> To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity.
This completely ignores the fact that - in the US at least - many newspapers started as organs of the local political parties. They always wanted to get their news out to their people. Then it went into full fledged "yellow journalism" that was all about the headline and engaging emotions vs objectivity.. which should sound familiar. And that was the late 1800s!
Around 50-60 years ago, as "mass market" became a thing and ad revenue exploded, newspapers and journalism as a whole veered towards objectivity because the local furniture store wanted to advertise to everyone not just one party. But if you read interviews, memoirs, notes, and the like of the journalists for that era, their stated goal for being a journalist was "to change the world." We can debate the specifics of what that means but it's not interchangeable with "neutral observer and reporter of facts."
Like many things, this appears to be a pendulum and it's swung from neutrality/objectivity back towards the opinion-based, light on facts approach for now.
How long we stay there and the consequences are yet to be determined..
Philosophically even truth is an opinion. There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from. Say you cover news about a certain group but don't cover news from another group. Or you report the facts only in the rhetoric of commonly held norms, like so and so nation committed atrocities, while our nation bombed insurgents backed by so and so and accidentally killed a bunch of children. You always report in frame even if done objectively, otherwise your journalism would be considered inflammatory and you would find yourself without a job. So yes there is pure propaganda, etc, but in general news is propaganda of stuff as they, whoever they may be, want you to know it.
If you want real news, then go to the country they are talking about and observe it for yourself. You will find things a lot more mundane than they are made out to be for the vast majority of people living there, until that passive propaganda gets them bombed or economic sanctions destroy their livelihoods. The justification of which is made in the objective reporting, even if journalists don't want to change they do so every time they report something. It's in the nature of the frame and the rhetoric they are writing from.
> There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from.
Nah.
“If someone tells you that there is no truth, they are telling you not to believe them. So don’t” - Idr who this is a quote from.
The claim that there is no truth is a pointless one. Well, it is pointless to believe*. There may be uses to making the claim.
*exception: if someone can observe your innermost beliefs and is threatening that if you don’t believe it, then they will do something you don’t want, then it could be worthwhile. But that’s true of any belief.
We're just meat bags with terrible sensory perception and reasoning skills. This is the reason I am more open to claims of "no reality" and the like. Plato's cave but no one sees the whole picture
The claim “we cannot ever know anything with absolute perfect certainty” is a quite different statement than “nothing is true”.
Even “we aren’t able to properly conceptualize any true statements” is, while not plausible, is still better than “nothing is true”. (It may be that many things we think are true are fundamentally confused/slightly-nonsensical in ways that we can’t correct by virtue of how our thought processes work, but I don’t consider it plausible that nothing we can believe is entirely true.)
> “If someone tells you that there is no truth, they are telling you not to believe them. So don’t” - Idr who this is a quote from.
Look at the number 9, now if I tell you that it's in fact the number 6 and you are looking at it wrong. Who are you going to believe. Now imagine it's something much much more complicated and there is no time to write out all the facts that would let us conclude that it could be a 9 or a 6. Am I lying to you by telling you it's a 6? Am I not lying by omission? How can you not lie without omission, if you have a limited amount of space to tell a story, any story. Where do you tell the truth. That is to say okay there is truth, but it's only partial and when it comes to reporting it's always partial and therefore not impartial and therefore not objective. Unless by objective you mean you have an objective or an agenda that you are trying to forward with the news, and that's your partial truth.
The problem with this argument is that you are presenting truth and falsity as a binary quantity. While it's correct that there is no statement free of bias, it does not follow that all statements are equally biased. Fox news seems pretty darn biased to me. The NY times is less biased, but it's definitely slipped a lot.
Okay, in grey areas there is even more room for telling partial truths. If something objective as a number can lead to a valid disagreement, then what hope do we have for complicated political issues. To me in the end it breaks down into complicated power relations.
We can tell whichever shade of grey that we want to tell that those who are listening to us what to hear in the frame and the rhetoric which appeals to them. Fox news is biased to tell the partial truth of a certain demographic which feels empowered by that rhetoric. If more people believe reality as told by Fox News it gives them more power within the system to get whatever they think it is that they want. Currently they are going after Cuomo, a democrat, in the sidebars there are criticisms of cancel culture.
Yes I know the difference, I was making a point, you can still know what you are saying but not say everything that needs to be said in order to fit the definition, in fact I am arguing that if you are telling a story, and not writing a book, you can't fit that definition.
That's the great thing about math: It doesn't care how sincerely you believe that 6 and 9 are the same number. In other words, the kind of game you're talking about can only go on for so long before cold reality makes itself known.
Everyone is talking around in circles here about what truth means and how journalists should handle bias. Truth in terms of journalism means, is this a story made of facts that would benefit the average citizen without regard to physical and social factors vs is this a story that skews or withholds facts for the benefit of a small group of elites with an outsized influence.
Average citizen of only your country belonging to the majority, I guess that's what you mean, because the content of the news these days could be very dangerous if you are not a citizen of the country doing the reporting. And if you belong to a minority from a country or an ethnicity that is not favoured it could be even more biased against people's perception of you as a person.
That's exactly right and journalistic standards have been a reflection of the zeitgeist, for better or worse. It's never tended to be fair to those who have no power at all. Historically, the fairness and honesty part has skewed more towards the white middle class, shifting to the upper white middle class. The window has been shifting more toward the upper end. It's almost in the realm of competing propaganda.
> The truth is an ideal and when we pursue that ideal, things go well. When we stop pursuing it, we get "post-journalism".
My response to that is that this idea is subterfuge for resolving complicating political problems with propaganda rather than by proper system design. We are in this situation, because propaganda has lost its power over the masses after 100 years. We need better ways to resolve problems that appealing to ideals while a select elite push their agenda on the people who accept it unquestioningly. In many ways our methods of dealing with this has been akin to religion, which also appeals to religious ideals to gloss over real issues and silence them.
