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Or, in fact, a little bit less, as cjet was pointing out.
The difference between these two is illustrated by this meme. Even if newspapers' dishonesty is not a result of Machiavellian power games but social dynamics, the fact is they know the negative social dynamics are there, and are doing absolutely nothing to stop them, and are in fact looking for ways to promote them even more.
Given the popularity of "don't give ammo to the rightoids" argument on progressive forums, I'm pretty sure that this is also happening quite often. We would of course need access to journalist's private communications to prove it either way, but that just means your denial of it happening is completely irrelevant.
The issue is that you attempt to address the newspapers' dishonesty by trusting the internet people more, but the internet people aren't actually less misleading than the newspapers because
When someone says that, what they're thinking is "this isn't representative of a broader trend but posting it appears to, which feeds prejudice and bias". That kind of thing can be true! You'd accuse left-wingers of doing that themselves whenever they report on a school shooting or a hate crime, accurately. They are not explicitly, intentionally lying.
Also, themotte is smarter than most left-wing sources because we're smart. I don't think we're smarter than center-left rationalists, though, so it can seem themotte (right-wing) is better than other sources (left-wing) but the betterness is the cause, not the right-wingness.
Actually, no I wouldn't. My approach is the old-internet "battle arena of ideas" or "the best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct it". It's good that progressives post about school shootings, because events like that should be discussed. If they want to extrapolate these events into a trend not representative of reality, it's all the better for me, because I can slap them down in le epic internet argument. What's bad is the refusal to post or discuss cases that cannot be used to score political points (or worse, that the other side can use). This is why it's correct to trust internet randos more than mainstream newspapers.
Again, you might very well be wrong, since there's no way to prove that claim, and reason to believe it to begin with.
But more importantly they are explicitly, and intentionally enforcing the social dynamics that prevent inconvenient facts from being discussed.
Since what we're discussing here is whether or not we should trust mainstream newspapers more than internet randos, this only proves my point.
I mean ... not really? Progressives place an entirely unjustified emphasis on school shootings, and, in an unexamined manner, imagine that they are a threat worth mentioning to the well-being of children in the united states. Statistically ... they just aren't. Progressives should post less about school shootings, as a result. My point was just that when a progressive says 'this black shooting isn't worth reporting on because it's over-representing a rare phenomenon', that's wrong for reasons that aren't obvious to the progressive, the social taboo on racism and the idea that the racism is morally bad are melded with factual claim, in ways that make the output quite distinct from intentional dishonesty. (There's another objection like 'most people are stupid and won't be able to individually conclude that core political issues they hold are invalid because of thought experiments about biased reporting of a coin toss' but I'll ignore that for now.)
I'm saying you shouldn't trust internet randos more. And if the randos (or more realistically, people 10 layers down the social media telephone game from them) got political power I'm not sure things would improve. If the media really were just being dishonest and there was a second non-dishonest group of people we could swap in for them ... that'd be one thing, but that's not the situation we're in.
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