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I think I understand what you mean by a "journalistic standard", but it seems to me that this standard does nothing to prevent deceit on the part of journalists, and only exists to insulate them from the necessary consequences of that deceit. It does not impede them from routinely deceiving their audience, but only codifies a method to enact that deceit with perfect legal and social cover. It seems to me that such standards are actively harmful to the public at large; we would be better with no standards at all, and a concomitant increase in public skepticism.
To me, the term "major scandal" means an incident that causes or at least threatens severe consequences for the people involved. I can think of lots of times when the media has been caught pushing outright lies, many of them resulting in dire real-world consequences. I can't think of a single time when this evident malfeasance resulted or even plausibly threatened severe consequences for even a single media organization, or even an individual journalist. It seems to me that a "major scandal" for the media means that they may have to publish a news story about how they've totally fixed the problem and it can't possibly happen again, they swear, and even this level of consequence is a rarity compared to the base rate of naked deception.
The fact that you possess this attitude toward Hasan Piker is exactly why I would prefer people generally to get their information from Hasan Piker and others like him. Your assessment of his credibility seems reasonably correlated to his actual credibility, so it seems unlikely that he could successfully lie to you, and very unlikely that he could do so in a highly consequential way. Even his most diehard fans are not going to presume that his credibility, impartiality and correctness are common knowledge society-wide. He does not have the power of "sure it's true, I saw it on TV".
Legacy media, by contrast, have also created echo chambers by banning all dissidents, only promote people who agree with them politically, and present themselves as experts on subjects they know nothing about, and routinely eschew the very concept of nuance and balance. In addition, they are deeply integrated into our centers of social and political power, and they secretly coordinate their reporting to maximize partisan control over and political advantage within those centers. Their record of mendacity is appalling, as are the accumulated consequences of their lies. Piker is, at worst, an amateur liar. Journalists are professional liars, working in an industry optimized from the ground up to produce precision falsehood on an industrial scale.
The above would be bad enough, but most people assume whatever they say is true, with the result that they have a considerable degree of control over the conversations it's possible to have, even among those who know they are not trustworthy. The New York Times really does set the nation's agenda, even for those of us entirely aware that they're fundamentally, murderously untrustworthy. That is what a "heap of fraudulently-acquired positive affect" looks like. By comparison, the Hasan Pikers of new media are working off old pennies they found in the couch cushions.
If you measure "honesty" in Lawyer-speak, journalists are reasonably honest. If you measure "honesty" by the variance between the plain facts of a matter and the impression the author intentionally conveys to the reader, Journalists are one of the most dishonest groups of people living.
Public trust in news media is at an all-time low, this recent poll Gallup shows only 7% of Americans have a great deal of trust in the media, and 27% have a fair amount of trust in the media. The public is as skeptical as it has ever been.
I'm not sure I agree with your point that having standards is harmful, much of the legacy media isn't following journalistic standards. It's the appearance of having standards but not following them that's harmful, not the existence of standards itself. It would be one thing if you were to argue specifics examples of standard are harmful, but to dismiss the entire notion of standards doesn't seem like the right solution either. You need some framework to make a judgment, and the legacy media's failure to meet journalistic standards is how you know they aren't doing a great job.
Many of these news organizations are unable to generate enough revenue and I say a large part of that is due to the increase in public distrust of news media. Many smaller ones have gone bankrupt, some examples: Gawker, Vice, Buzzfeed, Jezebel. Brian Stelter was basically fired from CNN cause his show couldn't attract viewers, and I'd say it's in large part due to his peddling of lies and disinformation. Lawsuits are a thing, plenty of examples of lawsuits you can find, even settlements and lawyers eat up money, and when your organization is struggling to make a profit you don't want to be spending money on lawsuits. It might not be to the degree you want them punished, but it's not like it doesn't happen either.
What percentage of stories from news media would you say are outright lies are bullshit? I'm not denying there isn't any propaganda, but I'd say 95% of the news is still factually accurate. You just don't remember those because those are mostly boring presentations of facts so there really isn't anything that can be a scissor statement.
The people who have the most trust in the media are old people, well they're getting older and will eventually no longer be here. So I'm more concerned about where the newer generations are getting their information from. They're getting it from social media and streaming services. Nearly 50% get it from social media daily and 48% never even look at cable or network news. You'll be hard-pressed to find a Gen Z kid who has full faith in legacy media, but many of Hasan Piker's viewers believe 100% what he says. So these people actually would be better off getting their news from legacy media because they'll be viewing it with skepticism.
