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https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1639661514398244864 It's been a rough time in the media business. So many national media outlets in the US have announced layoffs in the past few months: NBC, the Washington Post, NPR, Vice, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, News Corp, Gannett, not to speak of the bloodbath across regional and local media. Part of this is because the media industry is contracting with many other sectors in the economy due to inflation and fears of a recession. With so much media funded through advertising, a decline in consumer confidence necessarily will ripple out to the media. (I thought this piece did a good job of explaining the business psychology driving layoffs: https://www.thediff.co/archive/how-companies-think-about-layoffs/) Part of this, I suspect, is due to a relaxation of alarm following Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic. The furious pace of news developments and three years of people being cooped up inside has ended and fewer people are glued to their newsfeeds. There was an unnatural spike in readership/viewership and we're seeing a regression to the mean. But there is a secular decline in media as well. Whether your company is for-profit, non-profit, family-owned, billionaire-owned, venture-backed, hedge fund managed, subscription-based, ad-supported, odds are you've seen a decline in your business over the past two decades. A lot of this has been fueled by the internet collapsing traditional business models. Internet ads don't pay anywhere near as much as print, and craigslist obliterated the classifieds sections of local newspapers, which once provided up to 40 percent of their revenue. The internet has also democratized the tools of news-gathering. Anyone with a cameraphone and a data plan can start live streaming from press conference or protest, but does that a journalist make? Another factor is that the gate-keepers are no longer the media outlets themselves, but search engines and social media. News items live and die by algorithms beyond their control. I recall hearing from people complaining that the media wasn't covering the East Palestine chemical spill, but national media outlets like the Washington Post were there the next day. People's social media feeds however were overflowing with Chinese spy balloon coverage, and national TV outlets didn't give the disaster much airtime (it's probably worth drawing a distinction between television and print/digital/radio news outlets in this discussion). Attitudes toward media also played a role in its decline. In the early days of the internet, media outlets put their content up for free and only past few years, long after the horses left the barn, are outlets starting to raise paywalls. Readers however developed the expectation that news should be free. And some outlets even feed into this - during natural disasters or public emergencies, many outlets make their coverage of these issues free. Imagine any other business that would make its products free just when they are at their most valuable. It shows that news media isn't just a business but a public service, an ethos that even private for-profit outlets try to uphold. Even before the internet though, there has been a widespread decline in public institutions, mainly in government, but in the media as well: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/06/when-americans-lost-faith-in-the-news (Great piece, btw) All the while, politics in the US has evolved and mutated far more rapidly than the norms of journalism can keep up with, particularly the idea of "objectivity": From the New Yorker article: quote:In the memoir slash manifesto “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” (St. Martin’s), Margaret Sullivan argues that objectivity is not so much impossible today as meaningless, and that the press ought to stop striving to achieve it. The events of 2020 and 2021 showed that the press’s values were in the wrong place. “The extreme right wing had its staunch all-in media allies,” she writes. “The rest of the country had a mainstream press that too often couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do their jobs. Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy.” Perhaps this mode of thinking is obsolete. Witness the rise of hyper-partisan media outlets, mostly on the right. That leads to extremely divergent epistemology, which can manifest in the real world with life and death consequences: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/10/01/for-covid-19-vaccinations-party-affiliation-matters-more-than-race-and-ethnicity/ That leads to the larger question of how can you operate a democracy without a common set of facts. Now there is another threat to journalism: AI. With language models now integrated into search engines, Google and Bing can assemble a personalized new brief for you by scraping news outlets, but not passing any traffic or ad revenue through to the outlet that produced the underlying information. These language learning models are very good at plagiarizing. But they may also be able to start replacing journalists as well. CNet and BuzzFeed are already doing that. Here, I think, is where the greatest contrast and value-add of journalism can be drawn: https://inthesetimes.