I don't think propaganda has lost its power. To me its more powerful than ever. For a different example, look at advertising. It as well is more successful than ever despite people knowing full well what it is, how it works and how it affects them.
The notion that we can replace ideals with "proper systems design" is called Positivism. We've tried it, and variants like Marxism. None of them work.
Humans are limited animals. Enlightenment ideals, which are (yes) secularized religions concepts, are the best we've been able to do so far. Maybe at some point in the future we'll be able to do better but I'm not holding my breath.
Except when some humans which at the time were more backwards than the leaders of the world tried, they were simply shut down using propaganda and force. So as to deem what they were attempting to do completely feeble... mostly due to them being against this secular religion. It was in many ways a religious war in idealized secular terms. Therefore I would argue that no actual attempt has been made, because the power structure likes it this way. Their secular religious clergy does well for themselves in it and they don't want revolutions to change it. Not that it can't be done. No one has been allowed to actually try in good faith.
> Two weeks after the Cotton controversy, the Times published an essay by Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize–winning black reporter, titled “A Reckoning over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists.” Equating objectivity with “whiteness,” Lowery called for “moral clarity, which will require both editors and reporters to stop doing things like reflexively hiding behind euphemisms to obfuscate the truth.” The Trump administration and the Republican Party, Lowery urged, should be labeled as what they are: a “refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies.” In the post-Bennet moment of post-journalism, editors at the paper were inclined to agree.
Traditional liberals that think it’s just Republican ideas that will be denounced as pernicious “whiteness” are in for a rude surprise. I saw this quite starkly this summer. Liberal city dwellers in Chicago and Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods, but being too afraid to say anything openly. It seems to have passed, but for a spell, near-universal beliefs about the necessity for order in a civil society became something many were too afraid to support for fear of being lumped together with Trump supporters.
> Liberal city dwellers in Chicago and Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods
I'm a long-time urban Philadelphia resident who spent almost the entirety of the unrest this past summer listening to police scanners on Broadcastify (except when they were blocked). I also consumed almost all available (edit: local) media coverage. I read r/philadelphia at least daily.
The only automobile arsons I am at all aware of during these periods were of police cars. There were indeed several of them, over an extended period of time. But I am not aware of any private vehicle arsons. Even building arsons weren't very common. They were almost always done in a moronic attempt to hide evidence of other crimes (e.g. looting).
So how many people in Philadelphia texted you pictures of cars on fire? Whose cars were they? What neighborhoods were they outside of? When did these acts of arson occur?
Chicago was a nightmare during the unrest this summer, and the violence was not confined to the Mag Mile; they trashed food stores on the west side, where the nearest grocery stores were miles away. Buildings were set on fire. I don't know about specific car arsons, but car arsons are less unusual than building arsons here, so I wouldn't be at all surprised.
"Very bad shit didn't happen in Chicago this summer" would not be a good hill to die on. From your comment downthread, I assume you just mean to say you think it wasn't that bad in Philly.
It also was very difficult to talk about it at the time; there was a loud (though, I think, Very Online) strain of political thought saying that the violence was a good thing, and that criticism of the violence was "dictating to people how to protest". That the violence wasn't coming from the protesters at all was beside the point.
I had a call with a bank in Chicago where they apologized for not being able to do [a thing the McKenzie family needed done] because their branch was closed. I asked if they had closed again due to covid-19, because the site said that that branch had re-opened.
They said "Oh, no. We're back to WFH because our branched was torched."
I don't want to point fingers at the bank for social reasons, but I was flabbergasted, given that it is not in part of the city where a bank would consider itself at obvious risk during a suspension of the general prohibition against breaking into banks.
I don't know about what happened in Chicago. I'll take everybody's word for it that it was worse than Philly.
I wasn't quite able to articulate this last night, but the original comment I was replying to implies that random white people were subjected to arson, and that it was done retributively - because they were white.
If that happened in Chicago, I hadn't heard about it and I'm not particularly interested in arguing about it.
But, as I said in my other comment, nothing of the sort happened in Philly.
The cars on fire were in Chicago. Arsons were up 65% in Chicago in 2020: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/2/26/22300843/chicago-burn.... I don't know why you think police vehicles don't count. 8 government vehicles were set on fire in just one day in Chicago last summer.
And it wasn't just cars (which I'm just using as an example):
> Dozens of convenience stores and retail shops were hit by arsonists, along with five department stores, five groceries, two churches, a currency exchange, a car dealership, a bank, a bar, a barbershop, a carwash and a drugstore. Most of those fires were set on May 31 and June 1.
Why are you answering my questions about Philadelphia with a link and a quote about Chicago?
I directly quoted your comment. You said "Liberal city dwellers in ... Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods"
That quote can only be read as suggesting that multiple random vehicles were set on fire. If you meant police cars, why didn't you say that? Why would anyone anywhere have to "discretely" text you photos of a burning cop car? It was widely covered - live, in real time - by local and national media!
Please read the essay [0] before reacting to some out-of-context quotes. The essay is about the problem wherein "objectivity" is itself not an objective thing, but wherein the hegemony opinion is taken as fact.
Let me extract a relevant passage for you:
> Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity, the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses. And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers. On opinion pages, the contours of acceptable public debate have largely been determined through the gaze of white editors.
> The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral. When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded or robbed of new opportunities.
Another passage:
> For years, I’ve been among a chorus of mainstream journalists who have called for our industry to abandon the appearance of objectivity as the aspirational journalistic standard, and for reporters instead to focus on being fair and telling the truth, as best as one can, based on the given context and available facts.