His viewers don't need to qualify the information they got with "I heard this from Hasan", they'll just repeat his talking points as straight-up facts. If you question where they got that information from they'll just respond "educate yourself" and not even bother engaging in conversation. Where did they learn these tactics? From Hasan Piker and other political streamers. Hasan may not have any influence over the people who'll use that line, but he has a massive influence over younger people. And there are people peddling extremist, radical far left and right viewpoints online. I'd argue this is more dangerous than the agenda the legacy media pushes through.
By the way, it's not like the only options for news and politics are political streamers or legacy media. I didn't say people should only get their information from the legacy media, but if it was between getting news only from The New York Times or Hasan Piker, I'd pick The New York Times 100% of the time. And if it isn't clear, I'm not a fan of legacy media either.
The correct way to use polls to examine this question is not to ask people whether they trust the media, but to identify lies the media is pushing, and then use polling to determine how effective those lies have been at shaping the public's perceptions. The results are quite horrifying. That particular lie has killed ~10,000 black Americans over the last three years, as part of the worst single-year spike in violent crime the country has ever seen, and I see no evidence that any real lesson has actually been learned by the general public, any more than they did from getting lied into Iraq, or lied into implementing bussing, or any of the other disasters over the years. Journalists have done it before, and they'll do it again.
On an object level, standards exist to be enforced. If the standards don't result in enforcement, they're worthless. On a meta level, power lies in people, never in the rules people create. Good people don't need rules, bad people won't obey them. Rules help at the margin, but they don't solve the basic problem of a corrupt class with ready access to serious power. The solution isn't to try to enforce the rules on fundamentally untrustworthy people who have zero intention of having their desires and values constrained. The solution is to recognize them as an enemy, and then to apply relentless coordinated meanness to them until they are too scattered and harried to cause further harm.
If you are set on putting your hope in rules, then find rules that correctly apportion accountability for the harms caused by misuse of power, and then enforce them, and keep them routinely updated as vulnerabilities and workarounds appear. This still won't help unless a supermajority of the people who are supposed to be constraining want to be constrained, but if that's the population you've got, they can do a lot of good.
No. The way I know they're doing a bad job is by comparing their observed actions to their stated goals, and by comparing the results of those actions to my own values. I don't give a fuck if they claim to be following their own rules or not. If this result is allowed by their rules, then their rules are worthless. If this result happened despite their rules, their rules are worthless. There is neither need nor point to turning this into a lawyer LARP, not when we can simply assess the situation according to our common values.
It's true that the general decay of trust in media is happening, and that this has resulted in lower profits for many media properties over time. This is clearly insufficient to dissuade them from perpetuating their abuses, so it seems to me that more robust and legible action is necessary. You are approaching the issue as though the existence and maintenance of a powerful, influential media should simply be assumed to be an immutable feature of the universe. It is not. We can in fact create an environment where their behavior is sufficiently disincentivized that their class ceases to exist as a coherent entity.
The large majority of all media output addressing any question of consequence is some manner of bullshit. That is to say, most pieces addressing questions or issues consumers care significantly about are designed to deceive those consumers about that issue in some significant way.
I think your estimation is likely quite high. Further, it does not help if I make nineteen completely factual statements along with one lie, if some of those factual statements are used to support the lie and the others are irrelevant to the topic at hand. If I try to fool you into thinking that your Significant Other is cheating on you, introducing myself by my actual name, addressing you by your actual name and gender, giving a correct description of your Significant Other's appearance and the appearance of their vehicle are "factually accurate" statements. If I claim to have followed them around all day, and honestly list off nineteen places they went, and then lie about the twentieth, that likewise would match your 95% accuracy figure. The fact remains that my core mission is deceit, and the factual truths I'm telling you are being used to support my mission of lying to you, either by directly supporting the lies or by serving as a smokescreen for them.
Another way to phrase this would be that they say things that are true and things that are interesting, but the true things aren't interesting and the interesting things aren't true. Unless you consume news purely for entertainment, what makes boring facts boring is that they do not matter to you in any significant way. Being honest in ways that do not significantly help me while constantly lying in ways that harm me is an unacceptable pattern of behavior. I don't care if they correctly identified the state, county and city then-nominee Kavanaugh resided in, correctly cited relevant dates, correctly attributed quotes, correctly identified the sequence of events they covered, and so on through the infinite catalog of minutia it seems your argument must based on. I care that they smeared him with false rape accusations. Getting that wrong invalidates everything else.
Skepticism of the sort you cited above is insufficient to prevent the harmful consequences of our current media establishment.