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-journalism-chatgpt-media-ethics quote:Human journalists are flawed too. But we are accountable. That’s the difference. Institutions in journalism live on credibility, and that credibility is granted as a direct result of the accountability that accompanies every story. When stories have errors or biases or leave things out or misstate things or bend the truth, they can be credibly challenged, and credible institutions are obligated to be able to demonstrate how and why the story is how it is, and they are obligated to acknowledge and fix any deep flaws in their reporting and writing and publishing processes on an ongoing basis. If they don’t do that, they lose their credibility. When they lose that, they lose everything. This process of accountability is the foundation of journalism. Without it, you may be doing something, but you ain’t doing journalism. To me, it seems there is money to be made in media. I posit that you can run a media outlet as a *profit generating* entity, but not a *profit maximizing* entity. Most media outlets have an inherent limit of consumers and after they hit saturation, there isn't much room for growth. It makes for a good family business, but it's terrible for shareholders or hedge funds. Journalists genuinely do provide a socially beneficial service and I think it's worth fighting for. You can needle the New York Times all you want (and there's a lot to criticize) but what other institution is infiltrating slaughterhouses to find exploited child workers? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html To this forum I pose the following questions: Be honest: Where is the first place you usually hear about news? Facebook? Twitter? Your groupchat? Or do you actually pick up the paper every morning? How do you support people doing the kinds of journalism you find valuable? Do you pay for any forms of media? Why? Or if you used to, what made you stop paying? Do you have an idea for a media business model? What's an obscure or non-mainstream source of news you found to be useful or reliable? Should there be government funding for media a la BBC? Or a bailout for ailing local news outlets? How do you think the news media industry will actually shake out over the coming years?
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Mar 31, 2023 03:39
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T Zero posted:To this forum I pose the following questions: * the forums, my union group chats, or from a colleague at work, occasionally directly from the reporter (ex, Chris Hedges on Substack, delivered through email). I guess you could count local news too, but my brain basically filters out everything that's not the weather forecast. * Throw a few bucks at their substack * Nope. They've got advertisers for that. I ended my WaPo subscription when it became an Amazon product. * Nope. Direct readership is good, but how you build that base out from 0? gently caress if I know. * ?? * Yep, but how you separate government funding from government influence is a process beyond me. We of course can't prove the hypothetical, but one would presume that were, say, PBS or NPR to take a bold anti-arming Ukraine stance and advocate for strictly humanitarian aid most their government funding would be threatened.
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Apr 25, 2023 20:39
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Necrobama posted:
I think this is an interesting dilemma. And I actually do kinda agree with twitter's stance on labeling outlets NPR as "government" funded, though NPR obviously has a few layers of abstraction and isn't as directly funded as, say, Al Jazeera. On one hand, if you have media funded by a democratic government, you can have outlets with a public service mission at their core. On the other, it can be an even greater instrument of Chomsky's propaganda model for news by circumscribing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. With BuzzFeed News and FiveThirtyEight folding this week, I'm still wondering how the hell do you make money with the news?
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Apr 26, 2023 03:14
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I still subscribe to a physical print newspaper and use AM radio while I am in my car for traffic and weather. Eventually I expect to lose both these options, but I feel this lovely future has failed to provide better alternatives and I have decided to go down with the ship of the old world.
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Apr 26, 2023 13:44
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T Zero posted:I think this is an interesting dilemma. And I actually do kinda agree with twitter's stance on labeling outlets NPR as "government" funded, though NPR obviously has a few layers of abstraction and isn't as directly funded as, say, Al Jazeera. On one hand, if you have media funded by a democratic government, you can have outlets with a public service mission at their core. On the other, it can be an even greater instrument of Chomsky's propaganda model for news by circumscribing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Technically 538 didn't fold, The Glorious and Venerated Disney Corporation hollowed it out and retained the brand name for ????????????????? As far as making money goes? The major players rely on ads. Those scammy "buy gold now before the economy collapses (this time for real real!!!!) because it never loses value!!!" ads? Those cover FOX Business News's operating costs and then some.