And:
> And so, instead of promising our readers that we will never, on any platform, betray a single personal bias — submitting ourselves to a life sentence of public thoughtlessness — a better pledge would be an assurance that we will devote ourselves to accuracy, that we will diligently seek out the perspectives of those with whom we personally may be inclined to disagree and that we will be just as sure to ask hard questions of those with whom we’re inclined to agree.
> The best of our profession already does this. But we need to be honest about the gulf that lies between the best and the bulk.
And:
> It’s been more than 50 years since the first black journalists appeared in mainstream American newsrooms. For all of that time, black journalists have made meager demands: Please hire some more of us. Please pay us the way you do our colleagues. Please allow us to ascend to leadership roles. Please consider our opinions about how accurate and fair coverage of all communities, especially our own, can be achieved.
> Collectively, the industry has responded to generations of black journalists with indifference at best and open hostility at its frequent worst.
Finally, as for the claim that the Republican party is a "refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies"... well, it is. Does that mean Republicans are all inherently racist? Of course not. But since the 00s, the % of racist Republicans has increased compared to the % of racist Democrats [1], although racism seems to be generally declining under both parties.
Anecdotally, Republicans tend to favor non-interventionist domestic policy, which in turn tends to allow the end products of racism (urban poverty, discrimination) to continue. Also anecdotally, the people I know who are the least interested in undoing the evils caused by slavery and segregation are also the most Republican. It's not overtly "white supremacist", but it is absolutely a failure to acknowledge just how evil and harmful the historical white supremacism of the USA really was... and that's just talking about the evils levied on the descendants of African slaves. We'll have to discuss the overt genocide of Native Americans another time.
Edit: the author goes into detail about the Cotton editorial situation as well. You might be surprised to learn that there can be multiple perspectives on a situation.
I’m familiar with the article, and I don’t think the quotes are out of context or unrepresentative. I agree with Lowery’s high-level point. Objectivity is aspirational, and reporters can’t help but color their reporting with their personal experiences. When Black and brown people are underrepresented in the profession, the pretense of “objectivity” can amount to a gloss on the facts from predominantly white reporters. I agree with all of that, and the solution is to hire more Black and brown reporters.
Where Lowery goes wrong is espousing “moral clarity” and “the truth” as the goal of reporting rather than objectivity. When Lowery talks about “the truth” he means “The Truth.” That doesn’t mean propaganda or naked partisanship. But it does imply the application of the reporter’s moral framework to synthesize “The Truth” from the uncontested facts.
He clear illustration of this lies further down in the article: “Moral clarity would insist that politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes — however cleverly — be labeled such with clear language and unburied evidence.”
How do you apply this rule in practice? Whether something is a “racist trope” is a characterization, not objective truth. The New York Times itself has published quite a stark illustration of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”
> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.
> These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.
The progressive pollsters who conducted the study above considered the rhetoric above as “obviously racist and divisive.” A typical New York Times reporter shares the same ideological framework, and would characterize that rhetoric as such. Under Lowery’s approach, she would report that as “the truth.”
But that’s not “the truth.” It’s a characterization under a particular moral framework. My mom (a Muslim immigrant from a country with lots of crime and political instability) would consider the Trumpian statement to be common sense. And according to the survey data, so would most people of color. What a reporter following Lowery’s approach would report as “the truth” would in fact be a falsity to most of the people affected by the statements.
That’s the basic problem with the approach Lowery espouses. It frees reporters to apply their own moral frameworks (which are not necessarily widely shared) to the neutral facts to derive “the truth.”
I also can’t help but point out that when Lowery talks about “Black and brown” viewpoints, he means “some Black and brown viewpoints.” At the end of the day, the white liberals in charge of the times aren’t going to hire reporters to write from the point of view of religious conservative Black and brown people (who are the majority). I’m an immigrant from a Muslim country and I am reading many Muslim reporters now in the Times, etc. But none of them sound like my mom. They almost uniformly hold white progressive moral views, many of which would be totally rejected by nearly all Muslims. A third of Muslims voted for Trump in 2020. You’ll never hear from them in the Times.
This selective amplification is a bigger problem under Lowery’s approach. The Times hires say Muslim reporters to provide more of the point of view of “brown people” and encourages them to apply their moral framework to synthesize facts into “the truth.” But the ones the paper hires have views that are actually unrepresentative of Muslims. So what exactly is the end product?
As to the point about the Republican Party—calling it a “refuge for white supremacists” goes beyond your narrow observation. It’s also statistically true that almost all American communists will vote Democrat. That doesn’t make the worth a “refuge for communists” (although Breitbart likes to characterize it that way to generate outrage).
And that's all fair criticism. Unfortunately it isn't what your first post said. I responded to what you said, which was mostly quoting TFA which was in turn twisting Lowery's words to make it look like he said something that he didn't say.
Edit: I will add, however, that there is still merit in Lowery's message. If we can't have real objective truth, let's at least hear the black truth, because we already hear a lot of the white truth.
Also, "real" communists hate the Democrats for being imperialist neoliberals. Just like how "real" white supremacists hate the Republicans for being big-government charlatans unwilling to stand up for the future of white children.
> And that's all fair criticism. Unfortunately it isn't what your first post said.
It’s consistent with my first post. When reporters are freed to apply their personal moral frameworks to the facts to derive “the truth” it’s not just Republican ideas that will be found wanting.
> If we can't have real objective truth, let's at least hear the black truth, because we already hear a lot of the white truth.
I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that’s not what you’re hearing. For example, only a small minority of white democrats (11%) believe that morality necessarily requires belief in God, while 55% of Black Democrats believe the same thing: https://www.christianpost.com/news/black-democrats-person-mu.... How many New York Time reporters have you read that being a distinctly religious viewpoint to their reporting?