The current media establishment likewise propagates such contentless responses ("racist", "sexist", "bigot", "homophobe", etc, etc), but in addition generates the omnipresent, apparently sourceless consensus of common "knowledge", which is significantly worse. Again, Piker has not helped start literal wars, nor has he crippled policing nation-wide, nor has he undercut major pillars of our society. I do not doubt that he or some demagogue like him could eventually become powerful enough to cause equivalent harms, but our present system has already done these things, and continues to do them. The worst Piker could possibly be is as bad as the media currently is, and I think it unlikely that he could actually achieve such an outcome were the current media to suddenly vanish. If we can destroy the current media establishment, preventing Piker and his ilk from taking their place seems like a cakewalk by comparison.
I reiterate that I prefer amatuer, isolated liars to professional, coordinated liars, and cannot fathom why anyone else would prefer otherwise. Here's an example of a lie the New York Times is currently telling. Nothing Piker ever has done or ever is likely to do is as bad as that single article, in terms of its actual effect on my life and wellbeing.
If you don't want extremists, all you need to do is ensure that your reasonable, moderate centrism delivers the results it promises. If it had not failed to do that, we extremists would not be winning to the degree we are.
Did you link the right source here? That thread is regarding public perception of police killing of unarmed black men, and doesn't say anything about an increase in black Americans dying over the last three years. Assuming you did link the right thread, I think you're trying to make the following claim:
My bias is inclined to agree with this train of thought, point three is probably the hardest to actually argue successfully but I'm not currently interested in playing devil's advocate for a counter perspective for this particular point of discussion. If you're claiming something else, well please clarify.
Sure, but you're claiming that the existence of journalistic standards is harmful, and while your view here is interesting I don't see how it shows that the existence of standards is harmful. Earlier you mentioned that journalistic standards are being used as a shield to give the illusion of legitimacy to the media, that's a claim where I can see your point, but the existence of standards in and of itself is not harmful.
Maybe I'm taking the term "standard" more loosely than you are here, but even "good" people need standards. You later mention your own values, you're setting standards for yourself by having a set of values. If it was so obvious in life what the correct course of action was it would be self-evident to everyone they should do 100% of the time. But it is often we are operating with incomplete information, having a set of standards helps us decide what and how we should approach and value things. Much of the things we take for granted as moral goods or values are the result of thousands of years of advancement in society and civilization. And people with good intentions end up doing harmful things all the time. Why would we teach our young morals and manners if what is good doesn't need any standards?
That's a good way of analyzing how something fits relative to your morals and values, but it doesn't actually invalidate what I say. Since we've been speaking about journalistic standards but haven't really defined what it is, I'll refer to the standards defined by the Society of Professional Journalists. I'm sure you can just go down that list and recall recent news stories that don't fit these standards.
You don't have to agree with any of these journalistic standards, but what specific journalistic standard are you opposed to here? To me, the failure to adhere to journalistic standards is an easy way to tell how legacy media is failing to do what they publicly claim they want to do. You seem to be against the existence of these standards and refuse to even consider them, but looking through the list I actually don't find any that is clearly objectionable.
I am not and I don't know why you think I think this. You made a snarky comment in response to my concern that people are getting their political strangers from unqualified strangers on the internet. I could've just listed a bunch of other ways you can gather information, but I didn't know why you might think political streamers are a better source of information and frankly speaking, you came off to me as extremely pompous, hence why I didn't directly answer your question. I appreciate your more detailed follow-up since I could see more about your views and thoughts on the legacy media. I don't see how my disagreement that traditional news sources are a better source of news than political streamers makes me think "the existence and maintenance of a powerful, influential media should simply be assumed to be an immutable feature of the universe."
Okay, interesting. Do you have any evidence this has been achieved before? How would this be accomplished? How would you prevent the next dominant power from just doing the same thing? If you have any links to anything that would flesh out this possibility I'd be interested in reading more.
Please provide a number estimate, even if it's something as vague as a range estimate such as 40 - 80%. It's easy to say large majority or most and feel confident in your beliefs because you can recall many examples, but that's just the issue of the chinese cardiologist. Hard numbers are more important, if we look at the source you linked earlier a possible reason for why so many people can think the number is as high as 10,000 is because they think a lot of unarmed black men are shot. That's just a general feeling they have so they will most likely come to an incorrect conclusion.
I'm looking at the news media as a whole and you seem to be considering it from just political/cultural news. Traditional news media does more than propaganda. It reports on weather, sports, local events, culture, business, etc. Most of this stuff are boring, daily information that you won't remember. Sure, they might still be pushing an agenda even through these channels, but it's not like this information is not useful either.