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Apr 26, 2023 13:51
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It's really no joke how the revenue backbone of conservative media is paranoid scam poo poo, you can rate the conservative conservativeyness of a site on a scaled percentage of how many of the ads feature: biblical end times books bakkers buckets style emergency rations chicken little alternative currency metal Alex Jones skin reddening pills twelve signs you are having a heart attack right now tactical milspec diaper rash creme coffee but more patriotic-er The FDA Has Not Verified This One Weird "trick" To Cure Your Blood Pressure (doctors hate him!) Like a hallmark movie but it's about surviving woke death squads as a Christian family ...and more! Like it's legitimately a revenue lifeline, having the dumbest most paranoid motherfuckers on their sites 24/7 doing ad clickthrough on conman survive the apocalypse cd instructional sets
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Apr 26, 2023 14:05
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Staluigi posted:tactical milspec diaper rash creme 
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Apr 26, 2023 14:07
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Yeah, I don’t really have an answer to the problems of journalism funding. Part of the problem is that basically all funding models are potentially corrupting in their own way. The problems with advertiser and government funding, as well as the patronage of a “benevolent” individual rich person, are obvious, but what we’ve surprisingly learned over the past few years is that reader funding can have unhealthy effects too. People sometimes talk about the “audience capture” that afflicts Substack types, where the journalist’s worldview becomes more and more aligned with the worldviews of his readers. People like this are sometimes called “grifters,” and maybe that’s not wrong, but the really horrible thing is that I think most of them aren’t even consciously aware that they’re grifting; people are very good at convincing themselves that something that benefits them financially is morally or factually right.
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Apr 26, 2023 15:22
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Silver2195 posted:Yeah, I don’t really have an answer to the problems of journalism funding. Part of the problem is that basically all funding models are potentially corrupting in their own way. The problems with advertiser and government funding, as well as the patronage of a “benevolent” individual rich person, are obvious, but what we’ve surprisingly learned over the past few years is that reader funding can have unhealthy effects too. People sometimes talk about the “audience capture” that afflicts Substack types, where the journalist’s worldview becomes more and more aligned with the worldviews of his readers. People like this are sometimes called “grifters,” and maybe that’s not wrong, but the really horrible thing is that I think most of them aren’t even consciously aware that they’re grifting; people are very good at convincing themselves that something that benefits them financially is morally or factually right. Yeah, the layout of Substack is...well it's something. On the one hand, you've got someone like the aforementioned Chris Hedges - he's got a long, storied career of journalistic and activist work from reporting on-the-ground during our illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to teaching basic literacy and drama/theater/writing to incarcerated people. He's been featured on Democracy Now!, he's been a Keynote Speaker at the International Festival of Authors, been featured on VICE, and has been ejected from both The New York Times and is a defrocked minister. Love him or hate him, the man is a credentialed, experienced professional. And then there's the rest of Substack. The Greenwalds, Taibbis, the absolute bottom of the dredge barrel people with takes (note here I'm specifically not using the term 'journalist', rather, portraying these figures as 'take artists'). You can take someone like Hedges and very easily show that he has had the same consistent set of beliefs as an anti-war NYT reporter as he does as a  Russian Disinformation Agent after most of the US imperialist media turned on him and forced them out of their reputable spaces (like they did with Tara Reade!).
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Apr 26, 2023 15:34
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Perhaps what we are experiencing is a return to the mean, and what we should do rather than vitiate against the death of a single mass narrative is to embrace the bunkerization and compartmentalization of news into whatever hearsay is shared among our close groups of affiliates, our echo-chambers. That's essentially what we ran on for ages - in our villages and tribes - before the rise of mass literacy and newspapers, and perhaps the rise of small group-chats on all forms of social media is a return to that.