From the perspective of someone from a Muslim country, my perception is that the New York Times definitely doesn’t give you the “Muslim truth” even if it has Muslim writers. Every single Muslim family I know in real life is socially conservative (even if many of them vote Democrat—there is a strong “social liberalism is okay for white people but not in our community” sentiment). I’ve never read a Muslim writer in the New York Times who espoused anything approaching a socially conservative view. So whose truth are you getting?
Much of the rhetoric and power plays echo of the tactics used by socialists (communists) to divide populations (rural vs urban, intellectual vs illiterate, landed vs serf, etc) but to their credit they had a clear objective (to win at all costs) BUT they also had an endgame. They didn’t let this eat themselves (Mao did play with fire here). And once they won, all that nonsense went out the window, the dumb idealist ideologues got the hard boot and everyone else followed or pretended to follow the new realideology to survive. It’s like they don't read history.
I'd encourage you to read my sibling post. It's common knowledge that the "objectivity" practiced by reporters is anything but; but as soon as someone dares to specify that the so-called objective perspective also happens to be white, all of a sudden they're being equated with Mao†. If that's not "white fragility", I don't know what is.
†You're saying Mao played with fire, but you're not acknowledging the other differences between Mao (slaughtered millions of people) and these so-called socialists (who just want racism to end).
There's plenty to criticize about both the modern media landscape and modern "wokeness", but this piece seems more cultural grievance than productive critique.
Personally, when it comes to political journalism, one of my favorite pieces is Jay Rosen's "Why Political Coverage is Broken"[1]. I think it covers specific problems with media coverage in more detail, and provides a better path to restoring trust in news than "be more objective".
Rosen's piece seems like it's taking the opposite position, no? Unless I'm missing something, he's arguing that the media is too neutral, too willing to just report what politicians do rather than taking a stance. One of his examples of bad reporting is describing a candidate's campaign strategies without discussing whether the candidate should win.
(Although I suppose there's also no reason that 2011 Australia and 2021 USA would necessarily have comparable media landscapes.)
Yes and no. If you read other pieces of his, he goes into more detail about how there's a difference between objectivity and partisan neutrality. He calls partisan neutrality the "view from nowhere"---a framing device that divorces politics from its real-world effects.
A good rejoinder to that is from theories of procedural democracy. A press that is neutral as to partisanship is perceived within the overall political framework as being fair, which has the very positive effect of engendering trust in the institution. It’s the same reason why judges and courts strive to avoid the perception of substantive bias.
Politics must be divorced from “its real-world effects” because people of different political persuasions disagree about what real-world effects policies will have (or whether some effects outweigh other effects). A liberal reporting neutral facts about say a proposed immigration policy is still useful to a conservative. A liberal’s take on what they think will be “the real-world effects” of a proposed policy (at least, the ones they care about) will not be useful.
> It’s the same reason why judges and courts strive to avoid the perception of substantive bias.
I see the point that you're trying to make, but I'll also turn it on it's head: when a judge makes a ruling does that mean that they were "biased" in favor of the winning party?
> Politics must be divorced from “its real-world effects”
Does a judge ignore the "real-world effects" of their orders and only consider the behavior of the lawyers?
> A liberal’s take on what they think will be “the real-world effects” of a proposed policy (at least, the ones they care about) will not be useful.
Is a liberal judge's reasoning in an opinion not valuable to a conservative judge?
I get the idea, but I just fundamentally disagree with it. Writers who don't make efforts to maintain partisan neutrality will inevitably leave major gaps in their readers' understanding of the world, because they won't be able to help readers understand perspectives the writers don't personally agree with.
For a concrete example, there was a recent initiative in my state (California Prop 16) which was reasonably unpopular and ended up losing by a 14 point margin. But most journalists strongly favored it, and reported from that perspective - they didn't want to buy into the "view from nowhere". So a lot of my news-consuming friends had no idea there was honest, well-intentioned opposition to it, and to this day I see people argue the voters must have just been confused.
> For a concrete example, there was a recent initiative in my state (California Prop 16) which was reasonably unpopular and ended up losing by a 14 point margin. But most journalists strongly favored it, and reported from that perspective - they didn't want to buy into the "view from nowhere". So a lot of my news-consuming friends had no idea there was honest, well-intentioned opposition to it, and to this day I see people argue the voters must have just been confused.
I think that Rosen would agree that that's bad reporting. Dispensing with the "view from nowhere" isn't about discarding arguments from all but a favored side. It's about discarding "neutral" framing devices that don't inform the reader (such as the "he said/she said" and the "horse race"). "X said A. Y said B" is factual and neutral, but it doesn't help the reader develop a deeper understanding of the parties involved or the topics at hand.
> Traditional newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers.
Hey, it's HN's favorite (if tired) maxim about "if you're not the customer you're the product". I usually think of that applied to Google or startups, not sure why I never made the connection with non-paywalled news sites.
That's what makes the problem so bedeviling. Journalism has been afflicted with the same maximalist, parasitic ideology as every other institution. But other institutions have a couple of paths out: the profit motive has the advantage of being insensitive to ideology, and government has builtin safeguards against lunatic populists like trumpists or the woke.
But journalism can't really take advantage of either of these. The market doesn't steer it towards the socially optimal objective, and independence from the state is a core part of its value.
This article only seems accurate if you’ve never met any average journalists. Your run of the mill reporter is looking to tell an accurate story, nothing more dramatic or interesting then that.
The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories.
Your run of the mill journalist is a dying breed that's viewed as a cost center for the publisher and is not getting the soapbox.
Newspapers have long past turned into media, news is commodified and the value add of the news outlet is opinion. It is inevitable that publishers turn to opinion in an age where facts are free, widely disseminated, and not subject to copyright.
