dislike. Things like "80% of people think country going in the wrong direction".
Well while you're polling them, ask which direction is correct. Because 40% wanting less Trump bullshit and 40% wanting more Trump bullshit is totally different than letting your average reader assume 80% agree with their own assesment of what's wrong.
I want people to have strongly negative views on Fox News and the even worse variants of that kind of propaganda.
kids do their own research :)
My teen son loves The Onion.
Is this a data point? I have no idea, but he's cool and so is The Onion.
I too loved The Onion when I was a teen.
"The Onion" is a long sold-off brand that has nothing to do with that very funny midwestern free paper. It doesn't even have anything to do with that national media success of the 2000's.
It was first mostly sold off to the head of Strong Capital Management, moving to NY, then moved to Chicago under the editorship of "Cole Bolton - a Brown University graduate of business economics, former associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and research associate at Harvard Business School." During that last move, 85% of the staff resigned. From there it was sold to Univision (the tv channel) and merged with Gizmodo. Then it was sold to private equity group Great Hill Partners, then sold off again to the founder of Twilio under whom Ben Collins was put in charge, former NBC "disinformation expert"/twitter troll and worst person on the planet.
That's just a quick summary of the 4K words offered by Wikipedia about the ownership history of this brand. Brands aren't actually things anymore, their purpose is to conceal things.
This is good. Too many have slept walk into trusting narratives with dubious outcomes.
Yes, it's great. Now they'll get all their narratives from TikTok.
How reductive! I don't know what your qualms are with TikTok, but I can't imagine that decades of news media driven primarily by soundbites just as short as your average TikTok video can be seen as a superior "narrative delivery vehicle" ...unless you really place a premium on a corporate media bias influenced by pharmaceutical companies and the military industrial complex.
> decades of news media driven primarily by soundbites just as short as your average TikTok video
That's dying quickly. The NYT has more subscribers than CNN has viewers. Once you add the number of people who read NYT articles for free, the difference is massive.
Everyone complains about the media, but few offer solutions.
My favorite type of solution is something along the lines of taxing organizations whose viewers are more disconnected from statistics on the ground (by a bipartisan independent board choosing the types of knowledge sets that a well informed population should have). We could also subsidize organizations that are doing well informing people.
This is a way of dealing with the externalities brought about by people having so much misinformation in their day-to-day decision-making.
Almost any problem is better than that solution
If misinformation exists, it is analogous to pollution.
If misinformation exists, enemies of a state will spread it.
It’s a reasonable solution to consider taxing pollution and using funds to clean up the externalities.
After the great success of centrally-planned economies over the last century, now comes the next thing they'll try:
Centrally planned information environments!
It's sure to work great.
- "I'm from the government and I'm here to tell you what's Good and True."
- "Do you have a loicense for that opinion?"
Red tape spilling into society kan be more damaging than oil spilling into the ocean.
[dead]
[dead]
After the live streaming of a mass genocide by israel and the words used by mass media during their coverage it's 100% understandable.
The news media is heavily biased to the far left. This is due to the bias of ownership, as well as the low salary cost of young reporters who tend to lean left.
Any European will tell you that US media is biased right.
This is so out of touch.
If you look at media in the US, they will actually bend over backwards to explain away what Trump is saying or doing. They will present "both sides" on equal footing when one side is legitimately insane. And, when they refer to his speeches and policy, they actually make it sounds much MORE reasonable than it is.
Like, when they play clips of trump speeches, they always leave out the 30+ minutes of rambling. And when Trump says something obviously racist, they, I'm sure in an effort to give the benefit of the doubt, explain it in a way that is not racist. Oh, maybe he said that they're eating the dogs and cats because he's misinformed...
The problem is normal people get only neutral benefits from the benefit of the doubt. But bad actors can, and do, abuse the benefit of the doubt and get much more out of it.
It's so bad that even when Trump does something fucking stupid and doesn't offer any coherent explanation, the media will actually make up potential explanations FOR him and talk about those. They're so biased in his favor he doesn't even need to make arguments any more - they will make arguments for him that are reasonable sounding.
And, keep in mind, I'm not referring to Fox here. This is CNN and MSNBC.
Seriously, go listen to what they say trump said or did and then listen or read what Trump ACTUALLY did. It's always much, much worse.
One of the causes of the bias is that decision-makers in the media organizations preferentially hired those that shared their ideological commitment. This is easier in fields where a worker cannot prevent his or her ideological commitment (or lack thereof) from showing in his or her work product. Besides journalism, other fields with this property are the social-science and humanities departments of universities, which is why those fields were captured by Leftist many decades ago whereas other fields were captured only much more recently.
One department of the social sciences has resisted capture by Leftists, at least in the US, at least the last time I looked, namely economics. One could argue that that is because it was captured first by liberal or libertarian ideologues.
This comment is restricted to the US and Britain because those are the only 2 societies I know well enough for my observations to have any value. Also, the OP is about American teenagers specifically.