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Apr 26, 2023 15:39
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Necrobama posted:Yeah, the layout of Substack is...well it's something. I’m not super familiar with Hedges specifically, but I think the general distinction you’re drawing is thinner than you think. Seymour Hersh, for instance, was definitely a genuine anti-war investigative journalist back in the day, but is clearly a crank at this point. In general, I think a lot of investigative-journalism-adjacent people need active editors to push back against them occasionally and make them do more to verify what their sources are telling them.
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Apr 26, 2023 15:47
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DrSunshine posted:Perhaps what we are experiencing is a return to the mean, and what we should do rather than vitiate against the death of a single mass narrative is to embrace the bunkerization and compartmentalization of news into whatever hearsay is shared among our close groups of affiliates, our echo-chambers. That's essentially what we ran on for ages - in our villages and tribes - before the rise of mass literacy and newspapers, and perhaps the rise of small group-chats on all forms of social media is a return to that. Stanford published a wonderful little piece about this, and it's something that Neil Postman wrote about profusely. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/technorealism/glut.html quote:Growing apace with society's burgeoning Internet usage is the increasing volume of information posted online. This volume of information has grown exponentially, resulting in an information overload. This excess of information is a primary example of the Law of Diminishing Returns in action: the more information available to us, the more apathetic we are to it. According to David Shenk's work Data Smog, "the glut of information no longer adds to our quality of life, but instead begins to cultivate stress, confusion, and even ignorance." Postman is most widely known for the infinitely-memetic comic that was floating around on the internet years ago which, imo, is still very prescient today: (Note that the comic itself is credited to the artist, but the material comes from the foreword of Amusing Ourselves to Death  Silver2195 posted:Seymour Hersh, for instance, was definitely a genuine anti-war investigative journalist back in the day, but is clearly a crank at this point. How so? By what objective metric? If it's "clear" that he's just a crank, then you should be able to provide something other than the very fact that he's pushing against mainstream/state dept aligned narratives to paint the picture.
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Apr 26, 2023 15:49
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Edit: Overly snide remark was here that I thought better of. I’m sorry.
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Apr 26, 2023 15:51
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Silver2195 posted:I’m sorry, but if you need to ask, you’re a crank too. Please be willing to engage in good faith discussion with your fellow D&D posters 
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Apr 26, 2023 15:51
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Necrobama posted:Please be willing to engage in good faith discussion with your fellow D&D posters You’re right; I should have been more substantive. Hersh has made some very specific and easily disproved claims (that a ship was used to carry out a bombing when it was verifiably somewhere else at the time, for instance) that suggest he’s uncritically repeating sources that are simply making things up.
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Apr 26, 2023 15:57
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The Texas Tribune has a good model for successful journalism, but I don't know how replicable it is. It's online only, and it got seeded from million-dollar donations from a number of people, and gets ongoing funding through donations from readers, foundations, and corporations. It seems like they employ a lot of fresh-out-of-J-school reporters, which obviously keeps overhead low, and I don't know how they structure benefits. One of the big issues at the legacy papers were huge real estate footprints for their staff and printing operations and generous pension plans that became untenable as healthcare costs went way up and advertising revenue went way down. Why I'm not confident that it's replicable is that the philanthropy-supported model is only going to have so much capacity. Texas is the second biggest state, with enough political business to warrant a full-time outlet dedicated to the statehouse. But the other big papers, the Houston Chronicle, SAEN, DMN, etc. are either consolidating state bureaus or cutting staff. I also think that relying on cheap, inexperienced labor is, as ever, going to have consequences at some point. It also came out at the same time the big papers were gutting bureaus so the Trib had a good combo of content, timing, and labor-availability. For local news, I think you're going to continue to see conglomerations of weekly and small daily town papers, both through traditional outlets - such as the Houston Chronicle buying up all the papers in the various towns surrounding Houston and running them centrally- and through private conglomerations like Community Impact, because you can centralize a lot of news production in these arenas. If a county has four papers and all of them send a reporter to the monthly Commissioner's Court meeting, you are going to have four people write the exact same story. Cheaper to have one guy write the story and run it in four papers. The future I think is going to be more of the same, I don't think there's a secret model to delivering quality journalism at low cost. I think part of the problem is the sub-or-nothing paradigm, more often than not I want to read just one article but don't want to mess with a subscription. Maybe a industry-recognized third-party wallet app where you can put some money in and you get charged a quarter or whatever per article, kind of like how you can just buy a single newspaper out of a kiosk without signing up for a full year of home delivery. Most people are willing to pay a reasonable amount for a good product if you make it easy to do so. For myself, I pay for Wapo, NYT, The Atlantic, one or two substacks at any given time, DMN, Houston Chronicle and yes even the execrable Austin American Statesman, even though they never remember my login. But I am guided to these stories almost exclusively through twitter, I don't go to the Chronicle homepage everyday over a cup of coffee like it's 1988 again.