The line between reporting facts and stating opinions has been blurred so much that you've seen revolts in journalism schools (e.g. ASU's Walter Cronkite school) to oust deans that discourage confessional style opinion journalism as they vainly advocate for professionality and objectivity over activism. Activism and emotion is what generates clicks as younger reporters view themselves as crusaders "standing up" for justice in a world of iniquity rather than delivering information about events to the public. The public already can access all the information they need whenever they want. There just isn't that much room for value add in the current age of ubiquitous information.
I don't think it is a conspiracy to say that there is a large self-selection process going on in news that starts with ideology. A person has to pick whether they want to report for HuffingtonPost, Slate, or Breitbart. There isn't a conspiracy because there doesn't have to be one, people self select into their respective hive minds essentially. On your other point, the idea that the average person in news is an unbiased accurate reporter is laughable.
That kind of reporting is almost a niche genre at this point outside of small town papers. Everyone now seems to have a very obvious agenda, and the consumers seem to mainly want news that fits their own agenda. Again this isn't a conspiracy this is just the direction that the market forces took news into. A polarized ideological consumerbase, wants news that matches their polarized politics.
> That kind of reporting is almost a niche genre at this point outside of small town papers
Oh but it’s so glorious! Here in Annapolis we’re a small city (under 50k) but as a state capital we’re able to support a pretty good local newspaper (the capital gazette). It’s so refreshing to read articles by journalists that don’t wear their politics on their sleeves.
I think you're misreading the article. The thesis is that the journalists are seeking to push their own messages; that the leadership of most news organizations still favors objectivity, but the rank and file (and the readers) increasingly believe that journalists have a duty to take a stand and deliver the right messages. The article references a moderately well-known incident where many journalists issued loud public objections to a NYT headline, not because the headline was factually inaccurate (it simply summarized a statement a politician made), but because it painted that politician in an insufficiently negative light.
I've worked for a news outlet(pretty much smack dab in the newsroom) and I have friends and family who have either worked for other news outlets or are journalists; while I agree that they are generally well-intentioned, their motivations aren't as simple as telling an accurate story.
There's a growing number of young journalists who believe that objectivity is wrong and, because of that, choose to be overtly biased in what they report. In the broader sense, it's extremely common for news outlets to pass over stories that don't fit the narrative of their political affiliation. Even otherwise good journalists may pass on a story if they know it will result in them being seen unfavorably by leadership.
Even leadership at these companies may steer the newsroom in certain directions if they seem favorable to their parent media company, whether they agree with it or not, because they know they have a chance of getting axed if their publication or broadcast says the wrong thing.
> The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories.
Have you had any actual experience inside a newsroom? In my experience, there's tons of groupthink that happens among journalists. There's nothing that makes journalists any different from average people, whom have a tendency to form cohorts with likeminded people. At one news outlet I worked for, a certain person in leadership(whose name and title I will leave nameless) mentioned in a meeting that there happen to be some journalists at the company who lean conservative; people in the meeting couldn't believe it and nearly flipped out, like it's a bad thing that someone is conservative, or that it's a given that all journalists identify as liberal. Lots of thought and communication among journalists occurs over Twitter, which helped facilitate an echo chamber rather than diffuse it.
I simply don't agree that notions that there are hive minded groups of journalists are "all conspiracy theories". I'm sure there are some good groups of journalists out there but, from where I'm standing, they seem few and far between. There's nothing farfetched about a company having its own culture and unique hiring practices; it's human nature that happens all the time in and outside the media. It doesn't necessarily have to be driven by overt plans to manipulate anyone. Rather, what a news organization publishes is often influenced by whatever the incentive structure is. For journalism, the incentive structure that governs it promotes low-grade reports on news that hasn't been fully fleshed out combined with some carefully disguised opinion material intended to keep people reading. Currently there's little to no enforcement of efficiently informing readers since the desire for profit and prestige has overtaken the desire for integrity.
None of this is new, though. It's just been accelerated recently. Look up the history of "yellow journalism". American journalism has a long history of publishing tripe to sway the public at the behest of media titans.
I've worked in newsrooms and disagree with this saintly image of truth-seekers. Yes, the rank and file reporters are not looking to grind an axe; even if they were, they'd be too busy to do it. The well-known writers have huge egos and strong opinions. The editors are even worse.
Also, please don't cast aspersions like "only seems accurate" and "conspiracy theories." There is no conjecture in this editorial: It's somebody's opinion about recent, real developments in major newspapers.
This completely ignores the fact that - in the US at least - many newspapers started as organs of the local political parties. They always wanted to get their news out to their people. Then it went into full fledged "yellow journalism" that was all about the headline and engaging emotions vs objectivity.. which should sound familiar. And that was the late 1800s!
Around 50-60 years ago, as "mass market" became a thing and ad revenue exploded, newspapers and journalism as a whole veered towards objectivity because the local furniture store wanted to advertise to everyone not just one party. But if you read interviews, memoirs, notes, and the like of the journalists for that era, their stated goal for being a journalist was "to change the world." We can debate the specifics of what that means but it's not interchangeable with "neutral observer and reporter of facts."
Like many things, this appears to be a pendulum and it's swung from neutrality/objectivity back towards the opinion-based, light on facts approach for now.
How long we stay there and the consequences are yet to be determined..
If you want real news, then go to the country they are talking about and observe it for yourself. You will find things a lot more mundane than they are made out to be for the vast majority of people living there, until that passive propaganda gets them bombed or economic sanctions destroy their livelihoods. The justification of which is made in the objective reporting, even if journalists don't want to change they do so every time they report something. It's in the nature of the frame and the rhetoric they are writing from.
Nah.
“If someone tells you that there is no truth, they are telling you not to believe them. So don’t” - Idr who this is a quote from.
The claim that there is no truth is a pointless one. Well, it is pointless to believe*. There may be uses to making the claim.
*exception: if someone can observe your innermost beliefs and is threatening that if you don’t believe it, then they will do something you don’t want, then it could be worthwhile. But that’s true of any belief.