Also, I'm not arguing that 95% of the facts in one particular news story are true and therefore make up for the 1 lie in that story. Hopefully my comment above clarifies what exactly that 95% estimate is referring to. This is not an excuse for traditional news media, I just think it's important to strive to be accurate about the facts that form your beliefs.
I'm not in disagreement that traditional news media has propagated these ideas, but incorrect common "knowledge" is also propagated through social media and newer media channels. For a generation that grows up on the internet, you'd think they'd be skeptical and more resilient to lies, but no, Gen Z is fall for online scams more than boomers. (Going off-topic, since I don't think anyone has done this analysis on the data from that survey to see if the reason is solely due to Gen Z being online more than boomers or if Gen Z actually is more likely to fall victim to online scams per hour spent compared to boomers.) If we refer back to that survey you linked above, I'd say that the narrative of police killing many unarmed black people was heavily propagated through social media, and many leftist political streamers like Hasan were in support of that narrative.
I hope you don't say people got their views from traditional media channels and were just repeating it, if you do, I'd like you to actually support that claim. To provide some counter-examples, the slogan for defund the police got popular via twitter from the Black Vision Collective. Leftist academic types routinely publish their views online directly. Activist-type people also seem to coordinate and recruit strictly online through social media. As our society moves more and more online, to a more and more centralized internet, we're certainly recreating the "omnipresent, apparently sourceless consensus of common knowledge". There may be more individual creators, but if they're all pushing the same views/perspectives, largely in part to the algorithms that control what people consume, well then the effect is pretty much the same.
Would you consider big tech to be part of the current media establishment? I'd say they operate under different principles from traditional news media and are a much more powerful force in today's environment. Legacy media is a dying dinosaur anyway, big tech is the bigger threat here, given big tech has more power and influence over younger people. We've shifted from talking about traditional media to current media, I assume you include big tech with the current media establishment, or at least be working with them when convenient.
See my point above about news media as a whole as a source of information beyond just politics. If you consider this from any individual person's perspective, the New York Times is a far superior source of news to Hasan Piker. What you do with that information is up to the individual. You're more concerned about how people behave. In that case, you might as well fight against democracy as a government system itself, for as long as humans are varied in intelligence and interest/ability in the pursuit of truth, people will be susceptible to being manipulated or lied to. Of course, nothing Hasan has done yet compares to the New York Times has done, his reach is smaller. My point is that the Hasans of the world are growing in power and influence. He's a socialist, supports defending the police, supports the trans agenda, he probably supports and peddles a whole list of political agendas you would probably not be in support of. If you swapped the reach the two had, Hasan's viewpoints would also lead to outcomes that would have actual effects on your life and well-being.
The matter of whether or not the New York Times has a greater influence than Hasan is not what I'm arguing, that should be obvious. I'm talking about which is a better source of information for news, and as I am more in disagreement with Hasan's politics than the New York Times's politics, I'd rather people get their information from the New York Times than from Hasan Piker. If you look at both sources with skepticism, the New York Times becomes an even better source of news compared to Hasan Piker. This is in context to the hypothetical scenario where those were literally the only two options, there are obviously way more sources of information and people would be better off getting information elsewhere. Somehow I don't feel like we're talking on the same page here.
Care to explain what extremist political position you're a part of since you consider yourself an extremist? Most conservatives would probably agree with a lot of what you have said thus far, and I wouldn't consider them extremists.
If you don't actually consider yourself an extremist and are only writing like this assuming my politics, can you stop doing that? We may have more in common than you think.
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I really like your point about journalistic standards. Did you come up with it or did some blogger? If it’s the latter let me know so I can follow them.
To add to your critique of the good old days of journalistic standards I’d like to point out that journalism wasn’t necessarily better (although there may have been more high-effort investigative work, I don’t know) so much as it was centralized to the point that heterodoxy was mostly invisible. It’s a common view that journalism was less political and more truth-seeking but I think this is mostly the result of the media being so powerful as to create the political water that discourse took place in. If you read Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent you can see many of the same criticisms that heterodoxers such as frequent this site make today. The journalistic standard of honesty can be stretched very far with some motivated pilpul. Maybe in the 19th century it was different.
Chomsky mentions centralization as one of the main causes of the state of affairs he critiques, and I have to agree. It doesn’t seem that news organizations are capable of being apolitical, in that case why not favor a decentralized media ecosystem wherein no organization has the power to shape the discourse?
The main argument against it I can see is the danger of ignorant plebs being manipulated by demagogues, which might have merit but cedes that capital J Journalism exists to manufacture consent.
The internet might give us the cure to Gell-Mann amnesia. I’m not sure it will actually be better but like many disaffected very-online people I dislike the current roster of media institutions and am happy to see them fail.
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