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Apr 26, 2023 17:47
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Because of the glut of information we generally don't read more then headlines. What's hilariously tragic is that Journalists got addicted to and started posting on the thing that hastened the demise of American media more then anything else, Twitter. It turns out in the modern world we don't want the deeper story especially if you have to pay for it and journalists were all too happy to give away the most important parts for free.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:14
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Silver2195 posted:I’m not super familiar with Hedges specifically, but I think the general distinction you’re drawing is thinner than you think. Seymour Hersh, for instance, was definitely a genuine anti-war investigative journalist back in the day, but is clearly a crank at this point. In general, I think a lot of investigative-journalism-adjacent people need active editors to push back against them occasionally and make them do more to verify what their sources are telling them. This is why I think it's really important to preserve news outlets as institutions rather than aggregations of individual reporters. Editors protect reporters from their worst impulses and channel them toward their best. Recall that Hersh's My Lai and Abu Ghraib reporting came at the New Yorker. Institutions do bring their own biases, but those can be useful too. There was some chatter recently that NYT had an institutional line was hostile to tech and Silicon Valley, but I think it was a useful corrective to the fawning coverage in the rest of the media of Zuck, Elizabeth Holmes, Musk, etc. at the time. OTOH, Iraq. Conversely, when "brand name" reporters strike out on their own in places like substack, they often see the quality of their work deteriorate and devolve into litigating petty grievances. zoux posted:
I think this a la carte model is a really interesting idea. Or maybe a cable TV model where you get access to a package of news outlets for a fixed rate. I'm curious: For you (and anyone reading), what do you think is a reasonable amount of money to spend on news media, say on a monthly basis?
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Apr 27, 2023 02:35
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LionYeti posted:Because of the glut of information we generally don't read more then headlines. What's hilariously tragic is that Journalists got addicted to and started posting on the thing that hastened the demise of American media more then anything else, Twitter. It turns out in the modern world we don't want the deeper story especially if you have to pay for it and journalists were all too happy to give away the most important parts for free. Yeah, giving it away for free is a big detriment. The other thing being that news is meant to be shared and journalists really want spread info and that's kinda antithetical to being subscription locked. I really don't think a donation based pay as you read is going to be sufficient for anything but the most meager operating costs. What I really hope is that they can leverage the eyeballs they have, if a journalist has to hawk Raid Shadow Legends, so be it. What that would require is some kind of platform amenable to that. I'm not sure how much Wikipedia is making from donations, but it can't be on par with the value it provides, and I think journalists would be worse off than that.
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Apr 27, 2023 16:08
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WarpedLichen posted:if a journalist has to hawk Raid Shadow Legends, so be it. What?