Even “we aren’t able to properly conceptualize any true statements” is, while not plausible, is still better than “nothing is true”. (It may be that many things we think are true are fundamentally confused/slightly-nonsensical in ways that we can’t correct by virtue of how our thought processes work, but I don’t consider it plausible that nothing we can believe is entirely true.)
Look at the number 9, now if I tell you that it's in fact the number 6 and you are looking at it wrong. Who are you going to believe. Now imagine it's something much much more complicated and there is no time to write out all the facts that would let us conclude that it could be a 9 or a 6. Am I lying to you by telling you it's a 6? Am I not lying by omission? How can you not lie without omission, if you have a limited amount of space to tell a story, any story. Where do you tell the truth. That is to say okay there is truth, but it's only partial and when it comes to reporting it's always partial and therefore not impartial and therefore not objective. Unless by objective you mean you have an objective or an agenda that you are trying to forward with the news, and that's your partial truth.
The article describes the NYT's explicit decision to reject objectivity and engage in active advocacy. That's not a "slip"
If you believe they're "less biased", it's likely because you agree with a) their approach or b) their goals.
Either way, it translates to "bias is fine as long as I agree with it" which IS the major thesis of the entire post-journalism analysis.
We can tell whichever shade of grey that we want to tell that those who are listening to us what to hear in the frame and the rhetoric which appeals to them. Fox news is biased to tell the partial truth of a certain demographic which feels empowered by that rhetoric. If more people believe reality as told by Fox News it gives them more power within the system to get whatever they think it is that they want. Currently they are going after Cuomo, a democrat, in the sidebars there are criticisms of cancel culture.
If you (a) know what you are saying and do not (b) intend to muddy the waters, you will explicitly note the difference.
This attitude is, at the bottom, responsible for the situation described in this article.
The truth is an ideal and when we pursue that ideal, things go well. When we stop pursuing it, we get "post-journalism".
My response to that is that this idea is subterfuge for resolving complicating political problems with propaganda rather than by proper system design. We are in this situation, because propaganda has lost its power over the masses after 100 years. We need better ways to resolve problems that appealing to ideals while a select elite push their agenda on the people who accept it unquestioningly. In many ways our methods of dealing with this has been akin to religion, which also appeals to religious ideals to gloss over real issues and silence them.
Humans are limited animals. Enlightenment ideals, which are (yes) secularized religions concepts, are the best we've been able to do so far. Maybe at some point in the future we'll be able to do better but I'm not holding my breath.
Except when some humans which at the time were more backwards than the leaders of the world tried, they were simply shut down using propaganda and force. So as to deem what they were attempting to do completely feeble... mostly due to them being against this secular religion. It was in many ways a religious war in idealized secular terms. Therefore I would argue that no actual attempt has been made, because the power structure likes it this way. Their secular religious clergy does well for themselves in it and they don't want revolutions to change it. Not that it can't be done. No one has been allowed to actually try in good faith.
Traditional liberals that think it’s just Republican ideas that will be denounced as pernicious “whiteness” are in for a rude surprise. I saw this quite starkly this summer. Liberal city dwellers in Chicago and Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods, but being too afraid to say anything openly. It seems to have passed, but for a spell, near-universal beliefs about the necessity for order in a civil society became something many were too afraid to support for fear of being lumped together with Trump supporters.
I'm a long-time urban Philadelphia resident who spent almost the entirety of the unrest this past summer listening to police scanners on Broadcastify (except when they were blocked). I also consumed almost all available (edit: local) media coverage. I read r/philadelphia at least daily.
The only automobile arsons I am at all aware of during these periods were of police cars. There were indeed several of them, over an extended period of time. But I am not aware of any private vehicle arsons. Even building arsons weren't very common. They were almost always done in a moronic attempt to hide evidence of other crimes (e.g. looting).
So how many people in Philadelphia texted you pictures of cars on fire? Whose cars were they? What neighborhoods were they outside of? When did these acts of arson occur?
"Very bad shit didn't happen in Chicago this summer" would not be a good hill to die on. From your comment downthread, I assume you just mean to say you think it wasn't that bad in Philly.
It also was very difficult to talk about it at the time; there was a loud (though, I think, Very Online) strain of political thought saying that the violence was a good thing, and that criticism of the violence was "dictating to people how to protest". That the violence wasn't coming from the protesters at all was beside the point.
They said "Oh, no. We're back to WFH because our branched was torched."
I don't want to point fingers at the bank for social reasons, but I was flabbergasted, given that it is not in part of the city where a bank would consider itself at obvious risk during a suspension of the general prohibition against breaking into banks.
I wasn't quite able to articulate this last night, but the original comment I was replying to implies that random white people were subjected to arson, and that it was done retributively - because they were white.
If that happened in Chicago, I hadn't heard about it and I'm not particularly interested in arguing about it.
But, as I said in my other comment, nothing of the sort happened in Philly.
And it wasn't just cars (which I'm just using as an example):
> Dozens of convenience stores and retail shops were hit by arsonists, along with five department stores, five groceries, two churches, a currency exchange, a car dealership, a bank, a bar, a barbershop, a carwash and a drugstore. Most of those fires were set on May 31 and June 1.
I directly quoted your comment. You said "Liberal city dwellers in ... Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods"
That quote can only be read as suggesting that multiple random vehicles were set on fire. If you meant police cars, why didn't you say that? Why would anyone anywhere have to "discretely" text you photos of a burning cop car? It was widely covered - live, in real time - by local and national media!
Let me extract a relevant passage for you:
> Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity, the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses. And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers. On opinion pages, the contours of acceptable public debate have largely been determined through the gaze of white editors.
> The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral. When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded or robbed of new opportunities.
