- Gumball Gumption
- Jan 7, 2012
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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.
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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May 10, 2024 12:09
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- Gumball Gumption
- Jan 7, 2012
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I really like this post because it illustrates that the issue with readers actually tends to cut in the other direction.
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.
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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- Gumball Gumption
- Jan 7, 2012
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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?
I'm stuck on the end of this and I really think the question is "can you make money with the news?" And the answer feels like no and also you never could. Profitable newspapers never sold you the news. They sold you a place to publish and read information. The product was their platform of the newspaper and the internet has superseded that in a lot of ways. Now that advertisers have many more options and the platform itself is free they're back to selling just the news and that doesn't sell.
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May 2, 2023 16:03
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- Gumball Gumption
- Jan 7, 2012
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Ideally, twitter and the substack notes/mastadon/bluesky clones would harness the current moment to try out a bunch of different monetization models.
Good point, though I think "never sold you the news" may be overstating it. If you look at some "pure news" products out there, namely industry trade journals, business intelligence, and newswires, those can be pretty stable and profitable, depending on the sector. They depend on a dedicated audience willing to pay a premium for information, but those audiences exist. Witness the Bloomberg media empire with its half-dozen subscription products, mostly without ads. And the fact that during emergencies and disasters most newspapers drop their paywalls I think shows that they are selling the news otherwise.
Also, if we expand beyond newspapers, some forms of news media were historically quite profitable. 60 minutes is CBS' most profitable show ever ( https://theweek.com/articles/528690/legacy-60-minutes) . To your point, yes it was likely because it was a great vehicle for ads, but it's the information in the show that gave the platform its value.
Maybe it's useful to frame the question more narrowly - Can you turn a profit selling the news to a general audience? Or, can the news media profitably perform a public service mission? I think you can, but it requires some shielding from the predations of capital:
I think the ongoing WGA writers strike is an interesting parallel. Entertainment companies are also struggling to stay afloat and their writers are trying to cope with changing landscape and business model. I believe WGA also represents some journalists, but I don't believe many of them are involved in the strike.
Yeah, I should be more clear in that I think unbiased news is hard to sell. Biased news and sensationalism sells. 60 minutes is honestly a good example of that since so much of their success was built on being an exciting hard hitting news investigation show compared to the stately news programs of the time. And for everything they get right they seem to have a pile of sensationalist panics to balance it out. They're famously one of the catalysts for the satanic panic in the 1980s.
The success of print journalism as we think of it was their control of the platform and otherwise if we look at news it's hard to sell unbiased and unspecialized news.
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May 4, 2023 06:32
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Apr 29, 2023 18:31