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Apr 27, 2023 16:18
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T Zero posted:This is why I think it's really important to preserve news outlets as institutions rather than aggregations of individual reporters. Editors protect reporters from their worst impulses and channel them toward their best. Recall that Hersh's My Lai and Abu Ghraib reporting came at the New Yorker. Institutions do bring their own biases, but those can be useful too. There was some chatter recently that NYT had an institutional line was hostile to tech and Silicon Valley, but I think it was a useful corrective to the fawning coverage in the rest of the media of Zuck, Elizabeth Holmes, Musk, etc. at the time. OTOH, Iraq. Well, I probably already pay way more than what people think is reasonable, but that's just an ethical consideration for me because I don't like sneaking around paywalls (though I confess, I do fail myself from time to time). For most people the amount is "zero" and that's the problem. If you look at any paywalled article, posted on twitter, the replies are full of people that are actually indignant that they might be asked to pay for it. This is not limited to news but any public service: people want comprehensive and robust programs and they are not wiling to pay a dime for them. The post-Ben Franklin-Era journalism model has always been reliant on ads, you won't go far off if you described every newspaper as an ad magazine that has news stories to entice people to read the ads. There's a reason the industry refers to the article-dedicated portions of page layouts as "the news hole". All our free- or low-cost entertainment is subsidized by companies through ads, and they always have been. That's why streaming is in such a crisis right now, there's a growing school of thought that there is no sub-based model that can be profitable at a price point people will accept. It's why WB is gutting their catalog and shunting their popular properties onto ad-supported streaming platforms. Now, David Zaslav might be wrong, but without the absurd largesse out of the endless pockets of US corporations - who are paying for something with a benefit that no one has ever been able to quantify - every previously ad-supported industry has struggled to switch to a different model. Whether that's platforms that started out as sub-supported burning through VC or platforms who had their ad space eaten up by Google and FB, we just don't have anything that can replicate the insane funds companies are willing to shovel into marketing. zoux fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 16:30
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I helped stand up a detailed media literacy thread that is probably going to be very helpful for this topic if you don't want it to get trolled into the ground.T Zero posted:Be honest: Where is the first place you usually hear about news? Facebook? Twitter? Your groupchat? Or do you actually pick up the paper every morning? T Zero posted:How do you support people doing the kinds of journalism you find valuable? T Zero posted:Do you pay for any forms of media? Why? Or if you used to, what made you stop paying? T Zero posted:What's an obscure or non-mainstream source of news you found to be useful or reliable? T Zero posted:Should there be government funding for media a la BBC? Or a bailout for ailing local news outlets? T Zero posted:How do you think the news media industry will actually shake out over the coming years? DrSunshine posted:Perhaps what we are experiencing is a return to the mean, and what we should do rather than vitiate against the death of a single mass narrative is to embrace the bunkerization and compartmentalization of news into whatever hearsay is shared among our close groups of affiliates, our echo-chambers. That's essentially what we ran on for ages - in our villages and tribes - before the rise of mass literacy and newspapers, and perhaps the rise of small group-chats on all forms of social media is a return to that. This would be catastrophic. There is in fact an objective external reality and descending into culturally mediated relativism does great harm to our ability to function. The sharing and spread of truthful information is necessary to society. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 23:59
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Discendo Vox posted:This would be catastrophic. There is in fact an objective external reality and descending into culturally mediated relativism does great harm to our ability to function. The sharing and spread of truthful information is necessary to society. I'm playing Devil's Advocate here a bit, so please forgive me, but let's pick this apart a bit. How would it do great harm? Or rather, how is journalism per se necessarily the conveyor of truth? That is to say - why is it assumed that journalism has a one to one correspondence to truth? On the converse end, what is the actual relevance or significance of knowing a truthful fact about something which is out of the power of the knower to influence? Say for example, you live in France, and on Le Monde, you learn about a grain silo explosion in Nebraska - the largest grain silo explosion in recorded history. It's a truthful bit of information, but barely has any relevance to you except a momentary glimmer of interest.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:52
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Just thought I’d mention Flat Earth News as a great book to read about the determination of the UK media. It essentially lays out how every portion of the UK media has shrunk massively, with the number of journalists decreasing, local news organisations dying, the amount of print that each journalist needs to produce increasing, etc contributing to a situation where there is little genuine journalism it much regurgitating of AP articles and opinion pieces. Although I don’t believe it says so explicitly, I think the obvious conclusion is that journalism is fairly incompatible with capitalism if the point of jour alien is to produce relevant truthful news about the world.