Another passage:
> For years, I’ve been among a chorus of mainstream journalists who have called for our industry to abandon the appearance of objectivity as the aspirational journalistic standard, and for reporters instead to focus on being fair and telling the truth, as best as one can, based on the given context and available facts.
And:
> And so, instead of promising our readers that we will never, on any platform, betray a single personal bias — submitting ourselves to a life sentence of public thoughtlessness — a better pledge would be an assurance that we will devote ourselves to accuracy, that we will diligently seek out the perspectives of those with whom we personally may be inclined to disagree and that we will be just as sure to ask hard questions of those with whom we’re inclined to agree.
> The best of our profession already does this. But we need to be honest about the gulf that lies between the best and the bulk.
And:
> It’s been more than 50 years since the first black journalists appeared in mainstream American newsrooms. For all of that time, black journalists have made meager demands: Please hire some more of us. Please pay us the way you do our colleagues. Please allow us to ascend to leadership roles. Please consider our opinions about how accurate and fair coverage of all communities, especially our own, can be achieved.
> Collectively, the industry has responded to generations of black journalists with indifference at best and open hostility at its frequent worst.
Finally, as for the claim that the Republican party is a "refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies"... well, it is. Does that mean Republicans are all inherently racist? Of course not. But since the 00s, the % of racist Republicans has increased compared to the % of racist Democrats [1], although racism seems to be generally declining under both parties.
Anecdotally, Republicans tend to favor non-interventionist domestic policy, which in turn tends to allow the end products of racism (urban poverty, discrimination) to continue. Also anecdotally, the people I know who are the least interested in undoing the evils caused by slavery and segregation are also the most Republican. It's not overtly "white supremacist", but it is absolutely a failure to acknowledge just how evil and harmful the historical white supremacism of the USA really was... and that's just talking about the evils levied on the descendants of African slaves. We'll have to discuss the overt genocide of Native Americans another time.
Edit: the author goes into detail about the Cotton editorial situation as well. You might be surprised to learn that there can be multiple perspectives on a situation.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black...
[1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-white-republicans-m...
Where Lowery goes wrong is espousing “moral clarity” and “the truth” as the goal of reporting rather than objectivity. When Lowery talks about “the truth” he means “The Truth.” That doesn’t mean propaganda or naked partisanship. But it does imply the application of the reporter’s moral framework to synthesize “The Truth” from the uncontested facts.
He clear illustration of this lies further down in the article: “Moral clarity would insist that politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes — however cleverly — be labeled such with clear language and unburied evidence.”
How do you apply this rule in practice? Whether something is a “racist trope” is a characterization, not objective truth. The New York Times itself has published quite a stark illustration of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”
> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.
> These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.
The progressive pollsters who conducted the study above considered the rhetoric above as “obviously racist and divisive.” A typical New York Times reporter shares the same ideological framework, and would characterize that rhetoric as such. Under Lowery’s approach, she would report that as “the truth.”
But that’s not “the truth.” It’s a characterization under a particular moral framework. My mom (a Muslim immigrant from a country with lots of crime and political instability) would consider the Trumpian statement to be common sense. And according to the survey data, so would most people of color. What a reporter following Lowery’s approach would report as “the truth” would in fact be a falsity to most of the people affected by the statements.
That’s the basic problem with the approach Lowery espouses. It frees reporters to apply their own moral frameworks (which are not necessarily widely shared) to the neutral facts to derive “the truth.”
I also can’t help but point out that when Lowery talks about “Black and brown” viewpoints, he means “some Black and brown viewpoints.” At the end of the day, the white liberals in charge of the times aren’t going to hire reporters to write from the point of view of religious conservative Black and brown people (who are the majority). I’m an immigrant from a Muslim country and I am reading many Muslim reporters now in the Times, etc. But none of them sound like my mom. They almost uniformly hold white progressive moral views, many of which would be totally rejected by nearly all Muslims. A third of Muslims voted for Trump in 2020. You’ll never hear from them in the Times.
This selective amplification is a bigger problem under Lowery’s approach. The Times hires say Muslim reporters to provide more of the point of view of “brown people” and encourages them to apply their moral framework to synthesize facts into “the truth.” But the ones the paper hires have views that are actually unrepresentative of Muslims. So what exactly is the end product?
As to the point about the Republican Party—calling it a “refuge for white supremacists” goes beyond your narrow observation. It’s also statistically true that almost all American communists will vote Democrat. That doesn’t make the worth a “refuge for communists” (although Breitbart likes to characterize it that way to generate outrage).
Edit: I will add, however, that there is still merit in Lowery's message. If we can't have real objective truth, let's at least hear the black truth, because we already hear a lot of the white truth.
Also, "real" communists hate the Democrats for being imperialist neoliberals. Just like how "real" white supremacists hate the Republicans for being big-government charlatans unwilling to stand up for the future of white children.
It’s consistent with my first post. When reporters are freed to apply their personal moral frameworks to the facts to derive “the truth” it’s not just Republican ideas that will be found wanting.
> If we can't have real objective truth, let's at least hear the black truth, because we already hear a lot of the white truth.
I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that’s not what you’re hearing. For example, only a small minority of white democrats (11%) believe that morality necessarily requires belief in God, while 55% of Black Democrats believe the same thing: https://www.christianpost.com/news/black-democrats-person-mu.... How many New York Time reporters have you read that being a distinctly religious viewpoint to their reporting?
From the perspective of someone from a Muslim country, my perception is that the New York Times definitely doesn’t give you the “Muslim truth” even if it has Muslim writers. Every single Muslim family I know in real life is socially conservative (even if many of them vote Democrat—there is a strong “social liberalism is okay for white people but not in our community” sentiment). I’ve never read a Muslim writer in the New York Times who espoused anything approaching a socially conservative view. So whose truth are you getting?