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Apr 28, 2023 21:28
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DrSunshine posted:I'm playing Devil's Advocate here a bit, so please forgive me, but let's pick this apart a bit. How would it do great harm? Or rather, how is journalism per se necessarily the conveyor of truth? That is to say - why is it assumed that journalism has a one to one correspondence to truth? I am not remotely interested in entertaining explicitly bad faith bullshit about whether or not truthfulness has value, again. I linked an entire thread of trying to push back against that garbage. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 29, 2023 00:02
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DrSunshine posted:On the converse end, what is the actual relevance or significance of knowing a truthful fact about something which is out of the power of the knower to influence? Say for example, you live in France, and on Le Monde, you learn about a grain silo explosion in Nebraska - the largest grain silo explosion in recorded history. It's a truthful bit of information, but barely has any relevance to you except a momentary glimmer of interest.
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Apr 29, 2023 05:08
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Discendo Vox posted:I am not remotely interested in entertaining explicitly bad faith bullshit about whether or not truthfulness has value, again. I linked an entire thread of trying to push back against that garbage. Dude you have a Glenn Greenwald avatar, you think you're qualified to determine bad faith argumentation? Come on. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 29, 2023 11:49
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Necrobama posted:Dude you have a Glenn Greenwald avatar, you think you're qualified to determine bad faith argumentation? I assume he didn’t buy that for himself, lol.
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Apr 29, 2023 13:16
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Silver2195 posted:I assume he didn’t buy that for himself, lol. 
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Apr 29, 2023 15:22
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Necrobama posted:Dude you have a Glenn Greenwald avatar, you think you're qualified to determine bad faith argumentation? In the dedicated subforum of bad-faith arguments and lovely-rear end red text avatar gifters, you think D.V. of all people bought a Glenn Greenwald avatar?  (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 29, 2023 18:10
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Sundae posted:In the dedicated subforum of bad-faith arguments and lovely-rear end red text avatar gifters, you think D.V. of all people bought a Glenn Greenwald avatar? Sorry, I guess I should keep a weird postingenemies.xlsx file like cinci did 
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Apr 29, 2023 18:25
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DrSunshine posted:I'm playing Devil's Advocate here a bit, so please forgive me, but let's pick this apart a bit. How would it do great harm? Or rather, how is journalism per se necessarily the conveyor of truth? That is to say - why is it assumed that journalism has a one to one correspondence to truth? They're right that objective truth exists but their philosophy assumes humans can perceive and then relay that objective truth. I'd disagree, any information passed through a human will be biased by that human. There are no objective journalists. There are no objective humans.
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Apr 29, 2023 18:31
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Necrobama posted:Yeah, the layout of Substack is...well it's something. Right-wing media is fairly clustered - in terms of TV, for instance, there's Fox News, Newsmax, and...that's pretty much it. Everything else is consumed and staffed by the left-of-center, and for them the biggest contemporary issue in journalism is that readers not only refuse to read information or opinions that contradict their own worldview, but that they believe that anyone writing in this way is illegitimate, should be pilloried and lose their job. The idea that Taibbi and Greenwald aren't journalists, I mean. They've been reporters for decades. They've both written a shelf of books and won numerous awards for their journalism. You can get as angry as you want with their, uh, takes, but by any objective standard, they sure are journalists. I don't read Greenwald, but I'm a longtime Taibbi reader and although I certainly don't agree with every opinion piece he's writing these days (or even most) he is also doing some incredible journalism. The only way to view Taibbi and Greenwald as "bottom of the dredge barrel take artists" is if you have been so poisoned by the hyperbolic Twitter echo chamber that you just refuse to engage with any news or information that could possibly threaten your worldview. And for many outlets, like the NYT and MSNBC, their primary mission has become not to conduct reporting and contextualize facts with a range of interpretive opinion. It's to be a safe, warm cocoon for consumers to reassure themselves that they're already 100% right about everything and that their views have inherent virtue. That isn't journalism, it's masturbation.
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Apr 30, 2023 17:25
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Discendo Vox posted:This would be catastrophic. There is in fact an objective external reality and descending into culturally mediated relativism does great harm to our ability to function. The sharing and spread of truthful information is necessary to society.
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Apr 30, 2023 17:31
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cat botherer posted:And journalists at institutions with the proper gravitas somehow are far less prone to distorting this objective reality with subjective biases and personal/instutional incentives than anyone else, am I right? Maybe? Though it depends on which "institutions with the proper gravitas" you mean. There are degrees of gravitas, and institutions can shift in weight, so to speak (I don't regard the current BBC as highly as I do the BBC of a few years back, for example). And of course some outlets are more useful for some subject areas than others. I take for granted that in almost any news story, even at a generally "good" outlet (say, the Washington Post), there's at least one substantial "fact" that an eyewitness or subject matter expert would point out is wrong, although it can be difficult to remember this principle when reading a given story (the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" problem). The general gist of the story is at least 80% likely to be accurate - but the headline doesn't always accurately convey the general gist of the story! At the same time, even that level of benefit of the doubt is considerably more than we should give, say, the National Enquirer or modern Newsweek. I tend to assume that any surprising claim made by such publications is false unless a more reputable publication confirms it. (I'm speaking for myself rather than Vox here, obviously.)
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Apr 30, 2023 18:30
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:I really like this post because it illustrates that the issue with readers actually tends to cut in the other direction. Chris Hedges both was fed false informants and unwittingly published that Iraq was working on biological and chemical weapons. He's been working with RT since 2016. Every name listed is both a journalist and a take artist. To some degree every journalist is just a person with a take. Even the most non-biased is working on the idea that whatever they're reporting is important enough that you should know about it.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:14
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:The only way to view Taibbi and Greenwald as "bottom of the dredge barrel take artists" is if you have been so poisoned by the hyperbolic Twitter echo chamber that you just refuse to engage with any news or information that could possibly threaten your worldview. Or you're just mainly colored by what they've done lately. Both of them began their shift from reporting to other kinds of journalistic work around 2014ish, both with an increased focus on punditry, and both embarrassed themselves with their reporting in the last couple of years. KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:And for many outlets, like the NYT and MSNBC, their primary mission has become not to conduct reporting and contextualize facts with a range of interpretive opinion. It's to be a safe, warm cocoon for consumers to reassure themselves that they're already 100% right about everything and that their views have inherent virtue. That isn't journalism, it's masturbation. It's much easier to recognize shameless pandering to audiences other than yourself, but it's pretty close to a universal phenomenon. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 03:58 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 03:55
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One might argue that being out-reported on the Russiagate hoax by a lovely transphobic moron like Greenwald an embarrassment to (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) Necrobama fucked around with this message at 05:14 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 05:06
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Necrobama posted:One might argue that being out-reported on the Russiagate hoax by a lovely transphobic moron like Greenwald an embarrassment to The Guardian rather than to the reporter they kicked to the curb for doubting the official Russiagate narrative but I'm guessing I'm probably dealing with folks that still believe that Russia Did Trump 2016 so I'm not sure there's really any worth in pursuing that argument. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Greenwald left the Guardian on good terms to found what ended up being the Intercept, years before Trump even announced he was running for president.
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May 1, 2023 05:12
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Cease to Hope posted:I'm not sure what you're talking about. Greenwald left the Guardian on good terms to found what ended up being the Intercept, years before Trump even announced he was running for president. Yup, you're 100% right on the publication name - that's what I get for posting at the end of a long day of air travel. Mea culpa.
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May 1, 2023 05:13
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