†You're saying Mao played with fire, but you're not acknowledging the other differences between Mao (slaughtered millions of people) and these so-called socialists (who just want racism to end).
Personally, when it comes to political journalism, one of my favorite pieces is Jay Rosen's "Why Political Coverage is Broken"[1]. I think it covers specific problems with media coverage in more detail, and provides a better path to restoring trust in news than "be more objective".
[1] https://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-bro...
(Although I suppose there's also no reason that 2011 Australia and 2021 USA would necessarily have comparable media landscapes.)
Politics must be divorced from “its real-world effects” because people of different political persuasions disagree about what real-world effects policies will have (or whether some effects outweigh other effects). A liberal reporting neutral facts about say a proposed immigration policy is still useful to a conservative. A liberal’s take on what they think will be “the real-world effects” of a proposed policy (at least, the ones they care about) will not be useful.
I see the point that you're trying to make, but I'll also turn it on it's head: when a judge makes a ruling does that mean that they were "biased" in favor of the winning party?
> Politics must be divorced from “its real-world effects”
Does a judge ignore the "real-world effects" of their orders and only consider the behavior of the lawyers?
> A liberal’s take on what they think will be “the real-world effects” of a proposed policy (at least, the ones they care about) will not be useful.
Is a liberal judge's reasoning in an opinion not valuable to a conservative judge?
For a concrete example, there was a recent initiative in my state (California Prop 16) which was reasonably unpopular and ended up losing by a 14 point margin. But most journalists strongly favored it, and reported from that perspective - they didn't want to buy into the "view from nowhere". So a lot of my news-consuming friends had no idea there was honest, well-intentioned opposition to it, and to this day I see people argue the voters must have just been confused.
I think that Rosen would agree that that's bad reporting. Dispensing with the "view from nowhere" isn't about discarding arguments from all but a favored side. It's about discarding "neutral" framing devices that don't inform the reader (such as the "he said/she said" and the "horse race"). "X said A. Y said B" is factual and neutral, but it doesn't help the reader develop a deeper understanding of the parties involved or the topics at hand.
Hey, it's HN's favorite (if tired) maxim about "if you're not the customer you're the product". I usually think of that applied to Google or startups, not sure why I never made the connection with non-paywalled news sites.
But you can’t let the state handle news either. And you can’t keep the free market from corrupting it. Not sure what the answer is.
But journalism can't really take advantage of either of these. The market doesn't steer it towards the socially optimal objective, and independence from the state is a core part of its value.
The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories.
Newspapers have long past turned into media, news is commodified and the value add of the news outlet is opinion. It is inevitable that publishers turn to opinion in an age where facts are free, widely disseminated, and not subject to copyright.
The line between reporting facts and stating opinions has been blurred so much that you've seen revolts in journalism schools (e.g. ASU's Walter Cronkite school) to oust deans that discourage confessional style opinion journalism as they vainly advocate for professionality and objectivity over activism. Activism and emotion is what generates clicks as younger reporters view themselves as crusaders "standing up" for justice in a world of iniquity rather than delivering information about events to the public. The public already can access all the information they need whenever they want. There just isn't that much room for value add in the current age of ubiquitous information.
That kind of reporting is almost a niche genre at this point outside of small town papers. Everyone now seems to have a very obvious agenda, and the consumers seem to mainly want news that fits their own agenda. Again this isn't a conspiracy this is just the direction that the market forces took news into. A polarized ideological consumerbase, wants news that matches their polarized politics.
Oh but it’s so glorious! Here in Annapolis we’re a small city (under 50k) but as a state capital we’re able to support a pretty good local newspaper (the capital gazette). It’s so refreshing to read articles by journalists that don’t wear their politics on their sleeves.
There's a growing number of young journalists who believe that objectivity is wrong and, because of that, choose to be overtly biased in what they report. In the broader sense, it's extremely common for news outlets to pass over stories that don't fit the narrative of their political affiliation. Even otherwise good journalists may pass on a story if they know it will result in them being seen unfavorably by leadership.
Even leadership at these companies may steer the newsroom in certain directions if they seem favorable to their parent media company, whether they agree with it or not, because they know they have a chance of getting axed if their publication or broadcast says the wrong thing.
> The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories.
Have you had any actual experience inside a newsroom? In my experience, there's tons of groupthink that happens among journalists. There's nothing that makes journalists any different from average people, whom have a tendency to form cohorts with likeminded people. At one news outlet I worked for, a certain person in leadership(whose name and title I will leave nameless) mentioned in a meeting that there happen to be some journalists at the company who lean conservative; people in the meeting couldn't believe it and nearly flipped out, like it's a bad thing that someone is conservative, or that it's a given that all journalists identify as liberal. Lots of thought and communication among journalists occurs over Twitter, which helped facilitate an echo chamber rather than diffuse it.
I simply don't agree that notions that there are hive minded groups of journalists are "all conspiracy theories". I'm sure there are some good groups of journalists out there but, from where I'm standing, they seem few and far between. There's nothing farfetched about a company having its own culture and unique hiring practices; it's human nature that happens all the time in and outside the media. It doesn't necessarily have to be driven by overt plans to manipulate anyone. Rather, what a news organization publishes is often influenced by whatever the incentive structure is. For journalism, the incentive structure that governs it promotes low-grade reports on news that hasn't been fully fleshed out combined with some carefully disguised opinion material intended to keep people reading. Currently there's little to no enforcement of efficiently informing readers since the desire for profit and prestige has overtaken the desire for integrity.
None of this is new, though. It's just been accelerated recently. Look up the history of "yellow journalism". American journalism has a long history of publishing tripe to sway the public at the behest of media titans.
Also, please don't cast aspersions like "only seems accurate" and "conspiracy theories." There is no conjecture in this editorial: It's somebody's opinion about recent, real developments in major newspapers.